Chapter 5 #2
Tessa looked at the eggs in her hands, then at the north fence line, which she could just barely see stretching along the far edge of the pasture down by the lake. It looked fine from here. The posts were standing. The wire fencing stretched between them. What was there to check?
She shrugged and went back to collecting eggs.
Wednesday morning at five forty-five, she was woken by Loretta's braying, which made a rooster to crowing at dawn sound like a soothing lullaby.
Tessa suspected the donkey did specifically to torment her.
She groaned and rolled out of bed, got dressed in one of her hideous T-shirts, and headed downstairs, half-asleep.
With every step down the stairs, she felt colder. She craved another couple of hours of sleep in her nice warm bed almost more than she could resist. But she had animals to look after and pictures to shoot today.
Coffee. She needed a big shot of caffeine in the worst way.
She rounded the corner into the kitchen and stopped in her tracks. Was this a dream? She pinched her own forearm hard enough to leave a red mark to test the theory that she was asleep.
Oww.
Nope. She was wide awake.
And Maple the blind goat was standing in the middle of Fern's kitchen.
Maple stood on Fern's braided kitchen rug, bleating softly, her blank white eyes aimed at nothing, her stubby tail wagging hopefully. She obviously was lost and needed help. Poor thing.
Maple's guide dog, Captain, had taken to sleeping at the foot of Makayla's bed the past few nights, and the goat must've followed the scent of him up here to the house. But how the goat had gotten out of the pasture to wander up here? And how had she opened the back door?
Tessa went over to the offending door and closed it the way she normally would. She gave the knob a tug and groaned under her breath. The door didn't latch properly until she lifted up on the knob and heard a telltale click.
"Oh, Maple." Tessa sighed. "Honey, you can't be in here."
The goat stepped forward, caught her front hoof in the rug's fringe, and stumbled. She knocked over a kitchen chair with a clatter that sent Hamlet rocketing off the living room couch with a squeal of porcine alarm. The pig barreled into the kitchen, which startled Maple, who bolted sideways into the baker’s shelf and sent Fern's entire collection of canned goods onto the floor with a thunderous crash of breaking glass.
That must’ve woken Makayla, for she pounded downstairs and careened into the kitchen in her pajamas.
“Stop!” Tessa called urgently. “There’s broken glass on the floor and you’re barefoot!”
Makayla skidded to a halt and stared at the chaos. "Why’s Maple in the kitchen?"
"I assume she’s looking for her guide dog," she said past her overwhelming urge to run back to bed and hide under the covers.
"Cool.”
She shot Makayla a not now look.
“Umm, I’ll go get Captain and bring him down for Maple.”
“And put on some shoes, please,” she managed to say relatively calmly.
It took her two hours to clean the kitchen floor, herd Maple and Captain back outside, take care of the other animals, and discover the north fence had a broken section of fencing with a gap a goat could squeeze through.
It took her another full hour to patch for the fence using baling wire, pliers, and a YouTube tutorial by a cheerful man in Idaho who made fence repair look effortless. It was not.
Her hands were sore and blistered by the time she finished securing fencing to the posts and stretching it tight once more.
She didn't have the nifty wire stretcher the guy in the video used and had to do it with her bare hands.
She said a brief prayer over her patch, exhorting it to hold up for the next 361 days.
The horses, donkey, Maple and Captain, and an assortment of chickens trailed along behind her as she trudged toward the barn. The cute pair of Wellingtons she'd ordered online had arrived yesterday, at any rate, and the rubber boots that came up to mid-calf handled the springtime mud like champs.
Until she stepped in a puddle that turned out to be mostly mud and deep enough for her to sink to her ankles in it.
She took her next step, heard a sucking sound, felt a squish under her foot, and wet cold abruptly soaked her sock.
She looked down and saw only sock top where her leg protruded from the puddle
.She looked over her shoulder in dismay and spied the top of her hot pink rubber boot with little yellow rubber duckies all over it sticking up out of the puddle
And she heard, drifting across the property line on the still morning air, the unmistakable sound of Arlo Pickett laughing. She looked up to see him sitting on his covered porch in his rocking chair, head thrown back, guffawing nearly as loud as Loretta.
Fern always said Tuesdays were the day to check the north fence line.
The old coot could’ve warned her the fence needed repair—
Oh, wait. He had. She just hadn’t understood his oblique reference when he’d blathered about Fern thinking Tuesdays were good days to check fence lines.
