18. Ramona
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Ramona
The cow is struggling when I reach the lower calving barn. I grab the radio off the hook by the door and call for whoever’s on duty on my way to the pen, and I don’t wait for the answer.
Three weeks in the cottage, and my body still hasn’t learned that the light in this barn isn’t mine to get up for.
There are employees on this ranch paid specifically for middle-of-the-night emergencies now.
Veterinarians on call in three counties, and managers I could wake with one phone call who would have someone here in fifteen minutes flat.
Julius built a whole system for this, spent more money than my dad made in a decade making sure no animal suffered because help came too late.
None of them are here yet, and she’s thrashing in the stall.
I grab a halter and a pair of gloves from the hook by the door and push into the pen. The cow’s eyes are wild and her sides are heaving, and her back legs kick at the straw. The calf’s hooves are visible but wrong, twisted at an angle that turns my stomach.
“Easy, girl.” I loop the halter over her head and pull it snug. “Easy now. I’ve got you.”
The barn door scrapes open behind me.
I don’t have to turn around to know who it is. I know his footsteps on concrete and how he breathes in cold air, and I know the sound of him moving straight to the supply shelf without asking what I need, because he already knows.
“Blake heard you on the radio. He’s ten minutes out.” Julius pulls on gloves and grabs lubricant from the cabinet. “How long has she been down?”
“I don’t know. I saw the light on from the cottage and came to check.” I brace my shoulder against the cow’s flank and dig my boots into the straw.
“Legs are twisted bad.” He drops to his knees behind her and pushes up his sleeves. “I need you to hold her steady while I rotate the calf.”
“I know what to do, Julius.” I press harder against her side. “I’ve been doing this since before your daddy let you near a calving barn.”
“I remember.” His voice comes out strained as he works. “You were sixteen and bossing me around like you owned the place.”
“You were seventeen and trying to take over my barn.” I adjust my grip when she kicks. “Some things don’t change.”
He laughs once, short and breathless, and I feel it low in my stomach where I don’t want to. Then the cow groans and kicks hard and there’s no more time for conversation.
***
The calf comes out in a rush of fluid and blood, and Julius catches it before it hits the ground.
He lowers it to the straw while I release the halter and scramble to his side. The newborn is wet and still, its chest not moving. Julius clears its mouth with his fingers while I grab a clean rag and start rubbing its sides as hard as I can.
“Come on, baby.” I rub faster. “Come on, breathe for me.”
Julius is working on the other side, his hands moving in rhythm with mine. His shirt is soaked through with sweat and worse, clinging to his chest and shoulders, and I refuse to notice. The cow is struggling to her feet behind us, exhausted but desperate to see her calf.
“There.” Julius presses his ear to the calf’s chest and holds up his hand. “I feel a heartbeat.”
I rub harder. The calf’s legs twitch. Its chest expands once, then again, and it coughs.
Fluid sprays across my shirt and the calf takes its first real breath, sides heaving, eyes blinking open. The cow moos low and urgent, pushing her massive head toward her baby.
“Good girl.” I sit back on my heels and breathe out. “Good girl, both of you.”
Julius is still kneeling beside the calf with one hand on its neck. There’s blood smeared across his cheek and straw tangled in his hair. His forearms are streaked and his jeans are ruined, and he could be the seventeen-year-old boy who showed up in my family’s barn all those years ago.
Damn it. Don’t do this to yourself.
The calf scrambles to get its wobbly legs underneath it. Then it pees directly on Julius’s face.
I press my lips together so hard they ache.
“You can laugh.” He wipes his face with his sleeve and makes it worse, smearing everything together. “I know you want to.”
“I am trying very hard not to, actually.” My voice comes out strangled.
“You’re doing a shit job of it.” He wipes again and misses the spot entirely. “I can see your shoulders shaking from here.”
“It’s on your face.” I point at my own cheek. “The other side. You keep wiping the wrong side.”
“Here? Is that it?” He smears it farther across his forehead and into his eyebrow.
“No, the other side, Julius.” I’m losing. “It’s literally all over you now.”
“This is not helpful feedback, Ramona.” He scrubs at his chin with both hands. “Not helpful at all.”
I start laughing.
The sound bursts out of me before I can stop it, loud and ugly. I have to sit down in the straw because my legs won’t hold me up anymore. My eyes stream and my stomach hurts and I can’t remember the last time I laughed this hard.
Julius stares at me for a second with pee still dripping down his temple. Then he starts laughing too.
The cow moos at both of us. The calf wobbles on brand new legs. And we sit there in the straw at three in the morning, covered in blood and piss, laughing with everything between us still broken.
***
The laughter fades. The quiet goes on too long.
