Chapter 12 #2
Here it came. The Look. The flash of resentment that had crossed Lexi’s face a hundred times across a dinner table, across a bed, across a crowded party as he dropped everything and responded to a call.
He braced for a snide comment, but Tessa merely asked, “Horse or cow?”
“Heifer. First time delivery. She’s in trouble.”
Tessa nodded, then turned and called toward the house, “Mak, grab your farm boots and mine. Now, please.”
Dillon stared at her.
“What?” she said, noticing.
“What are you doing?”
“Coming with you. Unless there’s a reason we shouldn’t.”
The reasons he had for wanting her not to come were the same reasons he had for wanting her to come, and they were all jumbled in the same emotional box he’d been avoiding opening for a while now.
“It could be bloody,” he said. “And it may not end well.”
“Makayla really wants to see a calf or a horse get born. I think she’s old enough to handle it regardless of the outcome. I’ll be there to talk her through it.”
She wanted to go with him? Shock rendered him, literally, speechless.
Makayla came out of the house holding two pairs of boots. “What’s up?”
“A cow is having trouble delivering a calf,” Tessa said, taking the boots. “Dr. Steele’s going to help her. I thought you and I might go along.”
“Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.” Makayla was already shoving her feet into her green farm boots, grinning like it was raining unicorns. “Really? Can I watch? I won’t be scared.”
“You’ll probably be scared a little,” Dillon said, finally finding his voice. “It’s okay if you are.”
As they pulled out of the driveway, Makayla leaned forward between the front seats of his truck, elbows planted on the big armrest, still grinning ear to ear. Tessa rode shotgun with his leather kit bag between her feet, smiling as well.
He drove toward the west end of the lake as fast as he could safely go.
Makayla unbuckled and reached forward, flipping radio dials with the focus of a safecracker until she found what she wanted.
Lively fiddling filled the cab. Makayla flopped back in her seat, buckled up, and commenced singing harmony to the bluegrass song.
Tessa glanced back, and her surprise gave way to an uncertain smile.
Good for her. She might not understand her daughter’s fascination with fiddling, but she seemed willing to go along with it.
He looked back at the road because if he kept staring at Tessa in her unguarded moment of maternal love, he was going to run them off the road into a ditch.
He still could not believe Tessa was coming along on a call voluntarily.
Lexi had hated everything about his work. The hours. The smell of him after a tough call. The blood and dirt and everything else that came home ground into the knees of his pants or splattered on his shirts.
Beside him, Tessa twisted her hair into a bun and was rolling up her sleeves.
She caught him looking and arched one eyebrow. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“I know that face. You make it every time I handle an animal incorrectly.”
She knows my faces?
“I was going to say,” he said carefully, “that most women wouldn’t volunteer to watch a cow possibly die birthing.”
Tessa looked out the windshield at the ridgeline, which still held on to a little snow. “Most women don’t have to live on a farm for three hundred and sixty-five days or forfeit their daughter’s college fund. It has a way of concentrating the mind on one’s priorities.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“You’re right.” She was quiet for a moment. “The answer is I don’t want to sit uselessly on a porch while everyone around me does the real work of farming and ranching. I spent a lot of years being that person in the Lawrence family. I thought I’d try something different.”
It was one thing for her not to be like Lexi. It was another thing altogether for her to voluntarily step into his world and ask to participate in its messiest and possibly most tragic aspect.
He gripped the steering wheel a little tighter and listened to Makayla hum a harmony line against a solo fiddle on the radio.
In the back of his mind, Lexi’s voice faded a little bit more. It wasn’t silent. He had no illusions about that. Voices like hers didn’t ever stop. But maybe it could be turned down in volume until Tessa’s voice saying, you’ve been taking care of two of women for weeks, drowned out Lexi’s.
He’d spent years believing Lexi. Maybe it was finally time to consider the possibility that she’d been wrong.
He took the turn into Pete Maddox’s ranch, and dust rose behind them. In his rearview mirror, he watched an eleven-year-old in a pink cowboy hat lean forward with her eyes shining. Beside him, a woman he had no business loving said, “When we get there, tell me what I can do to help.”
He answered, “Hold her head if she’ll let you. Either way, just talk to her.”
“Talk to her about what?”
“Animals don’t care what you say. They listen to how you say it.”
“I can do that. Goodness knows, I’ve been through childbirth myself. The cow and I can commiserate.”
He smiled a little. “Remember your daughter will be listening.”
She rolled her eyes at him as if to say, obviously.
The ranch house came into view, and beyond it, barns and cattle pens. In a paddock beside the barn, a cow lay on her side, her belly huge and sticking up awkwardly. A man in a baseball cap knelt with one knee on her neck.
Dillon killed the engine and got out, pulling on a shoulder length surgical glove as he strode over to the fence and ducked through it. Tessa and Makayla followed him more slowly, standing by the fence, still and focused.
“Okay,” he said to Pete. “Let’s help this mama have her baby.”