Free Earth and Sky by Zahra Owens

Hunter think he was mocking him. “Let me see your sketch?”

    Hunter handed over the crumpled piece of paper.

    “I think we have something close to that in the woodshed.”

    “I’ll get the truck so we can load it,” Hunter replied, turning on his heel and walking away.

    Grant shook his head and made his way over to the woodshed. Like he thought, there was a beam that was pretty close to the size Hunter had jotted down, and it wouldn’t take a lot of sawing to get it to fit. If Hunter’s numbers were accurate, of course. Grant smiled. How could he suspect Hunter, who was a stickler for details, might get something like that wrong?

    He bent his knees enough that he could hug the post and lift it. It was really too heavy for one man, but since Hunter wasn’t here yet, he tried to get it a bit closer to the door.

    He’d almost made it when he heard the sound of a truck engine being shut off. A few more steps and then…. The shed door opened and Grant stumbled, buckling under the weight of the beam.

    “Whoa!” Hunter shouted. “Don’t hurt yourself.” He put his hands against Grant’s shoulders, preventing Grant from toppling over, trapping the beam between them. As soon as Grant seemed stable, he let go and moved his hands to the post. “Let’s get this in the truck. The sooner that gate is fixed, the better.”

    They loaded the beam in the back of the pickup truck and got in front, Hunter in the driver’s seat. The ground was still soggy from all the rain they’d had, and Hunter had to swerve around a few potholes in the unpaved road to prevent them from being covered in mud. They didn’t speak, and although Grant wasn’t the greatest talker, he knew it was because of the tension between them. He wondered why Hunter hadn’t simply told him where the gate was and sent him with one of the manual laborers. Surely Hunter had enough to do without coming out to help him mend a gate.

    Hunter stopped the truck in one of the most remote corners of the ranch, at a point where the road became too hard to drive even for the sturdy pickup truck. Grant followed Hunter outside and looked up at the menacing clouds in the sky, thinking they were going to get wet before they were done, but he didn’t say anything. Not when Hunter was clearly not in a talking mood.

    They unloaded the beam, and Grant threw his bag of tools over his shoulder before they started off toward the gate, balancing the heavy beam between them. Grant recognized the gate as being one on the border of Gable’s property, separating his land from the Blue River Ranch. The lock was facing the other way, so Grant wondered why they were mending his fence. He didn’t want to state a fact that was as clear as day to Hunter, so he simply threw the younger man a look and set to work.

    Hunter’s measurements were pretty accurate, and like Grant had predicted, it didn’t take a lot of sawing to get the beam to the right size. They worked together well, the only conversation being Grant asking Hunter to hand him a certain tool or to hold a particular part of the gate in place so Grant could screw the bolts into the new beam to hold the gate up. They were just standing back, testing to see whether the gate fell nicely into the lock when they threw it shut, when all hell broke loose and rain started pouring down. The truck was a fair walk away, but there was no other shelter nearby. It didn’t take more than a look for them to decide to make a run for it, laughing when, in their haste, they couldn’t get the door to open on the first go. By the time they sank down on the worn seats of the truck, they were soaked to the bone.

    “I should have known this would happen,” Hunter panted, still laughing.

    “It’s done nothing but rain for weeks, and the clouds were pretty dark when we arrived,” Grant agreed.

    “Yeah, but it was warmer today, so I hoped we’d get at least one dry day,” Hunter said, by now sounding more pensive.

    Grant tried