Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Presley
I stand at the rail of the sick pen a little after noon with the heifer in front of me, my phone in my hand, and the whole rotten math of my life laid out plain.
Sixty-eight's got a snotty nose and a cough, and she's gone dull around the eyes.
She’s standing off by herself with her head low, and I've been around enough cattle to know that's not a wait-and-see.
That's a get-somebody-out-here-today.
A first-calf heifer can go from off-her-feed to dead faster than you'd believe if it's gone into her lungs, and I've got a whole herd of them she could've breathed on.
So I've got two choices.
I can call the mobile vet out of Llano, a stranger, forty-five minutes out on a good day, and a hundred and eighty dollars before he's even looked at her, money the program doesn't have to throw around yet.
Or I can call my sister.
Grace is a ten-minute drive across the ranch, and she's the best large-animal vet in three counties.
She works our stock for family rates, which is to say, for nothing, and she’s also the woman who stood in a hospital hallway and told me she couldn't look at me because I've got my mother's face.
I look at Number 68.
She coughs, wet and deep, and it settles it, because I didn't build this program to let a heifer die of my own hurt feelings.
I call my sister.
It rings four times and I'm halfway to relieved that I'll get her voicemail when she picks up. "Presley."
Flat.
Not a question, not a greeting.
My name in her mouth like something she has to hold at arm's length.
"Hey." I keep it professional, because professional is the only door still open between us. "I've got a first-calf heifer off her feed, snotty, coughing, gone dull. Number sixty-eight out of the group I bred in the spring. I think it's gone respiratory, and I didn't want to wait on it."
A pause.
In the background I can hear her truck, the road noise, a country station turned low. "Temp?"
"Haven't got a good one on her yet. She won't let me close, and I didn't want to stress her worse before somebody who knows more than me put eyes on her."
Another pause, longer, and I know what's happening in it.
I know she's sitting at a stop sign somewhere on this ranch weighing the same thing I weighed.
A sick animal against the fact that coming out here means being near me, and I hate that I've become a cost my sister has to reckon with before she'll drive across her own ranch.
"Put her in the chute," Grace says finally. "Not the pen, the chute, so I can get a temp and listen to her without either of us getting kicked. I'm twenty minutes out. I'm finishing at the Dawson place first."
"Thank you?—"
She's already hung up.
I stand there with the dead phone against my ear a second longer than I need to, and I tell myself the sting in my eyes is the dust, the heat, and the worry over the heifer.
Not the fact that my sister used to end every call with love you, see you at supper, and now she ends them by not saying anything at all.
Then I put the phone in my back pocket and I go get Number 68 into the chute, because that part I can do.
I've got the heifer settled and the head gate set and a bucket of water she won't touch when I hear the side-by-side coming, and it's coming from the wrong direction to be Grace.
It's coming from the back of the property.
I don't turn around.
I've gotten good at not turning around.
But my whole body knows the sound of that specific engine because I've spent weeks training myself not to react to it.
A person can't train a pull that deep out of herself in a matter of weeks, no matter how hard she works at it.
"Miss Presley!"
Not Thunder.
His daughter, Raine.
She's off the side-by-side before it's all the way stopped, braids flying, boots hitting the dirt at a dead run.
She's got a barn kitten clamped under one arm in a way the kitten doesn’t love, and she's the best thing I've seen in weeks.
My heart cracks right down the middle at the sight of her.
"Hey, wild thing."
I crouch down to catch her because she's plainly about to launch, and she does, one-armed, the kitten squashed between us and yowling.
"Careful, careful, you're gonna squish Biscuit."
"His name is Biscuit!"
She pulls back, delighted, holding the gray kitten up like evidence.
"You were right, you were so right, he looks exactly like a biscuit, and everybody says so. Mama Lou says so, and Daddy says so, and even Nash says so and Nash doesn't even like cats."
"I told you." I scratch the kitten's chin and he forgives all of us instantly, the way kittens do. "Biscuit's a perfect name for a gray cat. What's he doing all the way out here at my pens, though? Kittens belong in the barn."
"I brought him to show you."
She says it like it's obvious, like of course you'd haul a kitten across a ranch to show a person, and something in my chest goes soft and terrible all at once.
