Chapter 3 #3
Makayla was already disappearing into the barn once more.
“Makayla! Wait—”
But her daughter was moving with the unstoppable momentum of an eleven-year-old who had just been gifted an entire farm full of animals.
The stiletto heels of Tessa’s leather knee-boots were sinking into the gravel with every step.
She was tempted to kick them off, but the idea of stepping in animal droppings in her stocking feet kept her from acting on the impulse.
The inside of the barn was dim and warm and smelled like hay and old wood.
The braying resolved itself into a gray donkey standing in a stall, ears flattened, yelling at nothing in particular.
A three-legged dog—a portly yellow lab missing a back leg he’d lost in an illegal bear trap, sat in the barn aisle watching the donkey with an expression of weary tolerance.
Behind the dog, a blind goat with a black coat stood close, its nose nearly touching the dog’s tail.
Makayla stood beside the goat, crooning softly to it and petting its back. The goat’s stubby tail wagged so fast it became a blur in response to Makayla’s touch.
In the big stall next to the donkey, two elderly draft horses, chestnut with whiteish manes, horses stood together, hip-shot and half asleep.
Even from here, Tessa could see white hairs circling their necks and across their backs—scarring from harness rubbed-wounds that hadn’t been properly cared for when the pair had worked on a farm.
Further down, a llama with patchy, thinning wool regarded Tessa over its stall’s half-door with the imperious gaze of a creature that considered itself far above her pay grade.
His coat was flashy, with patches of chocolate brown and snow white where it wasn’t pink skin sprinkled with dark freckles.
Tessa never failed to be startled at how big the llama was—almost six feet tall at the tip of its fuzzy, admittedly rather cute, ears.
The tabby barn cat was perched on a beam above her head, glaring down with the malevolence of a diabetic queen whose insulin schedule had been disrupted. And she was clearly not pleased with her vassal humans.
Tessa stared up at it. “I don’t even know your name.”
The cat hissed back.
“Charming.”
She found a note taped to the feed room door in spidery handwriting that made her guess its author was Arlo.
It was a list of the animals, their names, medications, and feeding schedules.
She scanned it in growing dismay. The barn cat was named Chairman Meow.
The donkey was Loretta. The three-legged dog was Captain.
The blind goat was Maple. The horses were Biscuit and June.
The llama was Dolly. The geese were Bonnie and Clyde.
Last but not least was the potbellied pig named Hamlet who, the note informed her, lived inside the house and slept on the couch. Non-negotiable.
Tessa frowned. She didn’t recall Fern ever having a pig in her house when she and Makayla visited.
Had the pig—she glanced down at the list again.
Hamlet. Had Hamlet been removed to the barn when they’d visited for Sunday dinners?
He must’ve been. There was no way she’d missed a live pig in her mother-in-law’s living room.
Tessa folded the note and put it in her pocket.
The weight of being responsible for all these foreign and strange creatures crashed down on her all at once. She’d never even had a goldfish, let alone a pet that required regular attention, affection, or real care. She didn’t do animals. At all.
She was not going to cry. She was not going to let Fern get the best of her. And she was not going to let down her daughter.
First things first. She was going to make a plan. Plans were what she was good at. Plans were how a person survived hard things, especially impossibly hard things.
Makayla had spotted a cluster of chickens pecking outside the barn’s back door and crouched among them, delighted, while they ignored her entirely.
When she stood back up, her plaid skirt was dusty around the hem and her leather ballet-slipper shoes were caked with something Tessa chose not to examine closely.
“I’m going back to the house,” she told Makayla. “I need to unpack the car and figure out where to put our things before Mr. Sutter gets here tomorrow to make sure we’ve moved in.”
“Can I stay out here?” Makayla asked.
Tessa looked around, seeing nothing but threats to her child’s safety. “Don’t climb up in the hayloft or go into any of the stalls. And stay away from those geese. They’re a menace.”
“Aww, Bonnie and Clyde aren’t mean. Not if you have a snack for them.”
“You heard me. Stay away from them.”
“Fine,” Makayla huffed.
Inside the farmhouse, Tessa saw Mick everywhere.
It was one of the reasons she’d hated coming here after the fire.
