39. Callie
Callie
There is a place forty minutes outside of town called Serenity Hollow Holistic Animal Sanctuary, and for the low, low price of one field trip permission slip and the last shred of my professional dignity, twenty-two second-graders and I were going to do yoga with goats there.
I want to be clear that I did not pick this.
The PTA picked this. Samantha Green, specifically, picked this, after reading an article about how "agricultural mindfulness" boosts standardized test scores, which is not a real sentence but try telling Samantha that.
I'd read the brochure in the parking lot while the bus unloaded, and the brochure promised that the goats were "certified emotional support livestock" and that I would leave "rebalanced.
" I had not, in all my years of teaching, ever once left anything rebalanced.
I left things sticky, or messy, or on fire. But never rebalanced.
Oliver appeared at my hip in his collared shirt, squinting up at the goat pen with suspicion.
"Goats are ruminants. They have four stomach compartments and they regurgitate their food to chew it again.
It's called cud. I don't think we should be doing wellness near an animal that vomits on purpose. "
"That's a really good point, bud," I said, because it was, and because he was holding my hand a little tighter than usual, which meant the noise and the open space were getting to him.
I crouched down to his level. "You don't have to touch any goats you don't want to.
You can be my official documentarian. You count the goats and you tell me if any of them are breaking rules. Okay?"
His shoulders came down an inch. "Goats can't read rules."
"Then you tell me when they break the rules they don't know about. That's the most important job there is."
He considered this, decided it was acceptable, and produced a small notebook from his oversized backpack. I straightened up, feeling for one brief, shining second like a competent mom. Then I saw the men, and the feeling died a quick and embarrassing death.
Because here was the thing nobody had warned me about goat yoga: everyone gets down on all fours like the Lord intended, and that includes the three single fathers who had, for reasons I was choosing not to examine, also volunteered to chaperone a goat-based mindfulness experience on a Tuesday.
Cole, Luke, and Ben were already on their mats in the grass, dressed like men who actually planned to exercise.
Shorts, t-shirts, the works. Which was stupid of them, because now I was going to have to stand there and look at their muscles and perfectly formed bodies while a yoga instructor named Sunshine told them to "breathe into the hips. "
Cole's shirt had ridden up. There was a strip of his lower back on display, all that black ink disappearing into his waistband, and his forearms were braced in the dirt and corded with muscle.
I had personally had those forearms pinning me to my own mattress not so long ago and my entire body remembered it at once, like a dog hearing a can opener.
I looked away. I looked at Luke instead, which was a tactical error of the highest order, because Luke had dropped his head and his shaggy hair was hanging down and his shirt was doing nothing to hide the way his shoulders worked, and Luke caught me looking and did not stop looking back.
He held my eyes from upside down between his own arms and slowly, deliberately, raised one eyebrow.
A small involuntary squeak escaped me and I looked at Ben.
Ben was the worst one. Ben wasn't even pretending to do the yoga.
Ben was lying on his back on his mat with his hands folded on his chest, watching me have my entire crisis in real time, and when our eyes met he grinned at me like he could read every filthy thought in my head and was honored to be in there.
"Miss Morgan." Sunshine had appeared beside me, calm in a way that felt unnaturally medicated. "We have a mat for you."
"Oh, I'm okay, I'm really more of a supervisor…"
"Mindfulness is for everyone, most importantly the teacher." She steered me toward a mat that had been placed, by someone who hates me, directly between Cole and Ben. "Especially those carrying tension. You're carrying a lot of tension.”
"I contain a normal and healthy amount of tension," I said, lowering myself onto the mat while every joint I owned filed a formal complaint, "for an underpaid teacher and a single mother and um-" I stopped before I said a woman with three boyfriends. "A full life. A very full life."
"Mom only does yoga when the app reminds her," Oliver reported from the fence line, not looking up from his notebook. "She has done it four times. The app is named Brenda. She yells at Brenda."
"Thank you, Oliver."
Cole made a sound to my left that might have been a laugh if Cole laughed. I refused to turn my head, because turning my head meant looking at him, and I was a professional.
Then the goats came.
I cannot fully explain what happens to twenty-two children and three grown men when a herd of goats is released into a yoga session, except to say that it is the closest I have ever come to witnessing the rapture.