"'Cause you named him and you never got to see him get big.
He's getting so big! And I wanted to show you my loose tooth, but it came out already at Mama Lou's, so I can't. But I saved it, it's in a baggie. "
"You saved your tooth in a baggie."
"For the tooth fairy. Obviously." She rolls her eyes at my ignorance, nine years old and running the whole world. "Are you working? What's wrong with that cow? She looks sad."
"She's a little sick. My sister's coming to make her feel better." The word sister catches on the way out and I cover it. "You want to help me keep her calm till the vet gets here? You've got to be real quiet and gentle."
"I'm the best at quiet and gentle."
Raine is many things, but one thing she isn’t is quiet. But I love her for thinking it.
She helps me the way a nine-year-old helps, which is to say she talks the entire time and pets the heifer's nose with two fingers so soft it wouldn't wake a fly.
Number 68 settles a little with the small warm chatter of her, the way animals do around kids who mean them no harm.
And I let myself have it.
Ten minutes of this kid.
I know I shouldn't, I know every minute I spend with Raine is a minute closer to something I can't have.
But she's here and she's mine to borrow for a little while.
I've been so starved for somebody on this ranch to look at me like I'm not made of lies that I take it and don't feel bad about taking it.
"Miss Presley?" She's gone quieter now, petting the heifer, not looking at me. "How come you don't come to supper anymore?"
There it is.
Out of nowhere, the way the real questions always come from kids, sideways and sudden while they're looking at something else.
"I've been awful busy, baby." It's the same lie I've been telling myself. "Startin' up this cattle program is a big job."
"That's what Daddy said." She keeps petting. "I wanted to invite you to dinner. I asked him if you could come. But he said you were probably busy." A pause, her small hand smoothing down the heifer's nose. "Were you? Busy?"
And I don't know what to say to that, because the honest answer is no, baby, I wasn't busy, I've never once been too busy for you, and I can't say it, because saying it opens a door I've spent weeks nailing shut.
He said I was probably busy.
I turn that over while Raine pets the heifer, and it hits somewhere cold in me.
He didn't say he’d ask me.
He didn't say maybe.
He told his daughter I was busy, which is a way of telling her no without telling her no, and I don't know what to do with the fact that it stings.
That some stupid, starved part of me wanted him to want me at that table even though I've been telling myself for weeks that the last thing on earth I want is to sit in that man's kitchen.
Maybe he doesn't want me there.
Maybe the rattlesnake on his neck and the visit to my pens was the whole of what he had in him, and the actual day-to-day of me, the supper-table me, the me his daughter wants—maybe that's more than he's asking for.
I hate how much that thought hurts.
I have no right to it.
I'm the one who ended it.
I'm the one who said no more lies and walked out his door.
"I was pretty busy," I tell her, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. "But it was real sweet of you to want to invite me."
Raine goes still for a second.
Then she looks up at me with Thunder's dark eyes in a nine-year-old's face, and she says the one sentence that takes the ground out from under me.
"I think my daddy misses you."
Everything in me goes still.
"He hasn't said it or anything," she goes on, matter-of-fact, back to petting the heifer like she hasn't just reached into my chest and closed a fist. "Daddy doesn't say stuff like that.
But he just looks sad a lot. Since a while ago.
He looks at his phone and doesn't call anybody and then he looks sad, and one time I asked him what was wrong and he said nothin', baby but it was a lie, I could tell, 'cause his voice went funny. "
She shrugs, a small terrible shrug. "I think he misses somebody. And you used to come around, and now you don't, and he got sad right around then. So."
So.
All of it laid out by a nine-year-old with a kitten under her arm, the plain sum I've been refusing to add up, done for me in the sun at a sick pen while a heifer coughs.
He looks sad.
He got sad right around when I stopped coming.
I have to look away from her, out across the pasture at nothing.
I breathe through the burning behind my eyes so I don’t cry in front of this child, because if I start I won't be crying about a heifer and she's too smart not to know it.
That's when the second engine comes.
Two of them — Grace's truck rolling up the ranch road, and behind it, further back, slower, the low rumble of a bike easing across the property.
