Chapter 20
MAGGIE
Sloane drops the end of the hose into the pool and walks back to the tap. The handle's stiff and she has to use both hands to turn it. Everyone in Duster is watering something on a morning like this and the pressure out here in July is a joke. It'll take an hour to fill, maybe longer.
The pool is four feet across and two feet deep, hard blue plastic.
I found it yesterday in the back of the feed store when I was clearing space.
Mom bought it five years ago for a pig who'd come in from a factory farm in bad shape and was struggling in the heat.
The rim was a bit too high so he used it twice and then forgot about it, and it's been stacked against the wall ever since.
Nothing in a sanctuary gets thrown away.
You always end up needing it eventually.
Sloane walks back, wiping her hands on her shorts. Which aren't shorts, exactly. They're hot pants. Her top is cropped, sitting a few inches above the waistband. She's tanned after a week outside and she looks annoyingly good.
"You're not in your cocktail dress today," I joke. "Did you go shopping?"
"No." Sloane chuckles as she rolls the lip of the hose over the side of the pool so it doesn't jump out.
"Our housekeeper drove them over on Friday.
Well — my parents' housekeeper. Irina. She's got a daughter and she lent me some of her things to wear.
" She straightens up and pushes her hair off her face. "I hope it's not inappropriate."
"I'll let you know if the goats decide to file a complaint," I say with a grin. "So you have more practical clothes now?"
"Yeah. Irina turned up at the motel with a suitcase and a cooler full of sushi and a bottle of Chablis. She drove four hours to check on me, and my dad doesn't even know she came. It was so sweet."
I glance up. Sloane's looking at the water going into the pool, not at me. She blinks a few times. "I just — I really needed to see a familiar face, you know? It was a good start to the weekend."
"How sweet. So it wasn't too bad staying in Duster?"
"It was okay. On Saturday I got the bus to Cawley," she continues. "Had lunch at the Mexican place. Got some books out of the library."
"Good books?"
She bites her lip and a little color comes up under the tan on her cheeks. "Yeah," she says. "I enjoyed them." She bends and adjusts the hose in the pool again, even though it's fine where it is.
There's something odd about our exchange, which takes me a moment to place. It's that there's actually nothing odd about it. It's the kind of easy back-and-forth I'd have with my volunteers on any given morning. Not something I ever pictured having with Sloane Archer.
"What did you do?" she asks. "Other than working. Anything nice?"
"Mom came by on Saturday. She'd only got back from Portland the night before but she still insisted on making a casserole. It's a compulsion with her. She's not happy unless she's feeding someone. You'll try her casseroles one of these days."
"I'm probably not her first pick of dinner guest," Sloane says.
"She'll come around. I told her you've been pulling your weight." I glance up at the sun, then at my watch. "Come with me to the feed store, we need to clear some space."
Sloane follows me out of the paddock gate and around the side of the barn.
From the shed on the other side of the yard comes the sound of a chainsaw.
I glance over without stopping. Dale, one of my handyman volunteers, has the door off its hinges, leaning against the outside wall of the shed, with a pencil between his teeth.
"And then on Saturday evening I had dinner at a friend's house," I say. "I didn't realize it was going to be a double date kind of situation. She tried to set me up with someone and I hate it when she does that unannounced."
"Did it work?"
"Absolutely not."
Sloane laughs. "Who was she trying to set you up with?"
"The new vet in Visalia. She's nice enough but not for me."
We reach the feed store and I pull open the door. The heat inside rolls out at us — corrugated iron and July, it turns into an oven by ten every morning and there's nothing you can do about it. I pull the cord on the single bulb even though it barely helps.
The store is lined with metal shelving and plastic bins, hay bales stacked at the back.
There's a narrow aisle down the middle and a table with paperwork against the side wall.
Pig pellets on the left, goat and sheep on the right, chicken on the lower shelves, supplements in a locked cabinet because I had a raccoon break in two years ago who ate his way through about forty dollars of vitamin paste, and Hank's horse nuts in their own bin because he's picky and won't touch them if they pick up another smell.
Room for anything else: none.
"Okay," I say, looking at it all. "So we stack the chicken feed up higher, push the sheep pellets across, and the new feed can go —" I point at a section of the lower shelf that holds a pile of old tack nobody's used in years. "Along here. We just need to shift all that first."
Sloane looks at the shelf. "Sorry. New feed for what?"
"We've got two emus arriving. Sisters. That's why we're filling up the pool."
She stares at me. "Emus." The laugh starts in her throat and works its way up. Her hand comes up to cover her mouth. "Like — the big flightless bird. Six feet tall. That emu."
"The very same."
"You're winding me up." She's still laughing but it's starting to tail off into something else. Her face is catching up to the fact that I'm not joking, that I'm wiping down a shelf and taking stock of bin capacity and being practical about all of it. The laugh stops.
"Wait," she says. "Are you serious?"
"Their names are Thelma and Louise. They'll bunk in with the goats at night. Dale is making the door higher so it's easier for them to get in and out." I gesture in the direction of the shed and see a vehicle coming up the drive.
It's a white truck. TULARE COUNTY ANIMAL SERVICES on the side in green. It pulls up and the driver swings down from the cab. He told me eleven on the phone. It's barely gone nine.
"Damn it," I say. "That's their feed. He's two hours early."
I come back inside. "Right. Change of plan. If you can start bringing the sacks in from the truck, I'll finish clearing space in here. Take the wheelbarrow. They'll be heavy."
She looks at me for another beat, still confused. Then she sets down the box she was holding and walks past me out into the sun. I hear her mutter "emus" as she goes.