« Nobody’s shooting anybody. Lie still and don’t touch anything. »
She went back out into the storm. The snow was coming sideways now, burying the trail down to Larkin. In the shed beside her mule Hortense and her six nanny goats, she checked the horse’s foreleg—a bad sprain, not a break. She wrapped it in cold rags and gave him hay.
When she came back inside, Earl was looking around her cabin: the goat cheeses ripening on the shelf, her father’s books stacked on every flat surface, the rocking chair, the single bed with its blue quilt.
« Well, Mr. Jessup, » she said, shaking the snow off her shawl, « that trail is closed until the thaw. It did the same in ’79. Nobody got up or down until April. »
Earl stared at her.
« April? Ma’am, it ain’t Thanksgiving yet. »
« I’m aware of the calendar. So here we are: you with a broke leg, me with a cabin built for one, and five months of winter between us and anybody who’d care. And I can tell you right now what they’ll be saying in Larkin by Sunday. Poor Earl Jessup. Trapped all winter with the old maid of Snowbird Pass. Better he had froze. »
Something flickered across his face—guilt, she might have thought, if she’d had any reason to.
« I wouldn’t say that, » Earl said.
« You wouldn’t have to. Everybody else will. »