He's come for his daughter.
Of course he has.
She took off across the ranch on a side-by-side with a kitten, and Thunder doesn't let Raine get more than a holler away from him these days.
Not since the bunkhouse, not with whatever's got the whole club riding tight and watchful lately.
Grace gets to me first.
She parks and gets out, and she's all business, vet bag in hand, ballcap pulled low, and she gives Raine a real smile because Grace's ice was only ever for me.
Then the smile's gone when she turns to the chute, and it's just the heifer and the work. "Let's see her."
I hold Number 68's head while my sister works, and Grace is good.
She's so good, gentle and quick and sure, thermometer and stethoscope and her hands reading the animal like a language she was born speaking.
We don't talk except about the heifer.
Temp's up.
Lungs are junky on the left side.
Early pneumonia, caught in time, treatable, a shot of Nuflor and Banamine, and watch her closely for forty-eight hours.
It's the longest I've stood next to my sister since the hospital.
We were getting good at being sisters.
That's the part nobody understands about what got taken from me.
It wasn't a lifetime of closeness that broke, it was the brand-new bond we'd only just started building after I came home a Lyle.
The sisterhood I waited twenty-two years for and got to hold for exactly one season before my mother's sins put a wall down the middle of it.
And I can't even be angry at Grace for the wall.
That's the cruelest part.
She lost her mother twice and found out from a text, and I've got the face of the woman who did it.
If I were her I don't know that I'd be able to look at me either.
So I hold the heifer's head and I don't say any of the hundred things on my mind.
I let my sister work in silence, and I take what I can get, which is twenty minutes of standing close to somebody I love who can't love me back right now.
"You caught it early," Grace says, drawing up the shot, and it's the closest thing to a kind word she's given me in weeks. "Another day and we'd be talking about whether we could save her. You did right, calling me."
"Thank you."
I want to say more.
I want to say, Grace, please, I didn't know, I found out the same day you did, I would never— I've wanted to say it a hundred times—but her walls are up, and the heifer's between us, and Raine's right there, and this isn't the moment, there's never a moment.
"Really. Thank you for coming."
She gives the shot. She doesn't look at me.
And behind us, the bike goes quiet.
Thunder doesn't come to the rail.
He stays back by his bike, one boot on the ground, giving the vet room to work and giving me—I don't know what he's giving me.
Distance.
Cover.
A choice.
He stays back where I don't have to deal with him, and somehow that's worse than if he'd walked right up, because it's considerate.
I don't want him to be considerate, I want him to be the cold, dangerous man I can stay angry at.
"Raine," he calls, easy. "Let's let Miss Presley and Miss Grace work, baby. Bring the cat."
"But—"
"Raine."
She goes, because she minds him, hugging me hard around the neck one more time first. "Bye, Miss Presley, feel better cow!" Then she trots off toward the bike with Biscuit yowling his displeasure to the whole county.
And for one second, as she goes, I let myself look at him. He's already looking at me.
Of course he is.
He's got his hat pushed back and the rattlesnake dark on his throat in the noon light and that steady weather-coming stare fixed on me across forty feet of dirt.
He doesn't wave and he doesn't smile and he doesn't say a word.
He just tips his chin at me.
Once.
The smallest thing.
Then he gets his daughter loaded and his own busted body back on the bike, and they ride off.
He looks sad, Raine said.
I get in my truck after Grace is gone and Number 68 is dosed and settled in the quarantine pens for the next couple of days.
I sit there in the heat with my hands on the wheel, and I think about a man who told his daughter I was probably busy, and got sad right around when I stopped coming.
The same man who rode all the way out here just to collect a kid he could've trusted to drive a side-by-side two hundred yards home.
He didn't have to come himself.
He wanted to see if I was out here.
And the worst part, the part I can't say out loud to anyone, not even the dashboard—the worst part is that when he tipped his chin at me, something in my chest lifted like a field lark going up.
For one whole second I forgot every good reason I have to stay away from him.
One second.
Then I remembered all of them, every last one, and I started the truck and drove home to my empty cabin.
But it took me that whole second.
And it's getting harder, not easier, to find them.