Read Online Luna by Sharon Butala - Free Book Online

boots, okay?” She went into the hall and brought back his worn riding boots.
    “So, what’s new with Diane?”
    “I think she might really be going to leave him.”
    Kent bent and began to pull on his old boots. After a moment’s silence, he said, his voice muffled, “He’d be better off without her, if she won’t settle down and pull her weight.” Selena felt heat rising in her face.She wanted to say, this is my sister we’re talking about, but she didn’t, remembering how Kent had allowed her to keep Diane with them for years, how he had fed and clothed her as if he were his own child, never complaining about the expense.
    “It’s never all one person’s fault,” Selena said. “It takes two to tango, you know.” She kept her voice casual.
    “She’s lazy,” he said. “It must have something to do with losing her mother when she was so young. And let’s face it, your old man wasn’t that hard a worker. I know you did your best, but she don’t do nothing to help Tony.” He stood up, went to the hall and came back carrying his light summer jacket while she stood silently, leaning against the counter, watching his lean back, remembering, too, that it was Kent who paid for Diane’s wedding, when her dad was so sick that they couldn’t even tell him Diane was getting married.
    “Come on, then,” he said, putting his arm across her shoulders. Their eyes met and for a second she thought he was going to kiss her. But no, they walked outside together, she catching her straw hat from its peg and setting it on her head as they went by the door. They curried their horses and saddled them, let them out of the barn, through a gate which Kent opened and closed behind them. They mounted then, still not speaking, and Selena waited while Kent, holding his horse steady, looked off into the distance ahead of them, to the right, and to the left.
    They rode north, stopping while Kent opened another gate, leaving this one open behind them. It was late afternoon and the wind was still fairly strong. It made the horses nervous and hard to manage. Selena was anxious to get into the hills near the northern edge of their lease where they would settle down. She had been as big a daredevil on horseback as anybody until she was pregnant with Phoebe and then all the years when her children were young she was nervous about riding, and did only as much as was required of her. All the women, at least most of them, were that way, they laughed about it among themselves, and yet they were faintly ashamed. It was only in the last couple of years that Selena had begun to enjoy riding again. Still, she knew her days of riding only half-broken horses and of taking chances on horsebackwithout even noticing it were over. In a way she regretted it, but she accepted what seemed inevitable.
    Selena liked riding with Kent beside her. He talked to her when they were riding in a way he rarely did otherwise. It was as if, out on the prairie on a horse, in the wind and under the sun, he lost some of his reserve, and for once the words flowed freely.
    “I been thinking,” he called to her, and she turned her head to hear him over the wind. “Our hay crop looks really bad, there won’t be nearly enough feed to last the winter, and the way things are, the calves are gonna be pretty light this fall. I been thinking I’d like to try to feedlot a liner load of ‘em—just try it out, you know.” Selena listened, thinking. This had been her father’s business, too. She knew it pretty well.
    “That won’t leave us much income to get through the winter.” He nodded, riding on through the short, dry grass. She called again, “How are we going to pay the feed bill if we do that?” They rode on, calling to one another, or not speaking, listening to the prairie noises they could hear during a lull in the wind: the whistle of the occasional gopher, the cry of a hawk. The day was still, the sun cast a burning heat over the land that even the wind