Chapter 12
LEVI
I'm sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark when the ranch starts waking up around me.
The first birds are starting up in the pines. The sky outside the window’s going from black to that deep blue that doesn't quite count as morning yet. I've been sitting here long enough to watch all of it happen, and I haven't moved.
Reid Holt.
I've been turning it over since I woke up at four and couldn't get back to sleep. Not the name itself. I know the name the way everyone who's ever spent ten minutes around a rodeo knows it. What I've been turning over is the other part, the part where I try to put myself on the other side of it.
If I had a daughter. If she were nineteen.
If she called from a ranch in Montana sounding different than she did a month ago, something settled in her voice that wasn't there before, and I drove out to see it for myself.
If I walked into that barn and found the man she's been spending her evenings with.
I'd look at him.
I'd do the math.
I go through the inventory of myself, and it doesn't take long.
Good with horses, good with a crowd. A truck, a saddle, a guitar he's had since he was seventeen, not much else to show for any of it.
Funny doesn't hold up under that kind of scrutiny.
Easy doesn't hold up either. A man looking at his daughter's future doesn't care if you can make a room laugh. He cares about the rest of it.
I get up. Pull on my clothes and my boots. Make coffee in my small kitchen while it's still mostly dark out and drink it standing at the window with my hand wrapped around the mug and the ranch quiet outside.
I need to be at the barn before the morning gets any further along.
***
Kade's two stalls in when I come through the door.
He doesn't look up, doesn't comment on the hour. He knows exactly what time it is. He knows it's earlier than I'm usually here. He doesn't say a word about either of those things, which is one of about forty reasons I've never left this place. I pull a muck fork off the rack and get to work.
We go through four stalls before I hear Logan's boots on the aisle.
He comes in with his coffee, takes a long look down the aisle at each horse, and nods at the water buckets Kade already topped.
Then he leans against the stall door at the far end like a man who's checked in on enough mornings to know what needs watching and what doesn't.
"Did Donnie short us again on the mineral supplement?" I ask because I need something in my mouth that isn't Reid Holt's name.
Logan looks at me. "I don't think so. Kade checked it in."
"I checked it in," Kade says from two stalls down, not looking up. "He didn't short us."
"He shorted us in April."
"He shorted you in April," Kade says. "You ordered wrong."
Logan presses his lips together and looks at the wall, and that's his version of laughing, which means I've done my job for the morning.
We keep going like that for a while. Logan asks something about the tractor and whether the belt that was slipping last week has been looked at yet.
I tell him Kade got it on Tuesday. Kade confirms it without elaborating, because Kade never elaborates, which should bother me more than it does.
Logan finishes his coffee, rinses the mug at the barn sink, and says he'll be around if anyone needs him. He's almost to the door when Kade says, without looking up from the stall he's working, "You ordered wrong in March, too."
Logan stops walking.
I put my hand over my mouth.
"I know," Logan says, and goes out the door.
I look at Kade. He keeps working. That single dry line landing better than anything I put together this morning, which is saying something, because I've been turning over jokes in my own head for forty-five minutes and got nothing close to that.
Reid Holt is still running on a loop underneath all of it. I work the last stall and let it run, and don't say a word.
***
I stay off the rail all morning.
It's the first time in four weeks I haven't found a reason to drift toward the arena between tasks.
I feel the absence of it the same way you feel a tooth you've been running your tongue over and then suddenly stop.
I know what I'm doing. I'm doing it on purpose.
It doesn't make the numbers work any better, but it's the only move I've got.
I start at the cabin corrals. They're empty.
Everyone's already mounted and in the arena.
But the troughs still need checking, and that's real work, not something I invented.
I start at the near end of the row. Bear's corral is first, Grant's dark leather halter hanging on the post, lead rope coiled neatly underneath it.
I check the water and move on. Gypsy's corral is next, Petra's gray rope halter looped over the top rail, the mare's water sitting low enough that I let it run for a minute.
Six more corrals down the row, halters on every post, lead ropes coiled or draped, troughs at various levels.
I work through all of them and don't rush it.
At the last corral, I look at the arena.
