He was not a man who had ever been jealous, or he had not thought he was. He had married late, at thirty-three, after a long stretch of years when he believed he would end up like his uncle Royce, a bachelor rancher who talked mostly to dogs. Claire Danner had been teaching fourth grade in Winifred and had come to a branding at the Kesslers' with a friend, and she had stood at the edge of the corral in borrowed boots and watched him wrestle calves, and later at the potluck she had asked him why he flanked them from the left side, and he had explained it to her for twenty minutes before he realized that she had grown up on a ranch near Denton and knew perfectly well, and had only wanted to see how long he'd go. He had loved her from about that moment. He had never in thirteen years had a reason to wonder about her, and the absence of reasons had become a kind of floor he walked on without thinking about it, the way he did not think about the fir planks under his boots.
He thought about it now. He thought about how often he'd been gone this fall. He counted it on the desk blotter with the eraser end of the pencil. The Miles City sale, three days. The Stockgrowers board meeting in Helena, two. Billings twice, three days and four. The trip to the Dillon bull sale with the Kessler brothers that had turned into five days because of a blown tire and a snowstorm on Monida Pass. He had been gone, all told, something like twenty-five nights since the first of August. He had called home most of those nights from motel rooms, and Claire had sounded tired and ordinary and had told him the heifers were fine and June had a loose tooth and the well pump was making the noise again.
She came back down at a quarter to eight. She had changed into a sweatshirt and she had not brought the flannel shirt with her. She went past him into the kitchen without speaking, and after a moment he got up and followed her.
The kitchen was the newest room in the house, which meant it had been redone in 1994, and the linoleum was curling at the edge by the stove. Claire stood at the counter with her back to him and filled the kettle and set it on the burner and then stood there with both hands flat on the counter, looking at the window, where there was nothing to see but her own reflection and the dark beyond it.
"It's not what you're thinking," she said.
He laughed. He did not mean to; it came out of him short and ugly. "That's what they say, isn't it. In the movies. That's the exact line."
"I know it is." She turned around. "And it's still true."
"Then tell me what it is."