6. The Ask
The Ask
LILA
First Note Farm — Morning
Coffee in hand, I cross the yard toward the barn and spot Jake at the east fence—I've decided to ask him.
I've weighed this for three days. That's longer than any practical decision should take, which means this isn't one.
The practical part is real. I need someone who knows land and cattle and what a failing operation looks like from the inside.
Jake Wilder knows all three of those things. He has demonstrated this at the breakfast table, at the fence line, and in every incidental exchange we have had over the past week without appearing to try. That part of the calculation is clean.
The less clean part is that asking requires me to tell him things I have not told most people. The ranch. The debt.
The father who died before I could call him back. Not all of it, not yet. But enough. Enough that he understands why I need what I'm asking for.
I have been self-sufficient since I was twenty-two, and I left the Panhandle with a drum kit, a full tank of gas, and the very clear intention of not needing anything from anyone. That is not bitterness.
That is just the shape of the life I built. I ask for nothing, I owe nothing, I carry my own weight, and I carry it quietly, and the arrangement has worked for years.
Tommy is the one exception. Tommy calls, and I answer, even when the calls are about the ranch, which is the one subject where I have no useful answers.
I answer because he is my brother; he stayed, and I didn't. That debt doesn't have a ledger.
Asking Jake is different from answering Tommy.
Asking Jake is choosing to let someone see the gap, the explicit gap between the self-sufficient version I present and the version that inherited four hundred acres of failing Panhandle land and doesn't know what to do with them.
That version is real. I just don't show it to people I have known for one week.
I am, apparently, about to show it to someone I have known for one week.
I am good at not needing things from people. I deliberately built that skill, and I have been good at it for years; it has served me well.
Now I am standing at Shadow's fence in the early morning, telling myself it is just a practical request, which it is, and that asking for help is not the same as depending on someone, which it isn't, and that Jake Wilder will probably say no anyway, which he won't.
I know he won't, which is what's making this harder than it should be.
Shadow presses his nose to my hand.
"I know," I say.
I go inside, make coffee, and wait for a reasonable amount of time.
* * *
Dolly gets into the grain shed before seven.
I don't know how she got into the grain shed. The grain shed uses a sliding bolt rather than a lever latch—I checked it myself last night; it was fully across.
Oat dust hangs in the slanting light.
Dolly doesn't care about my timeline or my certainty about the bolt.
She is standing in the grain shed at six-fifty with her front hooves on a fifty-pound bag of oats and an expression of complete serenity.
I stand in the doorway.
Dolly looks at me.
I look at Dolly.
"Get out," I say.
Dolly takes a measured bite of oats.
Crunch.
She gives me that patient expression of someone who has considered my position and found it unconvincing.
I step into the grain shed. She doesn't move.
I try the low stern voice I use with horses who are testing a boundary.
Dolly is not a horse. The low, stern voice doesn't think.
I try stepping toward her slowly, the way you approach an animal you want to redirect.
Dolly shifts her weight calmly and takes another bite.
A jolt shoots through me, coffee sloshing over the rim. From behind me, entirely too close, a voice says: "You have to make it worth her while."
Jake Wilder is standing in the yard with two coffees, already dressed for the day, apparently in the habit of wandering over from Porch Light Farm before seven in the morning with spare coffee.
"I have to make it worth her while," I repeat. I know this goat, sort of. So why is he telling me this?
"She's a goat. She's not going to do something for nothing. We have had goats like her at our ranch before. They didn’t climb the lean tos, though." He laughs at that and holds out one of the coffees.
I take it because it would be rude not to and because I want it.
"What does she want?" I ask.
"Usually whatever you have." He moves past me into the grain shed with the ease of a man entering a room he has been in before, which he has not been in before, which is simply how he moves through every room.
He crouches down and holds out an open palm. "Hey, Dolly."
Dolly considers him.
She steps off the oat bag, walks across the grain shed, and headbutts his knee with the brisk affection of a goat who has decided, on her own schedule, that this is acceptable.
