19. Shoplifting the Pooty
SHOPLIFTING THE POOTY
Dean
Maverick was already balanced on the split-rail fence by the time I slogged across the muddy pasture, his boots swinging as if he was testing the laws of physics.
He tried to whistle through the gap in his teeth, produced something that sounded like a dying smoke detector, and looked proud about it.
That’s when the goats descended.
They mobbed him like paparazzi on a red carpet, and he greeted every single one of them by name, pointing with the authority like some visiting dignitary to the United Nations of barnyard animals.
“Hi Vincent, hi Goatie, hi Nanny, hi Chew-Baaa-Ca, hi Selena!”
Vincent Van Goat, Goatie Hawn, Nanny, Selena Goatmez, and Chewbacca all nosed at his hands and legs, sniffing for breakfast.
Once he’d said hello to everyone, we loaded their troughs together. Afterward, he asked if we could check the chicken coop, because Princess Laya had been “looking sad,” which mostly meant she’d lost a few feathers and now wore the hunched, paranoid expression of a retiree expecting home invaders.
I found myself kneeling in the straw for twenty minutes, listening to Maverick talk about his new preschool friend “Scooter” (real name: Iggy), and how they were building a secret fort behind the sandbox, and how the big kid, Caden, was maybe an alien, and how if I ever needed backup in a “spy mission” I should let him know.
“You’re really good at sneaking,” he observed. “You don’t even make noise when you walk.”
It was supposed to be a quick animal feed before work, but Maverick needed to talk to each animal and make sure they ate enough.
I checked the time on my phone and saw I was going to be at least thirty minutes late to the office.
I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. Every morning I shouldered a little more responsibility for this kid’s happiness, and every morning it felt less like a chore and more like the most natural, inevitable thing in the world.
I’d never been good at casual anything. I was the guy who spent two hours reading reviews before buying a screwdriver.
If I got invested, I got obsessed. But this—showing up for Felicity, for Maverick—was rewriting my sense of self at warp speed.
I was the guy checking on the mental health of a chicken because a four-year-old thought she might be sad.
I was the guy who texted Felicity updates about said chicken’s mood swings, and I was the guy who started looking forward to bedtime stories and dinosaur trivia.
Hiding a relationship should have been child’s play for a Lockhart, especially me, who was notorious for my stoicism and privacy.
My older brother once managed to keep a broken collarbone secret for six weeks to avoid missing baseball season, and my parents still didn’t know that our tractor spent the better part of the 2011 harvest with a brick for a brake pedal.
But I was quickly learning romantic subterfuge was a separate skill set.
Not that we were flaunting it. We didn’t sit by each other in meetings or hold hands in public.
But Felicity’s laugh stuck to the corners of my brain, so I started bringing her coffee on my way to the office each morning—she liked it with oat milk and exactly one pump of hazelnut syrup.
I started keeping a carton of said oat milk in the staff fridge with her name on it in Sharpie.
By the following week, I had also stocked dinosaur and superhero Band-Aids, because the kid had an almost professional capacity for minor injuries.
It wasn’t just me blurring the lines of rules. Felicity retaliated by infiltrating my office. She left me notes hidden in my ledgers, in drawers, and in the pockets of my jackets.
In my ledger: “Reminder: Smiling does not negatively impact quarterly earnings.”
On my computer screen: “Blink twice if the spreadsheets are holding you hostage.”
Inside my desk drawer: “If you keep rolling up your sleeves like that, I cannot be held responsible for declining productivity.”
On a financial report: “You’re my favorite hostile work environment.”
In my Google calendar: “I checked the budget. You can afford one emotion today.”
Her handwriting was a looping, half-cursive thing that looked like cartoon bubble letters drunk on espresso.
Every time I saw her, something in my chest realigned, a click, a correction.
I found myself making any excuse I could to see her and talk to her.
I had to check on the copier or double-check payroll.
I spent every free moment at her house fixing her porch railing, tiling her bathrooms, repairing her damaged roof, or helping Maverick repair his tricycle.
This was not the casual, friends/co-workers-with-benefits scenario Felicity had proposed.
It was not even close. I was failing at casual sex with the kind of dedication most people reserved for Olympic training.
I wanted to be with her, and even more disturbingly, around her child.
