The fence went down again before Courtney June finished her coffee. She saw it from the porch: three cedar posts leaning into the mud, wire coiled like a snake in the grass. Her twelve heifers stood ten feet from the gap, chewing, patient, waiting for her to be stupid about it. Past the break lay the neighbor's pasture — the neighbor being the only reason she'd bought this land in the first place, and the only man in the county who had never once tipped his hat to her. She pulled on her boots over her pink overalls and grabbed the post driver. If those heifers crossed the line and chewed up his winter rye, he'd never speak to her. Not to complain. Not to yell. Just a closed door forever, which was worse. The ground was soup from the storm. Every post she set wobbled loose again. She drove one down to her knee and it still leaned. She stood in the mud and swore at the sky. That was when the capybara waddled out of the willow scrub on his side of the property line. It was round and brown and calm as a loaf of bread. It sat down in the gap in the fence, blinked at her, and did not move. Courtney stared. Capybaras did not belong in this county. Capybaras did not belong in any county she knew. Behind it, a man came jogging through the wet grass, rope in hand, hat pushed back. Him. The neighbor. He stopped on his side of the wire and looked at the mess — the leaning posts, the mud, the pink overalls, the heifers, the rodent sitting between them all. "That's Beau," he said. "He gets out." "I was fixing the fence," Courtney said. "I can see that." She waited for him to turn around. He didn't. He stepped over the downed wire, took the post driver out of her hands, and sank the next post in three clean strikes. She held the wire. He drove. Beau chewed a willow shoot and watched. They worked the whole line before noon. He didn't say much. She learned his hands were scarred across the knuckles and that he took his coffee from a dented thermos and that he called the capybara "buddy" under his breath when he thought she couldn't hear. When the last staple went in, he wiped his hands on his jeans and finally looked at her straight. "Fence'll hold now," he said. "Keep your girls off my rye." "I will." He whistled. Beau stood up and followed him back toward the willow. Halfway across the pasture he stopped and turned. "Supper's at six," he said. "If you eat beef." He kept walking before she could answer. Courtney stood in the mud with a coil of wire in her hand and six hours to figure out what to wear.

Courtney walked back to the log cabin with mud drying on her overalls and six hours pressing on her chest. Supper at six. She had said yes with her silence, and now she had to look like a woman a rancher could sit across a table from. She stripped off the pink overalls at the door and climbed the stairs to the loft. Her closet held three flannel shirts, two pairs of jeans with torn knees, one church dress from four years ago, and a wool coat. She pulled the dress off the hanger. Moths had been at the hem. She held it up to the balcony light and saw daylight through the skirt. She sat on the edge of the bed. The clock on the dresser said noon. The nearest town was forty minutes down the county road, and she had no truck that week — the starter was in a box on the kitchen table waiting for a part. She went to the window. Her Clydesdale stood in the near paddock, broad and patient, tail switching flies. He could carry her to town and back before dark if she pushed him. He could not carry her home in a dress without ruining it on the saddle. She thought about it for a long minute. Then she thought about the closed door forever. She pulled on clean jeans and her second flannel and led the Clydesdale out of the paddock. She saddled him, tied a feed sack behind the cantle for whatever she bought, and rode down the road at a working trot. The dress shop on the main street was closed on Wednesdays. She stood in the street and read the sign twice. The feed store was open. So was the hardware. So was the little grocery with a rack of work clothes by the register. She went into the grocery. On the rack she found a plain cotton blouse, cream colored, her size, eleven dollars. She found a denim skirt on the same rack for fourteen. She bought both and a bar of soap and rode home. At the cabin she washed at the pump until her hands stopped smelling like wire and cedar. She braided her hair wet. She put on the new blouse and the new skirt and her cowboy boots, because the boots were the only nice thing she owned and they had been her mother's. She looked at herself in the hall mirror. Not fancy. Not muddy. Clean. At a quarter to six she walked the fence line on foot, crossed at the repaired gap, and headed for the light in his kitchen window. She had solved what to wear. She had not solved what to say when he opened the door.