Chapter 4
MAGGIE
The plywood is holding up. I nailed it over the hole in the pig barn with whatever I had lying around. It looks terrible but it keeps coyotes out at night and that's all it needs to do until the restitution check clears, which could be any day now.
I'm standing at the gate of the pig enclosure with a bucket of feed in each hand when a truck pulls up. That'll be Luis. He volunteers a few days a week.
"Morning," he calls out, climbing down from the cab.
Luis is seventy-something, retired, built like a fridge.
He used to run cattle about five miles north before he sold his farm and his wife told him to get a hobby.
He found me. Or rather, he found my mother, back when she was still running this place.
"Morning, Luis." I look down. "Oh, morning, Dolly." Dolly is already at the gate waiting for me. She presses her snout against my leg while I undo the latch and I reach down and scratch behind her ear. She follows me to the trough and stays close.
The pigs are scattered across the yard in the morning sun.
Barbara is lying on her side in a patch of dirt she's excavated, and Gerald is standing in the shade with Mabel, the two of them side by side like old men on a park bench who don't need to talk anymore.
Little Pete, who hasn't been little since 2019, is rooting along the fence line.
The sound of feed hitting the trough brings them in. One second the yard looks peaceful and the next fourteen pigs are converging from every direction. Barbara heaves herself out of her crater and Gerald abandons his dignity. Little Pete tries to climb into the trough headfirst.
"Pete. Out."
Pete ignores me.
I lean on the fence and watch them eat. Fourteen pigs who came from places where they'd never seen sunlight or felt dirt under their feet. And now look at them. They're happy. That's the thing that gets me every single time.
Luis joins me. "Seal's gone on the goat trough," he says. "I can patch it for now but it needs replacing."
"I know." I sigh. "I've already added it to the list."
The list is a notebook on my kitchen counter, currently with forty-seven items, ranked by urgency.
The trough seal is around number thirty-two.
Number one is rebuilding the pig barn wall properly.
Numbers two through five are all things that were working fine before a socialite in a Porsche made them my problem.
"When does she get here?"
"Tomorrow."
He nods. "Go easy on her."
I frown. "Go easy on her? She drove through my fence and my barn." I hang the buckets on the hook by the feed store. "Dolly was on the highway, Luis. In the dark. If a truck had come—"
"I know." He sets his coffee on the fence post. "And you've got every right to be angry. But she's coming whether you like it or not and you've got two months of her. You can spend it punishing her or you can spend it getting some work out of her."
I don't answer. I've watched the security footage over and over and the fact is, she didn't hesitate. That's the thing that stays with me. She sat in that car and she saw what she'd done and she reversed.
"Assuming she's not going to be very competent with DIY," I finally say, "I'll have her muck out the pens. Scrub the water troughs. Haul feed. And she can help you with repairing the fence line too."
"Sure."
"And she can scrub the algae out of the horse trough — the big one, the one you have to climb inside."
"Maggie—"
"And the gutters on the barn are blocked. And someone needs to repaint the sanctuary sign by the road that’s peeling."
Luis sips his coffee. "That's not a work plan. That's a revenge list."
"Exactly. Sloane Archer gets what she deserves." I wipe the sweat off my brow. It's barely eight and it's already warm.
This is the heat Sloane Archer will be working in. With no Starbucks. This is Duster and the closest thing we have is the tank of burnt coffee at the diner that Ruthie brews at five in the morning and keeps going.
"Come on," I say. "Help me move the hay delivery before it gets any hotter."
The feed store is around the back of the goat barn — a corrugated iron building that turns into an oven by midday.
The delivery came yesterday afternoon and I left it on the pallet because I couldn't shift fifteen bales on my own.
Luis and I have done this enough times that we don't need to talk about it.
He takes one end, I take the other, and we stack them against the back wall in rows of five.
Each bale weighs about fifty pounds and by the tenth one my shoulders are burning and my shirt is stuck to my back.
This is the thing people don't understand when they ask if I ever get tired of it.
Of course I get tired. I'm exhausted most of the time.
But tired isn't the same as unhappy. People sit in offices under air conditioning and count the hours until Friday.
I've never sat here watching the sun come up and wished I was somewhere else.
I've never driven home from the feed store and thought, I should have taken that office job in Fresno.
This place is hard work and no money and fifty-pound hay bales in the heat, but it's mine, and I love it.
Poor Luis pretends he's fine but I know he's getting too old for this now.
Running a sanctuary in a place like Duster is a challenge.
Finding people who care about animals isn't hard.
But finding people who care about animals and can physically do the work and live close enough to show up regularly — that's almost impossible.
Most of my volunteers over the years have been retirees like Luis.
Good people with big hearts and bad backs.
They do what they can, but what they can do is shrinking every year.
Luis is the most reliable person in my life but it won't be long until it gets too tough for him and I have no idea what I'll do when that happens.
"I wonder how Princess Pigpen's going to handle this," he says. We drop a bale onto the stack and he straightens up with a grunt. "She's going to last about three of these before she passes out."
I laugh and wipe my hands on my shorts. "Then maybe she'll learn to drink water instead of champagne."