Page 6 of While the Sun Shines

Whit hooks a thumb back toward the shadowed aisle of the barn. “Should we think about starting milking?”

Ah, shit. Drew rubs a hand over his face, scratching through his beard and then up into his hair. Like clockwork, their days are always bookended by morning and evening milking, the sun already angling toward the tops of the trees and the first cows ambling their way toward the barn, their udders full and dinner on their minds.

“Of course, milking,” Drew says, as if he hadn’t lost track of the time. “I’ll try to negotiate with our new ovine overlords, if you two want to take care of the cows.”

“You got a plan?” Whit asks.

“Of course.” Yeah, he had a plan: purchase a herd of sheep, milk them, make cheese and sell it. He just didn’t figure the sheep would turn up with a plan of their own to dig their damn heels in and refuse to budge.

But it’s hard to be irritated with them given how they’re stamping their hooves, scared by the day they’ve had. As gently as he can, he scatters grain through the straw on the floor of the trailer, leaving them a treat to snack on once they’ve calmed down a bit.

“I’ll get a fence strung up around the trailer so they can make their way into the barn tonight if they decide to,” Drew says. “I’m sure they will, once they realize there’s hay and water inside, and we leave them alone to get settled.”

“Pie,” Penny says.

“Oh, right.” Drew looks at his watch, then up at the sun. “This’ll take, I don’t know, an hour?”

“I’m working tonight,” Penny says.

“Tomorrow, then?” he asks.

“You’re haying tomorrow,” Penny says. You won’t, he hears. He’ll be busy. Overwhelmed with a full day of work and exhausted by the end of it.

“Sorry,” he says. “But we can do it later, yeah?”

“Later,” she echoes. “I can’t promise those strawberries will survive tonight.”

“I’ll pick you more.”

“Sure you will,” she says. Already, she’s walking toward the house.

Stay, he nearly says. But no, she’s probably headed off to shower and make herself some dinner if she’s bartending tonight. If she wanted to hang out with him while he worked on the fence, she would. A bathtub, he thinks and smiles. She knows what she wants. Always does and always has.

“Sorry!” he says again, calling after her.

But the screen door’s already banging shut, and he can’t see Penny with the glare of the sun shining on the windows, bright and gleaming.

CHAPTER TWO

Drew wakes up with a gasp.

Shear bolts.

Oh fucking shit, he has to find the shear bolts he bought at the hardware store or the baler will break the first time he turns it on.

He slumps back into his sweaty sheets. Thank fuck he remembered. What a goddamn disaster if he’d managed to finish the mowing, the tedding, the raking, only to head out to bale and broken the thing on the first pass.

Now if he just has any idea where those bolts are…

Dawn’s far enough away that his bedroom is lit in gray shadows as he swings his feet to the floor. He’d picked up the little half-inch bolts just the other day, so they can’t have gone far. Though they’re not on his desk, where his laptop sits among a pile of receipts and invoices, and they’re not in the pocket of the pants he was wearing that day, which he discovers when he pulls them out of the hamper in a shower of socks and T-shirts.

Outside, the rooster screams at the coming morning as Drew turns in a small circle in his room. Quickly, he sorts through the top of his bookshelf, where he’s tossed a tractor manual, three unopened envelopes, and a catalogue advertising new hay equipment he can’t afford. He peeks behind the two pictures he keeps there, one of his parents holding him when he was only a bundle of blankets, and next to it, Uncle Bert and Aunt Mary, arms around each other and smiling.

Drew tosses the book he abandoned when spring truly got underway toward the bookshelf, clearing a spot on his bedside table where it sat long enough to leave a clean mark in a thin layer of dust. His phone, his phone charger, the old lamp with its loose shade, and the framed photo of him and Penny.

Probably the lesson to be learned here is that he should clean up all of his shit. Not let the tidiness he manages in the winter devolve into growing piles that crop up like the new grass does, only to be dealt with when fall arrives and the leaves turn and he feels like he can breathe again after the mad rush of summer.

He scans the nightstand again, as if the shear bolts might appear in front of the picture frame. Penny smiles up at him from it, braces on her teeth and his hat turned sideways on her head. Next to her, he’s grinning too, all long limbs and awkwardly skinny that summer between junior and senior year of high school, freckled and pink-cheeked from their hours outside.