Read Reason To Believe for Free Online Page B

hour."
    He flopped into his chair and smiled, remembering. "With you filling up notebook after notebook, and me sittin' outside, goin' through half a pack of cigarettes while I waited to take you out riding."
    She took a seat on the sofa and set about straightening magazines—a perfectly neat stack of three—on the coffee table. "Have you been riding a lot lately? I mean, now that you're..."
    "Some. I've got a couple of horses out at Dad's place. Took 'em in trade for some work I did. You fix cars for a living down on the rez, you never know what you might get paid with."
    "I remember."
    But not happily, he thought. They had lived there for a while after they were married. She'd taught high school history, and he'd rodeoed in the summer and fixed cars all year long.
    "But you're your own boss again." She made the observation ungrudgingly. "You always preferred it that way."
    "Yeah." He'd gotten a job as a mechanic at a car dealership after the Historical Society had offered Clara her dream job and they had moved to Bismarck. He hadn't minded the work so much, but he'd hated punching someone else's time clock. "I've even got a guy working for me now. He's got a lot to learn, but..."
    But it felt good to be able to put Darrell Takes The Hat on his payroll, if you could call paying yourself and one other guy a payroll. Darrell had a wife and kid, too. Only he lived in the same house with them.
    "How's your job going?"
    "Fine. I'm curator of the Indian collection now."
    "That sounds real good. You're takin' good care of our stuff for us, huh? The ol' man'll be glad to hear it's in good hands."
    She winced at that.
    "I ain't kiddin' you. He will. He always said I got the best end of the deal when we got married."
    "I'm glad he thought so."
    Ben thought so, too, even if he hadn't always shown it. Not that she was a princess and he was a total bum, but she'd always had a lot going for her. And she'd loved him once. The silence between them felt heavy, and he knew it was the weight of regret over the loss of that love. Maybe she'd stopped grieving over it by now, but he hadn't.
    And there was nothing to break the silence but talk of the most important concern they had left to share. Their child.
    "That ride goes on for two weeks, and it can get damn cold during those two weeks." He could feel it now, just as surely as he felt the heat and the goddamn pressure gradually being turned up on him. He was one cowboy who did not ride well under pressure. "I don't think Annie could hack it, do you?"
    "I doubt if she's serious," Clara said absently, intent on brushing something hardly visible off her wool trousers. "Just a whim. A test, maybe, to see what we'd say."
    "A test," he echoed hollowly.
    Now, there was a word he didn't much like, unless he was the one doing the testing. He tended to fail them, sometimes for lack of interest, others maybe for lack of purity.
    Like the time he'd sat up on the hill for three nights and two days, doing the hanble ceya his father said would help him find direction in his life. Thirteen years old, and all he wanted to know was, which way to the place where they keep the horses? But he'd gone up there, and he'd done what his father had told him to do. He'd tested his endurance. He'd gone without food or water, and he'd seen his first big pink elephant.
    Only it wasn't an elephant; it was a stout red roan horse.
    His father had said that the horse would come back to him one day, in the flesh. And it had. Twice. He'd gotten bucked off one once. Broke his goddamn arm. Another time he'd bet on a red roan in a Calcutta team roping and lost fifty bucks. Since then he'd stopped looking for that damn horse. So much for tests and foolhardy vision quests.
    Ben shook his head. "I don't have time. I keep tellin' the ol' man, I can't take that kinda time."
    "What does he say?"
    "He says I sound like a white man." A no-win notion that made Ben chuckle. Like trying to pass a Mustang off as a Thoroughbred.
    Not that he