But she’d never had the heart to tell Fern how much it hurt her heart to see all the pictures of Mick, the knickknacks he’d made his mother, the projects he’d done around the house over the years.
Fern had taken great comfort from the reminders of her only son.
Tessa had only taken pain from them. And now she had to live with all of it.
Every single bit of it forcing her to think of the man she’d lost and the tragic end to their fairytale love story.
Day-to-day, she locked away her pain and grief.
She’d learned long ago that the loneliness and sorrow overwhelmed her and paralyzed her if she let them out of their tightly locked cage for more than a few seconds at a time.
Better to keep them out of sight and out of mind as much as possible.
But here, in this place, the home where he’d grown up, filled bottom to top with Fern’s memories of Mick, how was she supposed to avoid all those awful, overpowering feelings?
The front door opened into a living room with wide plank floors that Mick had hand scraped and laid here with care. To the left was the stone fireplace with the wood mantle Mick had made.
A staircase rose along the far wall, its dark wood banisters a work or art.
Each spindle had been painstakingly hand-carved with a raised vine pattern that twined around the smoothly sanded spindle.
Mick had made that, too. She traced one of the vines with her fingertip and felt the ghost of his hands in the wood.
The kitchen table was his work, too—a long farm table he’d built from reclaimed barn wood.
She remembered him working on it in the months before Makayla was born, sanding it smooth, rubbing it with oil until the old oak grain glowed.
She’d sat at this table as a young bride eating Fern’s chili and laughing at Mick’s terrible jokes.
She ran her hand along the surface. The wood was warm under her fingers.
Through the kitchen window, she could see the door to Mick’s woodworking shop. An ugly silver padlock secured the door. It occurred to her she had no idea where the key to that lock might be. Which was just as well. She wasn’t going in there. Not today. Maybe not ever.
Hamlet the potbellied pig was, as advertised, asleep on the living room couch.
He was white all over, or rather pink beneath a covering of coarse white hair.
She guessed he was three feet long and would stand maybe half that tall when he wasn’t sprawled from one end of the couch practically to the other.
He looked solid, too. He had to weigh at least a hundred pounds.
He opened one eye when Tessa came in, assessed her briefly, and closed it again with a grunt that clearly communicated she was not interesting enough to warrant full consciousness.
The braying from the barn started up again. According to Arlo’s list, the cat was overdue for insulin by several hours, now. The horses needed—she consulted Arlo’s note—joint supplements and medication. The llama needed some kind of medicated skin treatment. The chickens needed feeding soon.
But before any of that could happen, the geese needed to stop terrorizing her driveway.
She had a store to run and a child to get to school and a growing designer wedding gown business with Charlotte that was in the middle of negotiations with a major New York bridal boutique.
And now she had a farm full of animals with needs she did not begin to know how to meet.
You can handle this. You’ve organized charity galas for three hundred people. You can manage a dozen animals.
Chairman Meow chose that moment to appear on the kitchen windowsill and yowl at her with a sound so mournful and accusatory it could have been Fern herself, reaching from beyond the grave to lodge a complaint about Tessa’s inadequacy.
The cat needed insulin. Now.
But Arlo’s list did not specify how much insulin the cat needed nor how she was supposed to administer it to said cat.
And the only veterinarian in this valley—the only person who knew how much insulin Chairman Meow needed and when and how to administer it to a cat who clearly viewed humans as the enemy—was a man she had publicly and memorably sworn she would never call.
If you were the last veterinarian in Montana, I’d learn animal medicine myself before I picked up the phone and called you.
She picked up the phone.
Arlo answered on the first ring, skipping a hello and going straight to announcing, “Been expecting you to call.”
“Thank you for picking up, Arlo. I also want to thank you for leaving me the list of information about Fern’s animals and their various needs. That’s why I’m calling, in fact. I don’t know how much insulin the cat—uh, Chariman Meow—needs, and I have no idea how to give it to him.”
“So here’s the thing. Fern left me a letter. That lawyer fella gave it to me when he read the will to you.”
. . . And she sensed another Fern grenade about to explode. Now what?
“Well, I read the letter.”
She would hope he had. His best friend in the whole world had left it for him.