5. Dolly on the Roof
Dolly on the Roof
JAKE
First Note Farm
I want to be clear about something: I'm not following her around. The orbit's just small—coffee lives in the kitchen, the east fence is where the east fence is, and the barn has a lean-to. That's all.
When I go for coffee in Cash's kitchen, and Lila is already at the counter, it is because it is a kitchen, and kitchens have coffee.
When I end up at the east fence, and she happens to be checking Shadow's water on the other side of the paddock, that is because the east fence is where the east fence is.
When I come around the barn, and she is on the phone in the lean-to with her clipboard, her back to me, that is because the barn has a lean-to, and I was going to the barn.
I have, however, noticed something.
When Lila Chen is near the horses, her voice has a certain quality. Low. Unhurried. Like she has all the time in the world, and the horse is exactly the company she was hoping for.
When she plays the morning session, I can hear the piano from the Porch Light Farm porch, and the sound has the same quality: no edges, nothing pushing.
And when she is on a professional call, both of those things are gone entirely.
I have not yet figured out what to do about the distance between those two versions. I just know the distance is there. And I know she is the only person in this orbit who appears to be carrying that kind of distance.
Everyone else out here seems to have set something down.
Lila Chen is still holding on.
* * *
The goat is Angel's fault.
This is not a controversial statement. Cash agrees. Kit agrees. Even Ivy, who came over from Sycamore Ridge to look at the situation and stood with her arms crossed for a full minute before saying anything, agrees.
The goat is Angel's fault.
Her name is Dolly. She is a fainting goat, cream-colored, approximately the size of a medium dog, and possessed of an intelligence and a confidence that are both completely out of proportion to her dimensions.
When startled, she locks up and tips over like a small, dramatic tree. Embarrassment never follows.
Angel saw her at a farm auction three weeks ago. She called it a practical decision—"property enrichment," she said.
Cash made the face he wears when he’s choking back opinions. Angel, of course, is immune to that face.
Dolly arrived on a Tuesday.
By Thursday, she had figured out the latch on the equipment shed.
This was discovered when the equipment shed door was found open, and Dolly was standing inside with her front hooves on the lower shelf, investigating a bag of feed with the focused attention of a goat who has been planning this for some time.
By the following Monday, she had figured out the latch on the tack room.
She had not done anything destructive inside the tack room. She had simply been in there. Standing. In the center of the floor.
Apparently thinking.
Nobody has yet figured out how she got onto the roof of the lean-to, the tin warm beneath the sun while her tiny hooves clacked like castanets.
Still, she was up there at six-thirty on Wednesday morning, looking extremely pleased with herself and completely uninterested in coming down.
"She's enriching the property," Angel said, looking up at Dolly on the lean-to roof.
"She's on the roof," Cash said.
"Goats do that."
"You knew that before you got her?"
Angel's expression said she had, in fact, known that before she got her. Cash looked at me like someone who knew he had already lost this argument and was just looking for a witness.
"I'll get her down," I said, because apparently that is who I am.
* * *
Getting Dolly off the lean-to roof takes four failed bribes, one wobbly ladder, and ends with me halfway up the roof, hay in hand, while the goat bleats in triumph and Lila rounds the barn just in time to watch my humiliation.
Lila looks at me on the ladder.
She looks at Dolly on the roof.
She looks back at me.
"Do you need help?" she says.
"No," I say.
Dolly makes the noise again.
"She does that when she wants the hay held higher," Lila says.
"You've done this before."
"Twice this week."
I hold the hay higher. Dolly considers this development with the gravity of a goat who understands that she has leverage and is deciding whether to use it.
Then she walks down the slope of the roof with the calm certainty of an animal who has already won and takes the hay from my hand and lets me carry her down.
"She likes you," Lila says when I set Dolly on the ground.
Dolly immediately headbutts my shin and trots away.
"Sure," I say.
And Lila Chen, a contained, observational, entirely too composed Lila Chen, makes a sound.
It is small. It is brief. It is so close to a laugh that I am ninety percent certain it qualifies as one.
She is already walking back toward the barn by the time I look up, and a quick thump of satisfaction beats in my chest before I can hide the grin.
I am in the yard with a ladder and an empty handful of hay, and I think:* there it is.**
That is what she sounds like when something catches her off guard.
I carry the ladder back to the equipment shed, and that sound stays in my head for the rest of the morning.
* * *
Cash and I eat lunch on the Porch Light Farm porch, pausing between bites to watch Dolly nudge the fence like she's scouting her next escape.
Dolly has somehow gotten into the adjacent field and is grazing at the fence line with the unhurried contentment of a goat who has had an excellent morning.
"How does she keep getting out?" I ask.
"We don't know," Cash says. "We've checked every section of fence. There's no gap."
"She's going over?"
"She's four feet tall."
"That's not an answer."
Cash looks at Dolly. Dolly looks back at us with the mild, satisfied expression of someone who knows more than she's letting on.
"Angel thinks she's good for the program," Cash says.
"Dolly or the fence situation?"
"Dolly. The participants like her. She walks into sessions, and the horses don't mind, and people who haven't smiled in three weeks end up smiling."
I look at the goat.
"Does she get on Lila's nerves?" I ask, which is not what I meant to ask.
Cash is quiet for a second in the way that means he heard exactly what I meant.
"Lila's the one who goes up on the roof after her." He is looking at me in some sort of way.
