Chapter 165: The Rope

/Kara’s Third Person POV/

Nora did the growl for Kara at lunch, and she did it badly.

She’d slept two hours, eaten four of June’s pancakes cold, and come looking for her sister in Nia’s rig with the story of the pastor and the cat, which she told standing up, with sound effects, while Tikki sat on the table beside Kara’s plate and watched the performance with his ears back.

"Like this." Nora put her chin down and made a lawnmower noise in her throat. "For a full minute. Nikki says he’s never heard it from a person before."

"That’s not what he sounds like." Kara wiped the table around the cat with a dishcloth. "He sounds like a kettle."

"Mea," Tikki agreed, and got off the table.

Kara had missed the whole thing. She’d been down at the hay barn with Dean when the pastor came up the drive, and by the time she’d walked back, the man was gone, and Nikki was up on the wall again with that look on him again.

So she went back to the hay barn after lunch, where Dean had asked her to come, with her hands cold and her sleeves rolled up anyway.

The hay barn stood outside Walter’s block wall and inside the new one, red boards gone grey at the bottom, a sliding door that only slid halfway, and bales stacked to the rafters on one side with the other side cleared for the tractor.

Dean had made a bed for Hank on a straw bale by the door, out of the wind, with a horse blanket folded four times under him and a second one over him up to the chin.

Hank was the Harts’ blue heeler, fourteen years old and stone deaf, grey all through the muzzle with one eye gone cloudy, and he’d spent the month of the end of the world asleep behind the woodstove on June’s scraps, which was why hardly anybody from the city had noticed him yet this time.

Kara had known him at ten, when he could still clear the paddock gate from a standing start.

He’d looked at Tikki once on the first night, with the cloudy eye, and gone back to sleep. And Tikki had taken that personally, and had been walking past him with his tail straight up ever since.

"Second opinion, Doctor Woodbrew." Dean was on his knees in the straw beside the bale, both hands on the dog’s left hip, and he put it the same way he had at the gate, with a smile that didn’t make fun of her. "Left hip... Tell me what you’ve got."

Kara knelt down on the other side of the bale, and Hank thumped his tail twice against the blanket and let her.

She ran her hand flat down his back from the shoulders, over the ribs, to the hips, and the left one came up under her palm sharp and bare where the right one was still covered, the muscle gone off it over the months until there was nothing between her hand and the bone.

"Muscle wasting over the left gluteals." She told the hip, not Dean. "He’s been off it a long time... Longer than a month."

"Two years... Started as a stiff morning."

She took the leg behind the stifle and brought it back, slow, and felt the joint grind under her other hand as it moved, a dry, gravelly catch she could feel more than hear, while Hank licked his lips and turned his head toward her without lifting it off the blanket.

"Crepitus on extension... Pain at the end of the range." She let the leg down onto the blanket. "He toe-touches on it when he walks?"

"Bunny-hops when he’s tired." Dean’s hands hadn’t moved off the dog. "Dysplasia, since he was six... It was managed. Then the pharmacy was forty kilometers away with a hundred thousand of those things between me and it."

"So what’s he been on?"

"Half a buffered aspirin with his breakfast." Dean looked at her over the dog, and for once there was no joke anywhere on his face. "And I hated every tablet."

"His kidneys hate them more."

"I know."

Kara liked him for that, and she liked him more for saying it plainly.

She knew exactly what he’d been doing for a month. She’d have done the same, and she knew what it cost a vet to give the wrong drug to his own dog every morning for want of the right one.

"Warm bed... Short walks, on the flat." She counted them off on her fingers, as she always did. "Keep him lean... And when the wing opens, bloods first and a week off the aspirin, then meloxicam at point one milligram per kilo, once a day, with food, and a joint supplement if the pharmacy has it."

"You’ve done the rotation."

"I’ve done the reading."

"Same thing." He grinned at her over the dog. "With your sister’s trick, anyway."

"I don’t have her trick." Kara pulled the blanket back up over the dog. "I do have a highlighter."

He laughed, and it was an easy laugh, with nothing behind it, the laugh of a man who’d been laughing his whole life without anyone ever making him pay for it.

That was the thing about Dean Hart, and Kara had put her finger on it inside of an hour on the first night.

He was kind in the exact way Nikki used to be kind, before. Easy with it, unguarded, and without any plan behind it, kind the same as other people were tall.