She then topples sideways.
It is brief, and total, and she is upright again in approximately five seconds, and she walks out of the grain shed with the dignity of someone who has decided that did not happen.
"Was that—" I start.
"Fainting goat," Jake says. "Something startled her."
"She startled herself."
"Happens." He stands and watches her go. "She'll be fine. They always are.”
I look at the grain shed door. "The bolt needs replacing, by the way. The slide is worn. She's not picking it; she's just leaning until the tolerance gives."
He looks at the bolt. He is right. The wear is visible once you know where to look.
"I'll get one from the hardware store," I say.
"I've got one in the truck. I can swap it out."
He says it the way he says all of it, not offering, exactly. Just stating what is available. Take it or don't.
"Thank you," I say.
He nods, drinks his coffee, and looks out at the paddock.
That's what makes him hard to dismiss. Not the warmth, not the way he fills a room. It is this: he just fixes the bolt. He sees something that needs doing, does it, and doesn't require anything from you in return.
My father was like that with the land.
I set the thought down before it goes anywhere.
* * *
The morning session runs well.
The pianist is now in her fourth week. She came in gripping, and she is leaving with open hands, which is not a metaphor. It is a literal description of what happened over four weeks of leading work with Shadow and Kit and the low piano progressions in the morning.
She is not fixed. She is not supposed to be fixed. She is beginning to remember what it felt like before the industry got to her, which is the whole point.
I watch her from the barn door during the closing minutes of the session. It makes me think of the piano in the empty room, the four bars of something I have been writing for six months, and the way the sound goes out and stays in the room because the room is closed.
The Panhandle doesn't close the sound. The Panhandle takes it out, spreads it across the flat land and the big sky, and it goes as far as it can.
My father used to say you could hear everything out there if you listened right, and that the land carried sound differently than anywhere else, flat and open and nothing in the way.
Today I'm asking Jake Wilder to come to the Texas Panhandle and tell me if my father's ranch can be saved.
That's enough for one morning.
Kit wraps the session. The pianist walks her horse back to the paddock gate with her shoulders lower than they were an hour ago.
She pauses at the gate and looks back at Shadow once, the way you look at something you are not ready to leave yet.
Good session.
I go to find Jake.
* * *
Late Morning
He is at the east fence, just as I expected, and my grip tightens on the clipboard while my pulse skips.
Not because he is following a pattern. I have stopped assuming that. He is here because Emmett is here, and Emmett and Jake have apparently arrived at a standing arrangement that neither of them felt the need to announce to anyone.
I walk to the fence and stand beside him.
Emmett looks at me. Looks at Jake. Returns to his hay with the composure of a horse that has seen this coming.
"The bolt is fixed," Jake says, without turning.
"I saw. Thank you."
We stand in the quiet. It is not uncomfortable. That is something I have noticed about Jake Wilder. The quiet is not uncomfortable with him, which is unusual. Most people fill the quiet. He lets it be what it is.
I have been thinking about how to open this for three days.
Every version I rehearsed started with the practical facts: land, cattle, the deadline, laid out cleanly and without personal detail, a business case with a clear-cut ask at the end.
I have given that version to Tommy's bank contacts, the estate lawyer, and the one advisor I called last month, who told me the math did not work.
I am good with that version. It costs me nothing.
Standing at the east fence with Jake Wilder and the morning quiet, I cannot find that version.
It is still there. I know where it is. I can't get it to come out first.
I open my mouth and give him a different version instead.
"I have a ranch," I say. "In the Panhandle. Inherited it with my brother. Four hundred acres, cattle operation, and the bank has a deadline we're running out of room on."
A pause.
"Four hundred acres," I say. "Cattle operation. My brother has been running it alone, and he's exhausted. The math on selling is real, and I can't — I'm not ready to sell it. But I've been away too long to know what saving it would take."
Jake is looking at Emmett. He hasn't turned.
I keep going.
