Will Bennett came to mend the barn roof on a Tuesday, with a wagon full of shingles and a ladder and a manner so unhurried that June, watching from the porch, thought at first that he had come to the wrong homestead. He was twenty-six, gentle in the face, steady in the hands, with the kind of honesty that showed not in speeches but in the way he measured a board twice before he cut it once. He had been sent by Tom Alden, who had told Mara that the barn roof would not survive the first autumn rain if it was not patched, and that Will was the man to patch it, and that he would charge fair and work clean.
June met him properly at the barn door, because Mara was in the garden and Elias was on the far fence line with Deke, and someone had to be civil. She had seen Will before, in Cedar Hollow, at Nellie's store, a man who tipped his hat and carried parcels for older women and did not push himself forward. She had not, until that morning, looked at him closely.
Miss June, Will said, taking off his hat. "Tom said the north side leaks. I thought I would start there, if that suits."
It suits, June said, and then, because she was June and could not leave a sentence alone, she added, "Though the north side leaks, and the south side sags, and the whole roof has opinions of its own. You may be here a while."
Will laughed, a low, easy laugh, and he looked up at the roof as if it were a puzzle he liked. "Then I had better get started," he said. "A roof with opinions deserves respect."
He worked the way good carpenters work: without fuss, without showing off, humming under his breath when he thought no one could hear. June brought him water at noon, and he thanked her as if she had done him a real kindness, and he asked her about the horses, not as a man making conversation but as a man who liked horses and wanted to know which mare was the nervous one and why. June told him about the chestnut with the white star, and about the way she gentled her with carrots and patience, and Will listened, and he asked a second question, and a third, and June found herself talking the way she talked when she was comfortable, quickly and with her hands moving.
She was annoyed at noticing him. She noticed the way he handled a hammer without banging his thumb, the way he stopped to help Mara carry a sack of feed without being asked, the way he ate his lunch on the barn steps and shared his bread with the barn cat as if that were the most natural thing in the world. She noticed that he was in no hurry — not to finish the roof, not to impress her, not to ask anything of her at all. And that lack of hurry, after weeks of men who pressed and threatened and wanted answers, felt like a door opening in a house she had thought had only one door.
In the afternoon, Elias came back from the far fence line and stood with Mara and watched Will work, and Mara, who missed nothing, glanced at June and then at Will and then back at June, and said nothing. That evening, when Will had loaded his tools and was ready to ride back to Cedar Hollow, he paused at the gate and turned to June.
I'll be back Thursday to finish, he said. "If the weather holds. And if you have that mare out, I would like to see how she goes. I had a nervous mare once. She taught me more patience than any man ever did."
June nodded, and she did not trust herself to say much, so she said, "Thursday, then," and she watched him ride out through the narrow trail between the rocky hills until he was a small figure against the evening light.
That night, June lay on her pallet and thought about Will Bennett's unhurried hands and his easy laugh, and about Elias's honest answer under the willow, and about the fact that her heart, which she had thought was fixed on one man and therefore broken, was capable of noticing another man without betraying anyone. She was annoyed at noticing, and she was also, quietly, relieved. A second door had opened, unforced, and she did not have to walk through it today, or tomorrow, or at all, unless she chose to. That was the difference, she realized, between being passed over and choosing for herself. One was done to you. The other was yours.
She fell asleep to the sound of the creek and the wind in the pines, and in the morning she went out to the horses early, and the chestnut mare came to her hand without shying, and June smiled, and did not yet know what she was smiling about, only that it felt like her own.