She smiled more when Dean was around, and she knew why. It had taken her exactly one night to decide it was nobody’s fault. Not Dean’s, for being who he was. Not Nikki’s, for being who he’d become. And not hers, for noticing the difference.

"He fell off that trailer, you know." Dean jerked his chin at the hay trailer parked at the back of the barn under a tarp. "Your Nikki..."

"I was there."

"You were on the ground. I was on the tractor." He sat back on his heels in the straw. "Nineteen years old, standing on the top bale with no hands, telling you about some bike race... We hit the rut by the creek, and he went straight off the back like a sack of feed... Face first into the pig trough."

"I remember the trough."

"He stood up out of it with a corn cob stuck to the side of his head." Dean was laughing again, halfway through it. "And he looked me dead in the eye and said he meant to do that."

The corner of Kara’s mouth moved, and she let it.

She remembered more of it than Dean did. She remembered Nikki at nineteen with slop down his front, bowing to her from the trough, and she remembered thinking, with her arms folded and her whole face straight, that she was going to marry that idiot one day if he lived long enough.

That boy was one apocalypse away from the man standing on the wall right now.

That was why she was strict with him, and she’d never once put it into words, and nobody had ever asked her the right question.

Every curfew, every plate put down in front of him, every flat "Nikki..." across the table when he was about to do something she didn’t like.

People thought she was mothering him, and Nia thought she was scolding him, and neither one of them was right.

What she was doing was holding a rope.

The man she remembered was at the other end of it, drifting further out every day, with more of the end of the world in him and less of the boy in the trough, and she was not going to let go of her end, whatever Nora thought about him still being Nikki.

That argument was still open between the sisters, and Kara didn’t know who was right.

She only knew that she wasn’t letting go.

"Nikki hasn’t eaten since the pancakes," she told Dean, who hadn’t asked, and looked at her watch. "I’m taking him a plate in an hour, and then I’m sleeping until my shift on the drone."

"I’ll carry it up the wall for you."

"He’ll have you eating it for him by the top of the stairs." She looked at him sideways over the bale. "... He does that now. And ask him for Hank’s meds while I’m at it."

That’s when the sliding door banged against its stop, and Nora came in with her cap on straight for once and her clipboard under her arm, which meant she was here on official business.

"Dean Hart." She stopped three meters from him with her feet together. "I have been observing your face."

"Okay..." Dean looked at Kara, and Kara gave him nothing.

"It is extremely symmetrical." Nora wrote on the clipboard without looking down at it. "And I do not trust it."

"It came like this." Dean touched his own jaw to check. "It’s the factory settings, I swear."

"That is exactly what a symmetrical man would say." Nora underlined it twice on the clipboard.

Tikki had come in behind her, on his own business, and while Nora cross-examined the shape of Dean’s head, he walked past Hank with his tail straight up, climbed into Kara’s lap without being asked, and went boneless there, all of him at once, his chin on her wrist and his eyes shut.

He did that for nobody else. Not Nikki, for whom he’d flown a helicopter in his own head, of course. Not Nora, who’d have paid him for it.

"He’s doing it again..." Nora pointed at the cat with the pen. "The lap thing... I would like it entered into the record that I have never once received the lap thing."

"You pick him up wrong," Kara told her.

"There is a wrong way to pick up a cat?"

"Yours."

Dean laughed, shaking his head, and looked down at Hank, who’d gone back to sleep under his blanket with his grey chin on the straw, and put one hand on the old dog’s head.

"You know, nobody picked Hank." He scratched behind one deaf ear. "Dad was standing in the yard one morning, and this thing walked out of the barley with burrs all down one side, sat down on his boot, and decided he was its idiot now."

Kara laughed before she could stop it.

It came out loud, right out of her chest, her head going back with it, and it was the first time in a month that she’d laughed out loud at anything at all.

Nora stared at her with the pen stopped in the air, Dean looked pleased with himself without knowing why, and Tikki opened one eye in her lap and shut it again.

Up on the wall, sixty meters off, Nikki had heard it.

He heard everything these days, from anywhere on the farm.

Through the half-open door, she saw him turn his head toward the barn, toward the laugh, and then turn away and look east over the wall, toward the willows, at nothing, with his hands in his pockets and the snow coming down on his shoulders.

Kara watched him do it with her hand on the cat.

It was the church, she decided.

Everything was the church with him this week. He’d be looking east all afternoon, the same as he had all morning, and it had nothing to do with her.

And as far as she understood him now, he had a plan brewing that her conscience would never agree to.

So she went back to the dog.