When she drove over the hill and down past the corrals, she saw Tom's yearlings running in the arena, but there was no sign of Tom and she felt disappointed, then amused that she should feel so. As she came around the back of the creek house she saw there was a phone company truck parked there and as she got out, a man in blue coveralls came out of the house onto the porch. He wished her good-day and said he'd fitted the new lines.
Inside, she found two new phones beside her computer. The answering machine showed four messages and there were three faxes, one of them from Lucy Friedman. As she began to read it, one of the new phones rang.
'Hi.' It was a man's voice and for a moment she didn't recognize it. 'Just wanted to see if it worked.'
'Who is this?' Annie said.
'I'm sorry. It's Tom, Tom Booker. I just saw the phone guy leaving and I wanted to see if the new lines worked.'
Annie laughed.
'I can hear they do, one of them anyway. I hope you don't mind him letting himself in.'
'Of course not. Thank you. You really needn't have.'
'It's no big deal. Grace said her dad sometimes had trouble getting through.'
'Well, it's very kind of you.'
There was a pause and then, just for something to say, Annie told him how she'd bumped into Diane in Choteau and how she'd kindly offered to bring Grace back.
'She could have taken her in too if we'd known.'
Annie thanked him again for the phones and offered to pay for them but he brushed it aside and said he'd leave her to get on with using them and hung up. She started to read Lucy's fax again but for some reason found it hard to concentrate and went off to the kitchen to make some coffee.
Twenty minutes later she was back at her table and had one of the new lines rigged up for the modem and the other exclusively for the fax. She was just about to call Lucy who was in a new fury about Gates, when she heard footsteps on the back porch and a light tapping on the screen door.
Through the haze of the screen she could see Tom Booker standing there and he started to smile as he caught sight of her. He stepped back when Annie opened the door and she saw he had with him two saddled horses, Rimrock and another of the colts. She folded her arms, leaned against the door frame and gave him a skeptical smile.
'The answer's no,' she said.
'You don't yet know what the question is.'
'I think I can guess.'
'You can?'
'I think so.'
'Well, I kind of reckoned seeing as you've just saved yourself forty minutes driving down to Choteau and then some forty more driving back and all, you might feel inclined to blow a little of it on taking some air.'
'On horseback.'
'Well. Yeah.'
They looked at each other for a moment, just smiling. He was wearing a faded pink shirt and over his jeans those old patched leather chaps he always rode in. Maybe it was just the light, but his eyes seemed as clear and blue as the sky behind him.
Truth is, you'd be doing me a favor. I got all these eager young colts to ride and poor old Rimrock here is feeling kind of left out. He'd be that grateful, he'd take real good care of you.'
'Is this how I get to pay for the phones?'
'No ma'am, I'm afraid that's extra.'
The physical therapist who looked after Grace was a tiny woman with a shock of streaked curls and gray eyes so large they made her seem permanently surprised. Terri Carlson was fifty-one and a Libra; both her parents were dead and she had three sons which her husband had given her in rapid succession some thirty years ago before running off with a Texan rodeo queen. He'd insisted the boys be called John, Paul and George and Terri thanked the Lord he'd gone before there was a fourth. All this Grace had found out on her very first visit here and on each subsequent visit Terri had taken up where she left off so that now, had Grace been asked, she could have filled several notebooks on the woman's life. Not that Grace minded in the least. She liked it. It meant she could simply lie on the workout bench, as she was doing now, and surrender herself entirely not just to the woman's hands but to her words as well.
Grace had protested when Annie told her she'd arranged for her to come here three mornings a week. She knew that after all these months it was more than she strictly needed. But the therapist in New York had told Annie that the harder you worked at it, the less likely it was you'd end up with a limp.
'Who cares if I have a limp?' Grace said.
'I do,' Annie said, so that was it.
In fact, Grace enjoyed the sessions here more than in New York. First they did the workout. Terri had her doing everything. On top of all the exercises, she strapped velcro weights on her stump, got her sweating on the arm bicycle, even had her disco dancing in front of the mirrors that lined the walls. That first day she'd seen Grace's expression when the tape came on.
'You don't like Tina Turner?'
Grace said Tina Turner was fine. Just kind of…
'Old? Get outta here! She's my age!'
Grace blushed and they laughed and from then on things were fine. Terri told her to bring in some of her own tapes and these had now become the source of much joking between them. Whenever Grace brought in a new one Terri would examine it, shake her head and sigh, 'More gloom from the tomb.'
After the workout, Grace would relax for a while and then get to work on her own in the pool. Then, for the last hour, it was back in front of the mirrors for some walk practice or 'gate training' as Terri called it. Grace had never felt fitter in her whole life.
Today Terri had pressed the pause button on her life story and was telling her about an Indian boy she visited each week up on the Blackfeet Reservation. He was twenty years old and proud and beautiful, she said, like something out of a Charlie Russell picture. That was, until last summer when he'd gone swimming in a pool with some friends and dived headfirst into a concealed shelf of rock. It had clean snapped his neck and now he was paralyzed from there on down.
'First time I visited with him, boy was he angry,' she said. She was working Grace's stump like a pump handle. 'He told me he didn't want anything to do with me and if I didn't go then he'd go, he wasn't sticking around to be humiliated. He didn't actually say "by a woman," but that's what he meant. I thought, what does he mean "go"? He wasn't going anywhere, all he could do was lie there. But you know what? He did go. I got to work on him and after a while I looked at his face and he was - gone.'
She saw Grace didn't understand.
'His mind, his spirit, whatever you care to call it. Just upped and gone. Like that. And he wasn't faking it, you could tell. He was away somewhere. And when I was through, he just kind of came back. Now he does it every time I visit him. Over you go now honey, let's do a few Jane Fondas.'
Grace turned on her left side and started doing scissor lifts. 'Does he say where he goes?' she asked. Terri laughed.
'You know, I asked him that and he said he wouldn't tell me 'cause I'd only come busybodying after him. That's what he calls me, Ol' Busybody. Makes out he doesn't like me, but I know he does. It's just his way of keeping his pride. I guess we all do that some way or other. That's good, honey. A little higher now? Good!'
Terri took her to the pool room and left her there. It was a peaceful place and today Grace had it to herself. The air was laced with the clean smell of chlorine. She changed into her swimsuit and settled herself to rest awhile in the small whirlpool. The sun was angling down from the skylight onto the surface of the swimming pool. Some bounced back to dance in shimmering reflection on the ceiling, while the rest slanted through to the bottom of the pool where it formed undulating patterns, like a colony of pale blue snakes that lived and died and were constantly reborn.