The kids lost their minds. The goats, who had clearly done this before and harbored zero emotional-support feelings toward anyone, went straight for the biggest targets in the field.
A small brown goat climbed directly onto Cole's back while he was mid-pose and stood there like a tiny king surveying his land. Cole went perfectly still. He had the frozen expression of an ex-military man who has decided that the goat has the high ground and must be respected.
"Don't move," Ben told him, delighted, already filming on his phone. "Don't you dare move. This is the best day of my life."
"Get it off me."
"Absolutely not. It chose you. It sees something in you, big guy."
A second goat headbutted Luke square in the ribs as he attempted a warrior pose, and Luke—who had never once in my presence been anything other than infuriatingly composed—said a word that made three nearby parents gasp and Emma shout, "DADDY. NAUGHTY WORD." from across the field.
I was laughing. I couldn't help it. I was sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat between two of the men I was apparently sleeping with, watching a third get steamrolled by certified emotional support livestock, and I was laughing so hard my eyes watered.
And then a goat approached me and attacked my lanyard.
The whole thing. It got the cord in its weird rectangular-pupiled mouth and it just started going, and I grabbed the other end and we had a brief tug-of-war that I want the record to show I was winning, until the cord snapped and I went backward into the grass and the goat trotted off with my staff ID and the little laminated photo of me from four years ago when I still had bangs.
"That's a felony," I informed the goat. "That's federal."
A hand appeared in my vision. Ben, crouched over me, blocking out the sun, grinning down with that easy crooked thing he did with his mouth. "You alive down there, Cupcake?"
"A goat just ate my identity. I'm legally no one now. I can do crimes."
"Yeah?" He pulled me up, and he didn't let go of my hand right away, and his thumb moved gently across my knuckles, in a way that had nothing to do with helping me off the ground. The noise of the field went a little far away. "What kind of crimes are we talking?"
"Identity theft, mostly. I'm going to become a woman named Brenda who charges her phone every night and has a label maker. Brenda has never once cried in a supply closet. Brenda's bras all match." I considered it. "God, I hate Brenda. Forget it. I'll just commit regular crimes."
He laughed with his head back, and it did something stupid to me.
Because that was the trouble with Ben. Cole made me feel safe and Luke made me feel grounded, but Ben made me feel like the funniest, most interesting woman who had ever lived, and he did it without seeming to try, and a person could get addicted to that.
A person could build an entire stupid future on a man who laughed at her jokes in a goat field.
He was still holding my hand. He was looking at me like he was thinking about doing something he shouldn't in front of twenty-two children, and I was thinking about letting him, when I caught the look over his shoulder.
Cole was watching us. He'd gotten the goat off his back at some point and he was sitting up on his mat, and he wasn't smiling, and his eyes were on Ben's hand around mine in a way that was very intense. And then his gaze flicked up to Luke, who I realized had also stopped what he was doing, who was also watching us, and something passed between the three of them. I’d like to think it was hunger for me, but could it have been jealousy?
I pulled my hand out of Ben's, casual, like I was just brushing grass off my leggings, and I felt the thought arrive like an unwelcome relative on my doorstep.
What if I messed up. What if this was going to ruin their friendship.
"Cupcake?" Ben's grin had faded a little. "Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere. Here. I'm here." I plastered the smile back on, the one that got parents to relax and kids to stop crying and principals to leave me alone, the one I was very, very good at. "I have to go count children. Sunshine's about to make us feed the goats and I refuse to miss that."
I walked away before he could answer, before any of them could, my heart doing complicated maneuvers in my chest.
"Mom." Oliver fell into step beside me, notebook open.
"Three goats broke rules. One ate your lanyard.
One urinated during the breathing part, which I think is rude.
And one is currently standing on Mr. Cole again.
" He looked up at me. "Your face is doing the thing it does when you pretend you're fine. "
I looked down at my son, who saw everything, who'd never once in his life let me get away with a single lie.
"I'm fine, bud."
"That's the thing I just said you do." He went back to his notebook, unbothered. "But okay. The goat on Mr. Cole is named Gerald. It says so on his collar. I think Gerald is the best one."
Behind me, somewhere in the chaos, I heard Ben call my name once, and I pretended the wind ate it, and I kept walking toward the children, who at least only wanted snacks and never wanted anything from me I couldn't give.