Blake came in while the calf was still finding its feet. He took one look at the two of us in the straw and went for water and a clean bucket without a word. He keeps working in the next stall, giving us what privacy he can.
The calf is nursing now, its tail wagging as it butts against its mother’s side. The cow has settled down, her crisis over, her baby alive and healthy. The barn has gone quiet except for the soft wet sounds of feeding.
I look at Julius without meaning to. There’s still blood on his cheek, dried now, a dark smear along his jaw that he missed when he was cleaning off the pee. His hair is a disaster and his shirt is destroyed. He smells of cow and sweat and the soap from the shower I used to share.
My hand moves before I can stop it.
I reach out and wipe the blood away with my thumb, my fingers brushing against his stubbled jaw. He goes completely still beneath my touch. I go still too, my hand frozen against his face, and I can’t remember how to pull it back.
What the hell am I doing?
I yank my hand away and wipe it on my jeans.
Julius doesn’t reach for me. He doesn’t try to close the distance I’ve created. He stays exactly where he is with his eyes on my face, and he waits. He’s giving me space even though I can see how much it’s costing him, the tension in his shoulders and his hands clenched on his thighs.
“You told me I was hurting you.” His voice comes out low. “That night at the celebration when Dakota said what she said.”
“I remember what I told you.” I wrap my arms around my knees and don’t look at him.
“I kept doing it because I liked her attention.” He picks up a piece of straw and twists it between his fingers until it snaps. “I liked that someone understood the part of me that wanted to compete again. I liked that she made me feel like I hadn’t wasted my best years sitting behind a desk.”
I wait for the excuse. For the but that makes it not his fault. It doesn’t come.
“I made you compete for my attention.” He drops the broken straw and finally looks at me. “With your own goddamn husband. You shouldn’t have had to fight for that.”
“No.” My voice comes out steady even though my insides aren’t. “I shouldn’t have.”
“And I should’ve defended you that night at the table.” He shakes his head hard. “In front of everyone. I should’ve told her to shut her fucking mouth instead of laughing it off like it was nothing.”
“Yes.” I make myself meet his eyes. “You should have.”
“I know sorry doesn’t fix it.” He runs both hands through his hair and leaves it sticking up worse than before. “I know words don’t undo what I did to us.”
“No.” I hug my knees tighter against my chest. “They don’t.”
The calf finishes nursing and wobbles toward us on shaky legs, curious about the humans sitting in its space. It sniffs at Julius’s ruined boot, then mine, then wanders back to its mother with a little kick of its back legs.
“I want to see what happens if you do the work without me having to keep asking.” The words come out of my mouth before I can stop them. “I don’t want to look back in ten years and wonder if there was more we could have done.”
Julius doesn’t move beside me. “What are you saying, Ramona?”
“We keep going to counseling.” I hold his eyes even though looking at him hurts. “Both of us, every week, and we let her make us talk about the hard stuff instead of sitting there pretending everything’s fine.”
“I’ll do that.” He nods so fast his whole body moves with it. “I’ll do whatever you need me to do.”
“And I’m not moving back into the farmhouse.” I shake my head and stand up, brushing straw off my jeans. “Not yet. Maybe not for a while.”
“I understand that.” He stands too, keeping space between us even though I can see how much he wants to close it.
The cow moos softly and settles deeper into the straw with her calf curled warm against her side. The sky outside the barn windows is starting to lighten.
“I should get back to the cottage.” I pull off my ruined gloves and toss them in the bin by the door.
Blake lifts a hand from the next stall when we pass. He has them from here.
“Let me walk you back.” Julius falls into step beside me without waiting for permission.
“You don’t have to do that, Julius.”
“I know I don’t have to.” His shoulder brushes mine as we walk through the barn door. “I want to.”
We walk across the property together without touching. The first light of morning is breaking over the hills and the ranch is waking up around us, trucks starting in the distance, lights coming on in the bunkhouse where forty hands are getting ready for the day.
At the cottage gate, I stop and turn to face him.
“Monday.” I watch his face carefully. “The counselor has an opening at two.”
“I’ll be there.” He shoves his hands in his pockets so he won’t reach for me. “I won’t be late, I promise.”
“You better not be.” I push open the gate and step through to my side.
“I won’t be.” He nods, and his eyes don’t leave mine.
I close the gate between us and walk toward the cottage door. His boots crunch on gravel as he turns back toward the main property and the farmhouse and the rest of it.
This isn’t forgiveness. This is trying.
I don’t know whether trying will be enough to save us. For the first time in weeks, standing in the doorway of a cottage that isn’t my home with the smell of his soap still on my fingers, I’m willing to find out.