Cass is at the rail.
Grant is beside her, both of them facing the arena where Sawyer has the rest of the group working.
Cass says something. Grant turns to look at Bear in the rail beside them and nods.
She says something else, one hand moving in a small gesture toward the gelding's hindquarters, and Grant watches where she points. He nods again.
I stand there with my hand on the hose and watch her.
I watch her point once more, and Grant looks again. I can see that he's going to do exactly what she said when he gets back in the saddle. Not because she told him to. Because she made him understand it. That's a different thing. She knows the difference, and that's the part I can't look away from.
I don't know how long I stand there. Long enough that Sawyer's voice carries from the arena, calling something out to the group, and it takes me a second to register that I've stopped moving entirely.
Cass's been here four weeks, and she already knows how to do that.
Make a person understand something without making them feel managed.
Grant looks like a man who's been in the saddle his whole life, and he's going to go back out on that course and ride differently because of a thirty-second conversation at the rail.
I make myself move.
The round pen gate has had a sticking hinge for a week. I've been meaning to fix it since Saturday. I get to it now, which takes twenty minutes and a trip to the tool shed for the right size bolt, and I'm two minutes into it when I hear Bingo before I see him.
He comes around the corner of the barn at full speed, ears back, tongue out, legs doing about four different things simultaneously, none of which appear to be communicating with each other. Sutton is twenty feet behind him and closing.
"Bingo, wait!" Sutton yells. Bingo doesn't wait. Bingo has never once waited in his entire seven months of life on this earth.
I catch the puppy before he takes out the gate entirely and hold him by the collar while he tries to reorient himself. Sutton arrives, plants both hands on his knees, and breathes.
"He got away," Sutton says.
"I can see that."
"I was teaching him to sit."
"Yeah, how's that going?"
Sutton looks at Bingo. Bingo looks at me. "He knows it," Sutton says. "He just doesn't want to do it."
I let go of Bingo's collar, and Bingo immediately sits, because the one thing this dog has figured out is that I'm not going to chase him. Sutton stares at him. I pick up my wrench.
"Can I help?" Sutton asks.
The hinge doesn't need two people. I hand him the bolt I already removed, and he holds it with the seriousness of someone performing surgery. I get to work.
"Bingo found a bird this morning," Sutton says.
"A live one?"
"No. A dead one. By the water trough in the pasture."
"What did he do with it?"
Sutton considers this. "He smelled it a lot."
"That's reasonable."
"And then he rolled on it."
I stop turning the wrench. "He rolled on a dead bird."
"Yep." Sutton nods like this is just information. "And then he jumped in the puddle by the dining hall, and Mom said he couldn't come inside, and he sat at the door and cried about it."
"For how long?"
"A long time." He pauses. "Dad had to carry him around the back."
"Your dad carried a wet bird-smelling dog around the back of the dining hall."
"He wasn't happy about it."
“I bet he wasn’t.”
I go back to the wrench. I feel almost normal for about twenty minutes.
Then Sawyer calls him from the arena. He drops the bolt, takes off at a dead run with Bingo right behind him, and I'm alone with the round pen gate and the arithmetic that never stopped running.
Cass said something, and a grown man changed how he was going to ride. That's who she is out here. The numbers come back.
***
Cass finds me mid-afternoon in the barn.
I hear her boots, and I know the sound of them before I look up. I've known the sound of them since the second week she was here, which is its own kind of information I stopped pretending wasn't there a long time ago.
"Hey," she says.
I look up from the bucket I'm filling. "Hey yourself."
She leans in the stall door with her arms crossed and looks at me like she's already decided she's not going to let this go and is waiting to see if I know that yet. "What's wrong with you today?"
Nothing. Everything. Reid Holt pulls through that gate in the morning, and from where he's going to be standing, I'm a thirty-one-year-old barn hand in a stall that isn't mine on a ranch I don't own, with a guitar and nine years of someone else's ranch behind me, a truck and a saddle and not much else.
"Wrong with me?" I put a hand on my chest. "Cass. I'm a delight. I've always been a delight. People pay good money to be in the same room as this personality."
She looks at me.