Chapter 4
By August the phone was ringing without Prewitt in between.
That was how it happened out there. Nobody advertised.
Ray Sundstrom told a man at the co-op, and the man at the co-op had a neighbor with a prolapse, and by the second week of July Kristin had six farms calling her directly and a magnetic sign on the door of the truck that Brynn had ordered without asking, in a font Kristin hated.
She worked six days. Some weeks seven. She was up at five and out most nights until dark and she had not felt this used up since she was twenty-eight, and it turned out that was a feeling she had missed the way you miss a place.
She also had a system now. Everything in the truck had a spot, and every spot was chosen for a hand that would not close.
Buckets with wire bails instead of grips.
A halter she could throw one-handed. Chains she could set with her teeth and her right hand if she had to and had, twice.
She had bought a pair of pliers with a spring in the handle so they opened themselves, which had cost nine dollars and had genuinely changed her life, and which she had not told a single living soul about.
Nobody in that county had ever once mentioned her arm.
That was not politeness. That was a different thing entirely, which took her until August to understand: they didn't mention it because half of them had one.
Prewitt's hip. Ray's shoulder. A woman near Watertown with two fingers gone off a PTO shaft in 1994 who milked ninety cows.
Out here a body was a tool you were still using, and everybody's was wrong somewhere, and nobody made a thing out of it.
Eleven years she had lived twenty miles east of these people.
She went up to Brainerd the second weekend of August.
She had not been to her father's house since the funeral. It had sat there five years with the water off and the mice in charge, and she had paid a man in town to mow it twice a year and had not once driven up to see what he was mowing.
It was smaller than she remembered. They always are.
Two bedrooms and a porch and a detached garage that had been the actual practice, with the concrete floor sloped to a drain and a rusted hoist bolted to a beam, and the whole thing smelling like cold iron and old straw and — faintly, under everything, still — betadine.
Kristin stood in that garage for a long time with Tilly nosing around the drain.
There was a cabinet on the back wall with his instruments in it. She had not taken them. At the funeral she had been thirty-one and married and she had walked through this garage and taken nothing, and she remembered why, which was that Adrienne had been standing in the yard.
Not doing anything. Just standing in the yard by the car, in a coat, being patient. Being extremely, visibly patient about a dead man's garage.
Kristin opened the cabinet.
They were shot. Five years of Minnesota with no heat had taken everything with a hinge on it, and half of it was fused with rust and the rest wanted a wire wheel and oil and a month of evenings.
She went through it piece by piece anyway, sitting on an upturned bucket, laying things out on a feed sack.
A calf jack. A set of OB chains, better than hers. An emasculator that made her laugh out loud. A drench gun. Four hoof knives with the handles worn to the shape of a hand that was not her hand.
At the bottom, under a coffee can of screws, a hoof pick with the initials A.H. scratched into it, and under that, folded in four, a receipt from 1998 for two hundred dollars and a note in her father's writing that said paid in full — do not remind him.
She sat on the bucket in the garage with the receipt in her good hand.
Here is what she had done with her inheritance.
She had taken a house and a garage full of iron and a stack of day-books, and she had put the day-books in a closet at the end of a half-mile drive, and she had let the rest of it sit in the dark for five years, and she had gone to four hundred parties.
She loaded the whole cabinet into the truck. It took her two hours and nine trips and she had to slide the heavy things on a scrap of plywood, and by the end her shirt was through and her left arm was doing the fine tremble it did now when she'd asked too much.
She stayed the night. She had not planned to. The water was off and the mattress was gone and she slept in the truck in her own father's driveway with the dog on the seat and a barn coat over her legs, and slept like the dead.
In the morning she walked the fence line to the back of the property because she could not think of a reason not to.
Forty acres of nothing much: scrub, a slough, a stand of red pine her father had put in the year she was born, now sixty feet tall and worth something to somebody.
There was an old three-sided shed at the back with a run-in and a water hydrant that still worked when she primed it.
