Chapter 29
The barn was ready by noon.
Wyatt had spent the morning doing final checks. The sheriff’s horses. The Percheron. The reenactment horses. The chestnut, calm in the crossties, standing like a horse who had forgotten she had ever been afraid of anything.
He checked the trailers next. Curtis’s two-horse straight-load. Dan’s stock trailer. The sheriff’s department rig, which didn’t need anything, but Wyatt checked it anyway because checking was what he did.
The equipment went into the truck bed in order. Spare shoes, emergency kit. Apron, folded the way Pop had folded it, the creases worn soft. A first-aid kit for the horses that Wyatt had assembled himself because the one the sheriff’s department carried was missing half its supplies.
Curtis arrived at eleven to load the chestnut.
He backed the trailer into position, lowered the ramp, and stood to the side.
The chestnut walked off the crossties, across the barn aisle, and up the ramp without hesitating.
She stepped into the trailer, turned her head to look at Curtis through the slat, and started eating from the hay net.
Curtis looked at Wyatt. Wyatt nodded.
“See you at seven,” Curtis said.
“Seven.”
Curtis drove away.
Dan had already picked up the Percheron an hour earlier—the big mare loading with the bored efficiency of a horse who considered trailers a minor inconvenience, like traffic. The sheriff’s horses would come from the department barn in the morning.
Everything was where it needed to be.
The barn was empty. Wyatt stood in the aisle. The crossties hung from their posts, unclipped. The stalls were clean. The boarders were in the pasture. Junebug was at the fence, dozing in the afternoon sun, his shadow long and still on the grass.
The tools were on the wall. Wyatt looked at them.
Rasps, nippers, the hoof knife with the worn handle, the clinching tongs, the hammer.
Each one on its peg, each peg in the stud where Pop had drilled it.
Outlines darkened the wood behind them, shaped exactly to what they held.
Forty years of the same tools in the same places, taken down every morning and put back every night.
Pop had prepped for the county fair the same way.
Wyatt remembered watching him at fourteen, sitting on an overturned bucket in this same aisle while Pop went through his kit piece by piece.
Checking every tool. Organizing every shoe.
Writing the schedule on a notepad in block letters, each horse’s name and shoe size and the time he’d start.
Pop didn’t rush. Didn’t skip steps. He treated the night before the fair the way he treated the fair itself—with the quiet seriousness of a man who believed preparation was a form of respect.
You respected the work by being ready for it. You respected the horses by having what they needed before they needed it. You respected yourself by leaving nothing to chance.
Wyatt stood in the aisle and looked at the tools on the wall.
You’d have liked this.
He didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t need to.
The conversation he had with Pop lived in a place that didn’t require sound—a running thread that had started the morning Pop died and hadn’t stopped since.
Not every day, but in moments like this, when the barn was quiet and the work was done and the tools were on the wall, Pop was close enough to talk to.
The chestnut walked up the ramp today like she’d been doing it her whole life.
You would have stood at the fence and watched her load and said something about patience. You would have been right. And I would have pretended I hadn’t heard you say it a hundred times before.
Wyatt walked to the workbench and ran his hand along the edge. The wood was smooth from decades of use—tools set down and picked up, invoices written, coffee mugs placed and retrieved.
Pop’s hands had worn this surface. Wyatt’s were wearing it now.
The town’s doing a thing, and they asked me to be part of it.
Not asked, exactly. Richard doesn’t ask.
But I said yes. I showed up. The horses are ready.
Tomorrow morning, I’m going to drive this truck down Main Street with twelve horses and a woman I’m in love with, and you would have liked all of it. Especially her.
He stood at the workbench for a long moment.
The barn was warm. Afternoon light came through the open door in a wide rectangle that reached halfway down the aisle, catching dust in the air. Outside, Junebug shifted at the fence. The bay mare grazed somewhere in the pasture, content.
She’s a good one, Pop. She pays attention. She doesn’t push. She stood on this porch and drank coffee from your mug and looked out your window, and she didn’t try to fix anything. She just stood there and let it be what it was.
You would have told me not to mess it up. I’m trying not to.
Wyatt pushed off the workbench. He walked down the aisle, past the empty crossties, past the stalls, past the tack room where the spare bridles hung and the emergency kit was packed and the clipboard sat on the shelf with Pop’s handwriting on the back page.
At the door, he stopped and looked back.
The tools on the wall. The worn bench. The aisle where he had learned everything he knew from a man who explained everything he did.
Then he turned off the lights and pulled the door closed. The latch caught with the solid click it had made for forty years.
Junebug watched him cross the yard to the truck. Wyatt stopped at the fence and put his hand on the old horse’s forehead. Junebug leaned into him, pressing forward until Wyatt had to brace.
“Hold down the fort,” Wyatt said.
Junebug blinked. Wyatt got in the truck and started the engine.
The exhaust was quiet now. No rattle, no gasket leak. He’d fixed it.
One thing at a time.
He pulled out of the drive and turned toward town. The road wound through the valley, past the Jennings farm, past the creek crossing, up and over the ridge where the cell signal dropped out and the mountains opened up on either side.
The afternoon sun was behind him, and the valley ahead was green and gold and laid out like something someone had painted on purpose.
Tomorrow was the Fourth. Tomorrow was the parade, the horses, the route down Main Street, the fireworks at night with Meghan beside him. Tomorrow was the thing he had been preparing for. Not for three weeks, not even for the month since Richard cornered him at the diner.
Longer than that. Years, maybe. He crested the ridge. The cell signal came back.
Hope Hollow sat in the valley below, the church steeple catching the light, the banner on Main Street visible even from here.
Wyatt drove down into town.