by Lexie Ray
“Stop looking at me like that,” she said quietly. “Please. And stop looking for a rubber band. It doesn’t matter. I have a dozen more back up at the house. I was just pissed off.”
“Okay,” I said, uncertain, drawing out the second syllable. “I’m sorry that this hasn’t been going well.”
“I wish I could explain myself to you, but there are too many things to unravel,” she said.
“You really don’t have to explain anything to me,” I said. I’d said it before, but it seemed like I needed to say it again, to reassure her, but her face puckered into a scowl.
“I obviously need to explain myself to you, because whatever we’re doing isn’t working. I hate living here and believing I’m the cause of you isolating yourself from your family. Everyone’s noticed that you’re acting pretty absent.”
“You’re not the cause.”
“Oh, bullshit. Everything was fine until I told you that we shouldn’t fuck. You spent more time in the house than you did out on the ranch. I know it’s me. I know it.”
“Maybe it’s me,” I said, running my hand through my hair and wishing my fingers were tangled in Zoe’s dark mane instead. “Maybe it’s hard to be around you because you told me how you felt and I still feel the same way.”
“What same way?”
“That I want to … be with you.” That I cared about her. That I wanted to take her in my arms and forget about everything else.
“You idiot. Do you think I don’t want to be with you?”
I peered of her, unsure of the exact meaning of her words. She was right. I didn’t understand anything. She’d told me she didn’t think we should be together, and here she was admitting that she was resisting my pull just as hard as I was resisting hers, two people on opposite ends of the same rope, yanking away.
I pursed my lips to question her on this apparent paradox and that’s the moment she decided to march right up to me and kiss me on my mouth.
I gasped and flailed for a moment, unsure of myself, unsure of everything, not knowing if I should put my arms around her or what, and then she backed off again just as swiftly as she’d kissed me to begin with. Her dark eyes were squeezed shut, lips pressed together, hands straying up to her hair.
“Complicated,” she said slowly, like it hurt her, then turned and jogged away, out of the barn.
I guessed I finally did understand.
It really was fucking complicated.
Chapter 3
The first of the calves came not a week later, not giving me much time to contemplate Zoe’s strange actions in the barn. It was a good thing that we had ended night shift when Paisley proposed to, because we needed all the help we could get. We’d moved all the expectant mothers to the corral nearest the barn, and as each began to give birth, we’d weed them out to give them personalized attention.
Everyone was required to help out during calving. The clinic closed, and the horse rehab projects were put on hold. Even Amelia and Zoe were out and about, offering buckets of water and rags and a hand wherever one was needed.
“You think Toby could come out and see all this after school?” Zoe asked me, washing her hands with what remained of the water in the bucket she’d been hauling around. We were all splattered with varying degrees of gore, but we hadn’t had to call the vet, yet, so that was a positive. Peyton was particularly gifted with the animals even though she was more used to horses than cattle.
“You’re his mom,” I said, thankful, as always, for the practical distraction of the ranch from the thoughts and feelings that remained unsaid between us. “I’m betting he can do whatever he likes as long as he doesn’t get in the way of anything.”
“He’s a small boy,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll harm anything. This is all so exciting. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Zoe’s face was bright and thrilled, flushed with exertion and delight. Really, seeing her flit around was making my day even more than the healthy births we’d had so far. Avery and Paisley were weighing the newest members of the herd, and Zoe would dart over to moon over them as if they could understand her.
“You’re going to grow up to be big and strong, I just know it,” she’d croon to one as Tucker and Hunter would secure a plastic tag to its ear and jot the number in the log. We were all working together, but I wished I could just watch Zoe. She brought wonder everywhere, and was a pleasure to observe.
As soon as the bus dropped Toby off, though, I found it hard to focus on the thing I actually wanted to focus on. The kid was completely underfoot, chattering a mile a minute, leaving a trail of belongings as he followed me around — first his jacket, then the contents of his backpack, which he hadn’t noticed was open, then finally his backpack. He started toeing off his shoes when Zoe finally spotted him and put a stop to it.
“Don’t you see the amount of dirt and cow shit?” she fussed, then laughed. Zoe was good natured and had quite a sense of humor, but this laugh was something I hadn’t heard before. While most of her jokes were self-deprecating or a little dark — with a sardonic chuckle to go along with them — this laughter was free and wild. It made her look and sound so much younger.
“Yuck, poop,” Toby complained, electing to keep his shoes on after all. “What’s going on with all of this?”
“You’re going to lose your homework is what’s going on if you don’t get all those books and papers picked up and put away in your backpack,” I warned. “Look, there’s one of them already blowing away.”
Almost as an afterthought, Toby collected his goods, not even bothering to brush off the dirt that coated a corner of a picture book borrowed from the school library before shoving it in to his backpack.
“Better put that up at the porch before it gets lost,” Zoe said, ruffling his hair as he passed her by. “Why, not even a hug for your mother after not seeing her all day? You don’t like me anymore, or what?”
