Chapter Sixteen – Rowan
I feed the horses first. Grain, then hay.
Jasper noses my shoulder like he’s owed conversation as well as breakfast. I rub the star on his forehead until his eyelids drop, then run a brush down his neck in long, even strokes that shine the bay back into him.
Chickens next. They pour from the coop like somebody cut a ribbon, all bustle and commentary.
I check the latches twice even though I’m the one who set them, then I’m headed over to Otter Creek Farms.
The barn breathes with me; it always does.
Usually, that’s enough to set me right. Today, it gets me halfway there.
I keep seeing a line of small faces under the oak, parents close behind, waiting for me to be the kind of man who knows what to do with ten different kinds of worry at once.
I can mend a fence in the rain with a headlamp and a pair of pliers.
I can read a sky and know when it’s thunder or a problem. Kids? Kids are their own weather.
Gravel chatters. Bailey’s SUV noses under the oaks and bounces to a stop like it’s done this lane its whole life.
The back opens, and a flock tumbles out—Velcro, braids, one kid already wearing his sneakers on his hands like puppets.
Bailey’s got a clipboard, a tote bag, and the look she gets when she’s about to herd humanity with a smile.
And then the passenger door opens.
Ivy climbs down in faded jean shorts and a white T-shirt, and the boots that drive my wildest fantasies.
Her hair’s in a loose braid that the morning has already started to work on.
She’s got a book tucked under one arm and a light in her eyes I’ve only seen here—back of the farm light, not stage light.
She looks at me first. Not the barn. Not the flock. Me.
“Morning,” she says.
“Morning,” I answer, and pretend that word doesn’t feel bigger in my mouth than usual.
We set the blankets in a half-moon under the oak, the swing nudging at my shoulder in the breeze like an old friend.
I haul the water cooler over, stack paper cups, and set a crate for Ivy to sit on.
Bailey posts a sheet of construction paper on the trunk with painter’s tape: Walk feet.
Farm voices. Ask before touching. Mud happens.
She already has two moms nodding and a dad signing up to bring muffins next time.
“Ready?” Ivy asks, tapping the book cover with her thumb. She means it like are you okay if I take this? I nod because of course I am. Because it makes sense here—her voice, kids’ knees folded underneath them, sun through leaves.
She starts. “Once, there was a girl who wanted something to grow.”
The flock goes quiet in a good way. Not the held-breath way. Shoe-Hands leans forward until he tips and catches himself with his palms. A little girl in polka dots migrates an inch at a time until her knee touches Ivy’s shoes like she planned it that way.
“What does a seed need?” Ivy asks, holding her palm out like she’s got one in it.
“Water!” three kids chorus.
“Dirt!”
“A song,” Shoe-Hands says, deadpan. Ivy tries not to laugh but doesn’t quite manage it. “You might be onto something,” she tells him.
I don’t move from my post near the barn.
I don’t need to. She has them. She doesn’t turn herself into a parade.
She makes the room smaller, and every kid feels like the page belongs to them.
When the book girl waits, Ivy asks what they’d plant.
A purple bike. A puppy. A thunder that’s only sound.
A new friend. That one lands in my ribs like a truth you didn’t see coming but recognize anyway.
I keep my eyes on the oak’s bark and tell myself I’m just checking for beetles like a man who isn’t soft.
We finish the book with a soft “The end.” Five kids don’t move.
Ivy hums a simple little refrain—four lines about water and sun and stubborn roots—and by the second pass, the whole blanket hums with her.
She doesn’t even look at me, and I know exactly what it feels like to breathe easier because she’s here.
“Okay,” she says, settling the book on the crate. “Want to meet actual chickens?”
We do the rules again. I’m better at rules than songs. “We’re going to move as a group,” I tell them. “I’ll show. Miss Ivy will help. Miss Bailey will make sure nobody rides the chickens.”
A hand shoots up. “Can we ride the chickens?”
“Absolutely not,” I say, dry enough that two parents laugh. Shoe-Hands looks at me like I just told the best joke anyone’s ever thought of.
We start at the coop. I open the latch slowly and walk them through it like my hands are a picture book.
“We’re quiet in here. We don’t chase. We collect like we’re surgeons.
” Ivy crouches beside me with the basket, and we ask who has careful fingers.
Seven careful fingers appear. I pick two. Ivy guides them through the straw.
An egg lands in a palm, and the kid whispers, “It’s warm,” like this is the first true thing he’s learned today. It probably is.