"I've been watching you this week. You know land. You know what a failing operation looks like and what the difference is between one that can be saved and one that can't. I need someone to walk Promised Land Ranch and tell me honestly which one it is."
That is the controlled version. The partial version. I had planned to stop there.
"I know that's a significant ask," I say. "You're here to visit Cash. You have your own ranch to get back to. I'm not — I understand if the answer is no."
He turns then.
He looks at me with the direct, unguarded attention that I have been cataloging for a week, the face that shows everything, that doesn't know how to do anything else.
"Yes," he says.
My breath stalls, a rush of relief tightening my throat.
I wait for the rest of it.
There is no rest of it.
"Just yes?"
"Yes." He looks back at Emmett. "I'd want you to see the Wilder Ranch first, so you have a baseline. See what a working operation looks like before we look at one that's struggling. Would that work?"
"That works."
"Okay." He drains the last of his coffee. "I'll call my dad tonight."
That's it. That is the whole conversation. Suddenly the future feels less impossible.
I had three follow-up answers prepared. For the questions about the timeline, what I could offer him in return, and whether the situation was as bad as I'd made it sound.
I had prepared responses to skepticism, to polite reluctance, and to the very reasonable position that this was a significant amount to ask of someone I had known for one week.
I had not prepared a response for 'yes'.
"I was ready for questions," I say.
The corner of his mouth moves. "I know, I could tell."
He pushes off the fence rail and heads back toward Porch Light Farm.
I’m at the fence with Emmett and my three unused follow-up answers, and the feeling of having braced for an impact that did not arrive.
It is not relief, exactly.
It is something more unsettling than relief.
Because relief is what you feel when the danger passes.
What I feel right now is the distinct awareness that I have just let someone into something I have been carrying alone for months.
He said yes without asking what it would cost him, and he said it in the same tone he uses for everything, the fix-the-bolt tone, the hold-the-hay tone, the low voice at the water trough tone.
As if my problem landed in the same category as a worn latch. Something that needs doing. Here's what's available. Take it or don't.
I have spent a long time not taking things from people.
I am having trouble figuring out how I feel about that right now.
Emmett exhales against my arm. He has been standing here the whole time, entirely unconcerned, which is the thing about Emmett: he doesn't find situations alarming that he has seen coming for a while.
"How long have you known?" I ask him.
He turns back to his hay.
Dolly trots past with a length of baling twine in her mouth that she absolutely did not have a minute ago and did not have any good reason to acquire.
I watch her go.
I don't have the energy to deal with that right now.
I go inside and update the session log and tell myself the slight unsteadiness I am carrying is just the adrenaline of a difficult conversation, which is entirely true and also not the whole story.
Tommy texts at noon.
Anything?
I look at the text for a moment.
Working on it, I type back.
It is the most honest thing I have said to my brother in months.
* * *
Afternoon
Angel finds me checking Shadow's feed chart around two.
She has the clipboard and looks like she has something to say, and has been waiting for the right moment.
With Angel, the right moment is usually whatever moment you are currently in.
"Jake told Cash," she says.
"I know."
"Cash told me."
"I know."
She leans on the stall door.
"I saw the way you watched him this week."
Lila looks up.
"Watching what?"
"The horses."
I don’t answer.
"The land. You already knew who to ask."
Angel has known about the ranch for six months, when I told her more than I intended during a long debriefing session and over a pot of bad coffee.
She has not pushed. She has not offered solutions. She has done what she always does: know the thing, wait, and trust that I will get there on my own schedule.
"You could have said something," I say. Not an accusation. Just a fact.
"You would have said you were fine."
Angel watches me for a second.
"You already knew who to ask."
I don't answer.
Because she's right.
I look at the feed chart.
"Yes," I say. "I would have."
She nods. She writes something on her clipboard that has nothing to do with this conversation.
She goes back to the barn.
I stand with Shadow.
Today I asked for help, and someone said yes.
That is enough, for now.
Outside, Dolly bleats, and I know tomorrow’s list of problems just got longer.