Chagrined, she stood there in one boot and her muddy sock, stinging hands planted on her hips, and declared to her animal escorts, "I'm going to start writing down everything that man says."
Dillon showed up Thursday morning to check Chairman Meow’s glucose. “You hold the beast. I’ll draw.”
She must’ve winced because he said, “Cats can’t scratch you if you properly scruff them.” He demonstrated on the air, grasping an invisible cat by the nape. “Like you’re holding an expensive handbag.”
She blinked. “Did you just compare a veterinary technique to handbags?”
“I’m trying to speak your language.”
“How much does this hypothetical expensive handbag cost?”
“Does that make a difference on how you hold it?” he responded.
“Absolutely. I’m hanging onto a Birkin bag a lot more tightly than a Luis Vuitton.”
“Oh.” He paused, thinking. “The expensive purse I’m hypothetically scruffing costs, I don’t know. A hundred bucks?”
A laugh burst out of her and Chairman Meow shot off the hay bale, disappearing into the rafters. Which only made her laugh harder. She didn’t stop until she was gasping for breath.
Dillon stared at her. “What?”
“A hundred dollars buys the dust bag the expensive handbag comes in.”
“The bag has its own bag?”
She wiped the tears from her eyes. “Oh, you naive man, a respectable designer handbag starts at five thousand. An expensive one is thirty-thousand.”
His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “Thirty-thousand dollars? For a purse?”
“For a handbag. There’s a difference.”
“What’s the difference?”
“About twenty-five thousand dollars.” She smirked, grandly amused at his slack-jawed bewilderment.
“That’s obscene,” he said blankly.
“That’s high fashion, baby.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “I paid less than that for my truck.”
“Yes, but your truck doesn’t go with a cocktail dress.”
“It goes perfectly with cat hair and barn mud. Both of which you’re liberally accessorized with.”
She looked down ruefully at her smudged blue T-shirt, jeans with a greenish stain she sincerely hoped was grass, red-brown antiseptic on her wrists, and a new scratch on the back of her hand from this morning’s insulin wrestling match.
She sighed. “You’d be surprised how much effort goes into looking like you haven’t worked at looking great. It costs a fortune to appear effortless.”
“And yet here you are,” he retorted. “It didn’t cost you a dime to look like you lost a fight with a barn, and you still outclass every woman in Montana.”
It was a tease. Obviously a tease. But it was still high praise coming from him.
Their gazes met. The laughter was still warm between them, and for a moment—just a moment—the humor softened into something quieter. Something that invited them to consider closing the distance between them.
He looked away first. Cleared his throat. “We need to catch the cat again.”
“Well, yes. You scared him,” she replied.
“I scared him? You’re the one who laughed like a hyena.”
“Because you said a hundred dollars was expensive for a purse.”
“I stand by it. No bag is worth thirty grand.”
“Spoken like a man who carries his wallet in his back pocket.”
“Where else would I carry it?”
“In a messenger bag, or maybe a cross body satchel. I can find you something starter level, say, in the five-thousand-dollar range—”
“You will not.”
“Consider it an investment in your fashion education.”
He stomped up the steep stairs to the hayloft to retrieve Chairman Meow, muttering all the way about the decline of civilization. The cat must have sensed his foul mood, because he meekly allowed himself to be picked up and hauled back downstairs.
Tessa held the cat like a handbag and the technique actually worked—not that she would ever admit to Dillon—and he drew blood from its ear vein with efficient speed.
“Glucose is perfect, which means you’ve got the dose exactly right.” He said as he packed his kit. “You’re a quick study.”
It was such a small thing. Four words, delivered without fanfare.
She wasn’t prepared for how much it meant to her. “Why, thank you,” she replied warmly.
He tipped his hat and headed for his truck. “I’ll see you next Thursday. And don’t you dare buy me a man purse.”
“No promises,” she called after him.
That afternoon, Tessa stood reluctantly in front of Mick's woodworking shop.
She hadn't been in here since Mick’s death. It had never occurred to her in all that time to ask Fern what she'd done with Mick's tools. He'd had an elaborate setup with lathes, table saws, drill presses, and every hand tool known to man.
She'd walked past the padlocked door a dozen times since she and Makayla moved int and had averted her eyes every single time.
Her grief counselor after the fire had warned her that losing a spouse was a wound that never healed, and she shouldn't expect that pain ever to go away.
It hadn't. But it had taken a back seat to the daily routine as life inexorably went on.