We wash up at the foot pump I rigged last winter when the old handle stuck. “Look at you,” Ivy murmurs, not for show, just for me. I shrug like it’s nothing and put another cup under a small pair of hands.
In the pasture, I bring Jasper to the fence and put his nose on the rail.
He sucks attention like a shop vac and pretends he doesn’t.
“One at a time,” I say. “He likes his forehead rubbed, not his eyeballs.” They giggle like I invented comedy.
Butterscotch comes up behind me with the swagger of a calf who thinks she’s queen. She sneezes directly on Ivy’s shin.
“She loves you,” Ivy tells the kids.
“She’s marking you for later,” I mouth back.
I clock a little girl at the edge. Pink medical bracelet, careful posture, the way worry wraps kids’ shoulders in a pattern you only learn if you’ve had to unlearn it yourself.
Ivy sees her too because of course she does.
She doesn’t point. She doesn’t coax. She brushes Butterscotch slowly, the big sure strokes you’d use on a skittish horse, and lets the girl come to the brush instead of the other way around.
After a minute, Rowan’s Rule of Farm Miracles does its thing.
The kid steps in, takes the handle, and the calf leans like we put this moment here just for her.
“Brave looks good on you,” Ivy says, quiet enough to be just for one set of ears. The kid’s shoulders stop trying to tuck under her earlobes. I swallow something that tastes like gratitude and cedar.
We move to the starter table I've set up under the pecans, with trays, a bucket of potting mix, and a bowl of beans. “Pinch,” I say, showing thumb and forefinger. “Drop. Cover. Press.” They say it back like a chant. Bailey keeps time with a paper cup. Dirt becomes a possibility a dozen times over. It’s messy in the right ways.
One kid dumps half his water on his shirt.
Shoe-Hands wants to name the worms. “Sir Wiggles,” Ivy pronounces, and now I guess we have a worm with a title.
I don’t perform for the parents. I don’t coo.
I show. I wait. I say, “Yeah, that’s it,” when a kid gets the seed to settle one knuckle deep because work should feel like you did something.
I watch Ivy be ten different kinds of patient, and I swear I feel a hinge give way inside my chest. The thought I’ve been holding under my tongue for weeks— maybe I could do this, not once, but again —raises its head like it wants sun.
By the time we circle back under the oak, we’ve got ten little starters labeled in crooked kid handwriting, two empty water coolers, and a flock of tired happy.
Ivy sets the book back on her knee, but the kids steal the moment—one at a time onto the crate, telling me and her what their seed will be.
A bike. A puppy. Thunder that’s only sound.
A friend who stays. I could listen to them all afternoon.
We don’t. We hand out juice. We recycle cups.
Bailey schedules two more mornings while I’m standing right there.
Parents drift. One mom with an anxious mouth thanks me with both hands.
A dad asks if he can come back and help fix a gate because he misses using a hammer.
The polka-dot girl presses the warm egg into Ivy’s palm with ceremonial solemnity.
“So you don’t forget,” she says. Ivy’s mouth wobbles, and I pretend I don’t see it because I know how to give people the dignity of not being watched when they feel.
We wave the last car through the oaks. Dust hangs and falls. Quiet returns in a hurry, the kind the farm carries when the day has done what it came for.
I carry the crate back to the porch. I tip the cooler and watch the last line of water catch sunlight on its way out. When I turn, Ivy’s still under the oak, knees up, chin planted. She’s looking at the footprints, the smudged blanket outlines, like a general surveying a good kind of battle.
“You were good,” I say. It comes out rougher than I meant. I clear my throat. “With them.”
She tips me a grin that’s more edges than teeth. “They make it easy.” She looks past me toward the pasture. “You were… you.” She lets it sit like that. “It worked.”
I don’t know what to do with praise. I keep it anyway. “Nobody rode a chicken.”
“They considered it.” She angles her chin toward the coop, where Pancake the goat is plotting something she doesn’t have the attention span to finish. We both chuckle, and I feel my shoulders drop an inch I didn’t realize they’d taken on.
I sit beside her and scrub a hand over my jaw.
The egg’s still in her palm, warm from one small hand to another.
I want to say I’m sorry for dragging my feet.
I want to say I’m scared of making something public that I can’t control once it lives outside the fences.
I want to say I’m better at mending than starting , and I don’t want that to be true anymore. What I say is simpler.