She stood there with the pump handle in her right hand and thought, in a perfectly flat voice: you could keep horses here.
Then she thought: you could put a practice here.
Then she said, out loud, to a dog and forty acres, "No. It's two and a half hours from anything," and went back to the truck, and that was the end of it, and she thought about it every week for a year.
Then she sat on the porch step with a warm beer from the cooler and watched the light go orange over the road, and she did not think about her husband for approximately four hours, and when she noticed that she noticed it neutrally, the way you notice a bird.
The friends came back in a lump, the way they do.
Brynn engineered it and did not pretend otherwise: a Thursday in Mound, the back booth at a bar with a walleye special, and two of the techs from the old clinic days already three drinks in when Kristin walked up.
She almost turned around in the doorway. She actually stopped and put her hand on the door frame.
Because the truth was they had not lapsed.
That was the polite word. She had dropped them.
She had dropped every one of them across about eighteen months, not on purpose, just by being unavailable in a particular direction until people stop asking, and both of those women had texted her in February and she had answered both with the same six words.
They did not bring it up.
They asked about cows. They asked with real appetite, and one of them made her describe the backward calf twice, and the other one told a story about a Great Dane and a corn cob that Kristin had heard four times and laughed at anyway.
Nobody said Blake. Nobody said how are you holding up, which is the sentence Kristin had been braced against since April.
At some point somebody's phone went around with a picture on it and it reached Kristin and it was a photo from nine years ago — the four of them outside the old clinic on the day the new sign went up, Kristin in scrubs with her arms crossed and her hair a mess, laughing at something off to the left.
She looked at it for a second too long.
"You can have that," the tech said. "I've got it saved."
"No, I—" Kristin handed the phone back. "It's fine. I'm fine."
"You're allowed to want a picture of yourself, Kristin."
Which was, in the end, the closest anybody came to saying anything, and Kristin drove home at midnight with the windows down feeling like she'd been turned over and set right, and got Tilly down the stairs for her last trip out, and stood on the sidewalk in the dark on the lake road while an old dog took her time.
Loneliness is a real thing and it lived in those two rooms. She was not going to pretend otherwise. There were evenings — most evenings — when the whole apartment was the size of a shoebox and the only sound was Tilly's tags.
It just wasn't the biggest thing in the room anymore. That was the change.
The colic call came at half past one in the morning on the twenty-first.
An eighteen-year-old gelding at a boarding barn on the Delano road, rolling, sweating, been at it since eleven. Kristin got there at two and there was already a truck in the yard with its light bar on and a man in the aisle with a stethoscope, and she pulled up thinking she had misread the call.
"Prewitt sent me," she said, getting out.
"Prewitt sent me too." He didn't look up. "Nick Pittman."
"Kristin."
"I know."
He said it without any weight at all, and went back to listening, and that was that.
They worked for three hours.
He was better with horses than she was, which she said out loud at about the twenty-minute mark, and he said, "That's most of what I do," and did not turn it into a compliment about anything else.
He passed the tube. She ran the pump. They tried banamine and walking and then more walking, and at four in the morning the gelding still had a gut that sounded like an empty church and a heart rate going the wrong way, and the owner — a woman in her sixties in a nightgown and barn coat, who had owned this horse since he was four — stood at the end of the aisle with both hands over her mouth.
At half past four he turned.
Not dramatically. That is not how it goes. There was a sound, and then a pile, and then the horse put his head down and ate three strands of hay off the floor like nothing had ever happened in his life, and behind them the woman in the barn coat made a noise like a kettle.
Nick Pittman sat down on an overturned muck bucket and laughed at the ceiling.
Here is the thing Kristin thought about afterward, on and off, for a long time.
Somewhere in the middle of it — around three, during the tubing — he had handed her the pump without looking and she had taken it with the right, and then he had needed the twitch and she had needed a free hand, and he had said, "Give it here," and taken the pump back, and it had all happened at the speed of two people doing a job.