"I went up on the roof after her today."
"I know. Lila told Angel. Angel told me." He takes a drink of his coffee. "She said you held the hay wrong the first time."
"I held the hay wrong."
"Apparently, there's a right way."
I look at Dolly. Dolly looks at me. This feels like a verdict of some kind.
"She laughed," I say.
"Lila?"
"Almost."
Cash nods slowly, as if this is information he is placing precisely in a designated location. "Almost is a lot, with him."
He says it simply, the way he says true things, and then he picks up his coffee and looks out at the field and doesn't say anything else.
I think about that for a while.
* * *
The professional call is set for three o'clock.
I am coming around the barn from the equipment shed side, and she is in the lean-to with her phone to her ear, her clipboard in her other hand, and her back three-quarters toward me.
I stop because walking through someone's phone call is rude.
I would go around, but the direct path to the water trough is straight ahead, and the indirect path is considerably longer. I will just wait.
I wait.
"Thursday works," she says into the phone. Her voice is different. Still precise, maybe more precise, but the low, easy quality is gone.
This is a professional voice. Efficient, clipped, no room in it for anything the call doesn't need.
"I can do the full session before noon. Send me the chart by Tuesday."
A pause.
"The chart, I need to see the chart before I agree to the tempo. I'm not walking in cold on a signature change."
Another pause. Shorter.
"I know Dale likes to be flexible. Tell Dale the chart." She makes a note on her clipboard without looking at it, the muscle memory of someone who has done this for years. "Thank you. Thursday."
She hangs up.
She stands for a moment in the lean-to with her phone in her hand—a small stillness, just a second or two, like she is switching something back.
Then she turns and sees me.
She doesn't startle. She just recalibrates.
"Water trough," I say, pointing past her.
"It's fine," she says. She steps aside.
I check the trough. She makes another note on her clipboard.
"Nashville session?" I ask.
"Thursday."
"You do a lot of those."
"Enough."
I look at the trough, which is full and needs nothing from me, which is a fact I registered thirty seconds ago and have been standing here ignoring.
"Do you like it?" I ask. "The session work."
She looks up from the clipboard. Not suspicious. Just assessing what kind of question that is.
"Yes," she says.
"But."
A pause. "What makes you think there's a but?"
"The way you said yes."
She has the same look on her face that she gives the horses when they do something she wasn't expecting. Not annoyed. Just recalibrating.
"I like it fine," she says. "It pays the Nashville apartment."
"But it's not the piano."
The clipboard comes down slightly. A small tell. The first one I have gotten from her that wasn't a near-laugh.
"No, it's not the piano."
She says it simply, the way she says everything, like a fact she has already made peace with. Just set it down. Here it is, with nothing more to add.
I want to ask the next question. There is an obvious next question: so why don't you play your own music for anyone?
I don't ask it.
Not because I don't want to. I have been watching Lila Chen for a week, and I believe the next question is the wrong move at this time.
You don't push a door that is not yours yet. You stand near it. You wait. You hold the hay at the right height, and you let the thing come to you on its own timeline.
I am, it turns out, capable of patience when it matters.
I nod and leave the trough alone and go back the way I came.
Behind me, I hear her flip to a new page on the clipboard and keep writing.
* * *
Porch Light Farm - Kitchen
I find Cash in the Porch Light Farm kitchen at the end of the day, and I ask him how long Lila has been playing piano.
He hands me a beer and leans on the counter.
"Long time," he says.
"Does she play for anyone?"
He thinks about this with the careful deliberation he uses when precision is required. "Angel has heard her. By accident." He opens his own beer. "Other than that, no."
"Why not?"
He gives me the look. The one from when we were kids. The one that says, "You know, I'm not going to tell you that."*
"She's good," I say.
"I know."
"How good?"
"Ask her."
"She'll say fine."
The corner of Cash's mouth moves. "Yeah," he says. "She will."
He takes a drink. He looks out toward First Note Farm the way he has been doing all week, without appearing to notice he's doing it.
"She doesn't let people in," Cash says. Not as advice. As a fact.
"I noticed."
"Most people stop trying after a day or two."
I watch Dolly in the yard. She headbutts the equipment shed door experimentally, assesses the result, and headbutts it again.
"That's their loss," I say.
Cash looks at me the way he has all my life when I am about to do something that is either very right or very wrong, and he hasn't yet determined which it is. He used to do it before I got on the bulls. He did it before I gave the wedding toast. He is doing it now.
"She's not like the people you usually talk to."
"Good."
"I mean that as information. Not encouragement."
"I know what you mean."
He hesitates a moment longer.
"Just saying she isn’t like the women you are used to back home."
"You've said that."
"I will keep saying it until it takes."
He sets his beer down and goes to rescue the equipment shed.
I stand at the kitchen window, and my mind goes back to Lila in the lean-to, flipping her voice off like a circuit breaker. The barn version and the Nashville version. The two versions and whatever lives underneath both of them.
She is not one thing.
She is at least three, and she has built the arrangement very deliberately, and the private piano is the one that nobody gets to hear.
That is a puzzle.
I have always been bad at leaving a puzzle alone.
Outside, Cash shouts, “Dolly’s on the roof again!” Lila’s laugh lifts over the yard, and I’m already running. I don't catch it. I go out to help with whatever it is.
There are worse ways to spend a Tennessee.