Last week, Maverick’s preschool teacher sent home a drawing of Maverick’s “family” which not only included me, but also my mom, brothers, , Banjo and Minnie, the ranch cats, and Rex, Ranger, Duchess, and Duke our family dogs. I kept it in my truck for three days.
I could tell my mom and brothers knew something was up, but they hadn’t said anything to me directly.
The one person who didn’t seem aware of our relationship was Felicity herself.
Or maybe she just refused to acknowledge it, in the same way one refuses to look directly at a solar eclipse.
When we were alone, she touched me like she had every right, but in public, she kept a respectful six-foot perimeter at all times. “For plausible deniability,” she said.
We’d broken rule number one more times than I could count. We’d hooked up in the bathroom, maintenance closet, my truck, her SUV, all on Lockhart Ranch premises.
The situation reached its apex on a Tuesday morning, when I caught myself running down the entire day’s schedule just to see when I could be near her.
This was, objectively, insane. I was a grown man.
I managed a multi-million-dollar ranch. I once completed my taxes two months early, for fun.
But here I was, sneaking around the property like a high schooler trying to dodge hall monitors.
My mom emerged from seemingly nowhere, her arms outstretched in that universal matriarchal gesture that meant, I love you.
“Just the boys I was looking for,” she announced. “I was wondering if anyone here wanted to help me make some pancakes.”
“I do!” Maverick’s hand flung up in the air.
“Great, and you are needed at the chapel.” She pointed at me.
“The chapel?”
“Felicity is there setting up the Ramirez wedding.”
“I have a call in fifteen,” I said, purely for show. I would cancel a kidney transplant for Felicity at this point.
She waved a hand, shooing away my call. “Well, then you better hurry.” She turned on her heel, and she and Maverick headed toward the main house as he talked about what he wanted to be for Halloween.
After a quick detour to the office, where I’d stashed a couple of Felicity’s favorites in a desk drawer— a protein bar in the only flavor she’d tolerate (caramel brownie) and a bottle of cold brew, oat milk already mixed in, I tossed them in a brown bag, took my mom’s advice, and hurried.
I double-timed it across the field. I saw Felicity before she saw me—her hair in a messy bun, her body cloaked in an oversized flannel, the sleeves rolled up. She was muscling a wheeled dolly stacked higher than her own head with boxes labeled “LINENS” and “CANDLES PLEASE DON’T TIP.”
I jogged the last ten yards. “You know, most people use the law of leverage, not brute force.”
She made a show of ignoring me, tilting the dolly at a dangerous angle. “Leverage is for people with upper body strength. I work in weddings, not construction.”
I reached for the dolly but did not take possession until she gave a reluctant nod. Then I took the handles, righted the whole mess, and steered it up the steps with zero effort. “You’re welcome,” I teased.
She ignored me and spotted the paper sack I had tucked under my arm. “Is that for me?”
“Yep,” I said, handing it to her. “I caught you skipping breakfast again.”
She pulled out the cold brew and regarded it like a holy relic. “If you’re not careful, I’ll start expecting this every day.”
“Consider it a line item in the operating budget,” I said, and tried not to look at how her fingers—smudged with sharpie—wrapped around the bottle.
She dropped onto the chapel steps with a grateful groan, uncapped the coffee, and took one of those slow, reverential sips that made me momentarily forget the concept of restraint.
For three seconds it was just the sound of birds and the weirdly erotic way she experienced caffeine.
Then she opened the protein bar, bit off half, and made a wordless sound of gratitude.
“You understand you’re aggressively boyfriending me, right?” she said, once her mouth was clear. “You’re like…outpacing the actual boyfriend bar by miles.”
“Because I brought you a snack?” I asked, my tone infused with innocence.
“That’s not all you’ve done.”
“I fixed a railing,” I downplayed.
“You alphabetized my spice cabinet,” she pointed out.
“It was a mess,” I defended.
“You bought my son a new hat and boots.”
“His didn’t fit.”
“Dean.”
I had no defense. Even if I could have conjured one, Felicity’s phone rang with the Bangles 80s hit “Manic Monday.” She glanced at the caller ID, lip curling as she thumbed it to speaker. “Hey, Jim, what’s up?”