“Aw, I like you.” He gave her a half-hearted hug, eager to be on his way to the porch so he could skitter back down here in as few seconds as humanly possible. Did it make me a terrible person to hope that he found something to occupy his attention back at the house? I could appreciate him being excited, but I’d been so occupied supervising everything — and watching Zoe. I did’t have any room in my attention span or abilities to watch a small child like a hawk and answer the questions that ricocheted out of his mouth like bullets.
My shoulders slumped a bit as I recognized Toby’s small form growing larger as he sprinted back toward the corrals. This process was a novelty to him, and it had piqued his curiosity. Calving was out of the norm, beyond the ranching activity he had grown accustomed to. Of course he wasn’t going to stay up at the house.
“What can I do to help?” he asked self-importantly, puffing his chest out.
“You can stay out of the way,” I said. “Watch and listen and learn.”
“Aw, man,” he complained. “That’s what my teacher always says.”
I raised my eyebrows but chose not to comment further. I’d imagine that was about what his teacher told him on a daily basis. The kid was curious, but a handful — two handfuls. I wasn’t sure I knew how the teacher found the time to teach the rest of the students with Toby in their class.
“Is it hurting the cows?” Toby asked, bending over to get a gander at the business end of the animal as Zoe moved closer, her eyes shining at her kid’s front row ticket to ranching education.
“Perfectly natural,” I said, stepping around him to monitor the creature. “Careful, now.”
“How do you think you were born?” Zoe quizzed him, her eyes sparkling with mirth.
“What? Like this?” Astounded, he dropped to a crouch and craned his neck just in time to recoil with a sound of disgust as the calf appeared. “I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it.”
“Back it up, buddy,” I said. “That’s the danger zone.”
The creature was probably too absorbed in what it was doing — calvin
g — to take notice of Toby, but the kid was in my way. But the last thing I needed was to trip over him or risk him getting a swift kick in the face. That would ruin the day, and it would certainly darken Zoe’s mood. I wanted to get through all of this without a terrible incident, and I just felt ill at ease seeing the kid so close to everything.
“He’s just curious,” Zoe said, frowning a little at me before grinning again. “Look, Toby. Here comes the calf. This is the first time it’s ever seen anything like this.”
The wet calf slid out of its mother and lay gasping on the ground, wisps of grass sticking to it. The mother turned ponderously around and began to lick it.
“Why is it just lying there?” Toby asked, his nose wrinkled.
“He’s brand new to this world,” Zoe told him. “Think about all these new things he’s seeing and hearing and smelling and feeling. The grass underneath him. His mother giving him his first bath. The wind and the sunshine and the birds singing. You — why, look! He’s looking right at you. Say hello. Hello, little guy.”
“Welcome to life,” Toby said a little grimly, and Zoe cackled again.
“You’ve got to have a better welcome than that,” she said.
“Well, we’re going to eat it, aren’t we?” he asked me.
“If not us, then somebody, yes,” I confirmed.
“Pretty bleak,” Zoe said, raising an eyebrow at me.
“But the truth,” I argued, then winced at the way Toby stared. “Kind of the nature of the ranch. That’s what the cattle do for us. We take care of them, and then they take care of us.”
“By feeding us,” he confirmed.
“Or somebody else who gives us money for the meat,” I elaborated. “Which can then buy us things. Like … your backpack.”
Toby looked stricken. “This guy’s going to die for my backpack?”
“Why don’t you go over there and help Avery and Paisley with the weighing?” Zoe prodded gently. “I bet they might even let you weigh yourself. How much do you think you weigh now? You haven’t been weighed since you went to the doctor at the beginning of the school year.”
“A hundred pounds!” he exploded, joyful and boyish again after his segue into despair.
“I don’t know about that,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “You’d better go check and report back to me later.”
He scampered off and I finally relaxed, able to fully focus on the tasks at hand.
“You know he’s just a little boy, right?” Zoe was staring at me with something of an unreadable look on her face.
“Of course he’s just a little boy,” I confirmed. “He was asking questions, and I was answering them.”
“He doesn’t need to know that somebody’s going to eat that calf,” she said.
“But that is what’s going to happen.”
“The calf was just born.” Zoe held her hand out to the creature, who was still wet but not as sticky. Its mother nuzzled its haunches a little bit until it staggered unsteadily to its feet. I waited for its instincts to kick in, and they did. It nursed. I sometimes had to guide them to the milk, but this one realized exactly what it was supposed to do.
“There’s not a lot of room for sentimentality on a ranch,” I said.
“That’s a crock of shit if I’ve ever smelled one,” she scoffed. “This is the most sentimental place I’ve ever lived in. You all ride horses, still, for fuck’s sake, even if you could do twice the work in half the time on ATVs and in trucks. You could even be rich, if you wanted to, but you’re still so stuck in doing things the old way that you’ll never get there.”
“Our parents wanted this kind of life preserved,” I said. “That doesn’t mean that we name all the cattle and sit around and cry when we cull the herd.”
“All I’m saying is that you could’ve toned it down for a little boy,” she said. “Toby’s only going to be eight. He doesn’t need to think about things that are just being born getting up and ready to die already.”
I frowned, thinking. “You know, Hunter was around eight years old when our parents died.”
Zoe fell silent at this. “That’s awfully goddamn young.”
“It was a car accident,” I added, trying to be helpful. “Or, sorry, I guess, if that’s too morbid.”
“If Toby wakes up with his little brain full of existential nightmares, I’m sending you up to deal with it,” she said, shaking her head at me and walking away.
I wasn’t sure where I had gone wrong on that one. I thought she’d wanted to know more about my parents, wanted some kind of clarification for the connection I was trying to make with her son, the olive branch of saying, “hey, I can relate to that because of this.” But I guessed sometimes those fell short.
Calving progressed steadily into the afternoon and evening, Amelia jetting off to the house with Toby to get started on a portable dinner that could be fed to the masses still dealing with the herd. Zoe was too enthralled, too big of a help to even think about returning to the kitchen tonight.
“How long does this go on?” she asked Tucker as he rummaged around in the box full of tags.
“As long as mother nature decides, I suppose,” he said. “There’s not really a schedule to it. Sometimes we have all of the births in about a week. Sometimes they stretch over a month. During the mating season, though, we try to time it right.”
“Jesus, do you remember when we had all of them over the span of two days?” Emmett asked, sidling up to use Zoe’s ever-present bucket of water. She poured it over his hands for him, listening raptly to the exchange of stories.
“I’m surprised you remember it,” Tucker rumbled. “You were just a little shit.”
“You were only a little bigger shit,” Emmett retorted. “Of course I remember it. That kind of event is epic.”
“Our parents were like the walking dead,” Tucker told Zoe. “They didn’t sleep for the entire 48 hours. We thought we were all so lucky because they kept us out of school. In the end, though, we realized that we wouldn’t have been working as hard if we were in school. We were all exhausted by the end of it, but it was a successful two days. Newspaper even did a story on it.”
“Two whole days,” Zoe said, whistling lowly. “Damn.”
“We slept in piles of hay, like the calves,” I recalled with a small smile. There wasn’t a calving season that passed that I didn’t think of this story. It was simply too memorable. “Dad said he almost tagged Tuck’s ear in the exhaustion and confusion.”
We all laughed to picture what a disaster that would’ve been, and Tucker thoughtfully modeled a bright yellow tag for us to better visualize it.
As the last of the light faded from the sky and the stars starting twinkling in the inky indigo of the night, Paisley and I met to set up shifts. Mother nature might’ve dictated that these heifers could’ve managed calving on their own, but we couldn’t afford for anything to go wrong. There was just too much invested — time, money, resources — for us all to just go on home, take a nice, hot shower, and get a good night’s rest. Everything might go according to plan without us there, sure, but if something went wrong — as it often did — we needed to be there to see things right.
“I wish we could just ask Peyton to never sleep again, don’t you?” Paisley remarked to me, watching her move easily from one animal to the next. I might’ve been seeing things, but it seemed like all of the heifers calmed at Peyton’s touch. She really did have a gift with animals.
“I’d pay her overtime in a heartbeat,” I said, “and she might try to agree, but we need her rested more than we need to run her into the ground. Everything’s going smoothly, now.”
“Famous last words,” Paisley said, rolling her eyes at me.
“I know. Sorry. But send Peyton home. Give her first rest.”
“I can hear you all, you know,” she said, frowning at us as she walked by. “I’m not tired. I can stay longer.”
“We might need you more when others are tired,” I said. “Go. We
’ll call you if anything happens.”
We split everyone up — a lot of the ranch hands opted to stay down at the finished barracks that we had planned for the dude ranch instead of driving home — and made sure all the animals were accounted for. Zoe took a heavily protesting Toby up to the house, at one point, practically dragging him to make him mind.
“I don’t want to go to bed,” he said. “I want to stay and help with the calves.”
“There’ll be plenty of calves left for you to help with,” I said, eager for him to be away. I hadn’t been able to concentrate with him around, even as he showed nothing but enthusiasm. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I handle a little kid?
“Listen to Chance,” Zoe wheedled. “Besides, it’s past your bedtime already. You’ll be falling asleep at your desk at school tomorrow, and guess who your teacher will bitch out?”
“You?” Toby tried unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn.
“You’re damn right. Me. Now let’s go.”
Zoe glanced at me. “I’ll be back.”
“You can sleep,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow. It was going to be a cold night — perhaps our first frost. Winter was upon us.
“And miss all this excitement?” Zoe flashed a brilliant grin. “Not on your life.”
I was worn out, but I couldn’t justify sleeping right now. I’d put myself on the first shift with the idea that I’d grab some shut-eye at some point, but I would’ve felt bad being asleep while other people worked. I’d work until I dropped. That was my decision.
It became automatic, the work I was doing. Check on the newborn calves. Check on their mothers. Make sure the feed and water supply for each heifer was well stocked. Help with a new birth. Help with weighing and tagging. Take a look at the logs, make sure they’re being filled out correctly. Touch base with everyone working. Make sure they have what they need. Give them food and water. Check the time. Send the exhausted ones away to rest. Call others in. Check the heifers in labor. Check on the newborn calves. Check on their mothers.