Page 40 of Runaway for the Grumpy Daddy

Boone

She slept in my bed and I didn't, and that was the correct distribution of the night.

I'd carried her in around midnight — quilt, rabbit, and all, her fist still knotted in my shirt like a lead rope she wasn't giving back — and laid her into the middle of the mattress, where she'd promptly claimed maybe a fifth of it and left the rest to history. Then I'd taken the chair. Slept some, in the shallow, useful way a man sleeps during calving, one ear on the room, and every time I surfaced I did the count: her breathing, long and even. The fire, holding. Biscuit on the floor beside the bed, stationed there since midnight of her own judgment, chin on her paws, one ear up, running her own watch like the old professional she was. Everything present and accounted for. I'd go back under for another forty minutes and surface and count again.

At first light she stirred, and I was already crouched at the bedside when her eyes came open, low and level so the first thing she saw wasn't a mountain over her but a face at her own altitude.

"Barn," she said. It came out of her before her eyes had finished focusing, the word arriving straight off the old programming, no thought involved. She was already gathering herself to sit up, and I watched the ribs vote against it, watched the wince start and get swallowed.

"No barn." I put one hand flat on the quilt over her collarbone, not holding her down, just present, a weight she could feel through the wool. "Day off. Whole day. The ribs need it and so does the rest of you, and there's no version of this morning where you argue me out of it." I let that stand a second. "Daddy's orders."

I watched the fight come up in her — but they'll need me, but the sale, but I can't just — and then I watched it fold. Fast. Faster than pride should allow, which told me exactly how badly she needed the folding. Her shoulders came down out of her ears and she went boneless back into my pillow, and something in her face went young and unguarded, and she said, small, already half back under, "Okay, Daddy."

Two words, and they went through me the same as they had at the footbridge. Same voltage. A man doesn't build up a tolerance to it, apparently. Good to know.

"Biscuit stays," I said. "She's on shift. Anything pulls wrong in those ribs, you send her for me and she'll come find me — she knows the job." Biscuit's tail thumped the floorboards once, a contract signed. "There's oatmeal on the stove and it will be eaten. All of it."

"All of it," she agreed, into the pillow, and was asleep again before I got my hat off the peg.

I stood in my own doorway a minute, looking back at the picture of it — the smallest woman in Montana asleep in the biggest bed, a one-eared rabbit at her collarbone, a gray sergeant of a dog posted at the bedside like the changing of the guard — and then I went out quiet, eased the door to, and pointed the truck at Ennis.

Forty minutes of highway, and for the first time in a week the list in my head had nothing on it for the ranch. No feed. No parts. No banding rings or scour boluses or any of the ten thousand small necessities a calving outfit runs through like water. The mortgage rode along in the cab with me anyway — it rode everywhere now, sat in the passenger seat like a dog that wouldn't be left home — and somewhere around the reservoir I made a decision about it. Not today. Today it could ride, but it didn't get to drive. A man can set a thing down for one morning without pretending it doesn't exist. I'd learned that this spring, at a kitchen table, from a woman who wrote her rules in careful loops. Today the list was hers.

The general store in Ennis had been the general store since before I was born, and the woman at the register had rung up thirty years of my fencing staples and never once asked me a personal question, which was the whole basis of our friendship. I took a basket. A basket, not a cart — this was precision work.

The colored pencils were first because I knew right where they kept them. Her crayons were worn down to stubs the size of shotgun shells; I'd watched her coloring at my table, gripping those little nubs in her scarred capable fingers, making do, and making do was another thing getting retired around here one item at a time. There was a cheap set of twenty-four and there was the good tin — forty-eight, German, the kind with a lid that closed like a toolbox — and I stood there roughly no seconds at all before the tin went in the basket. Then the paper. Not a pad — a ream of a pad, thick stock, heavy enough to take wet color without buckling, because she pressed hard when she got going, tongue between her teeth, and paper that buckled under her would be a personal insult to me now.

The books took longer.

The children's shelf was low, naturally, built for its customers, and I crouched in front of it like a man reading a heifer's chart and went through them one at a time. I had criteria. I hadn't known I had criteria until I was holding the first one, and then they arrived fully formed: animals in it, because animals were her country. Nobody abandoned in it — I opened one about a lost dog and read far enough to confirm the dog got found and stayed found, permanently, in writing, before it made the cut list. And the ending had to hold weight. I read four endings standing in that aisle, a man six-foot-five with his hat pushed back, moving his thumb down pages the size of my palm, and a kid at the end of the aisle stared at me the whole time and I let him. The winner was one about a barn at night and everything in it going to sleep, one animal at a time, each of them tucked and named and safe, and the last page was the farmhouse light going out. I read that last page twice. It held.

The cow was an accident. I was passing the toy shelf on the way to the register and there she was — a soft Hereford-looking thing, white-faced, roughly the size of a loaf of bread, with a stitched expression that managed to be both patient and mildly guilty, like she'd already eaten something that wasn't hers. I picked her up. And then I stood there holding her, a full minute by any honest clock, my thumb moving over the plush of her one crooked ear, thinking about a violet hoofprint on a small rib cage and a woman who talked to livestock in full sentences and had learned this week, again, what livestock could do — and thinking that there ought to be one cow in her life that was on her side unconditionally, zero exceptions, no stars next to its number in any chart.

The cow went in the basket.

At the register I laid it all out — the tin, the paper, the barn book, the cow — and the woman rang it through without comment, though her eyebrows conducted a brief private conversation over the cow. I paid cash. She looked at me once, the look with the question in it, and I said, "Mm," and she nodded like that settled everything, which between us it did, and bagged it all in paper.

On the drive back I rehearsed the joke.

Four sentences. I'd built it lying awake in the chair around three a.m. and I ran it now like walking a fence line, testing every post. It's so you remember how cute cows can be. Even though some of them are kickers. This one's guaranteed gentle. I checked her references myself. Four sentences was, by my lifetime average, a filibuster — Cash would have paid money to witness it — and I ran it top to bottom five times between the reservoir and the county road, adjusting the pause before the last line, because the pause was where the whole thing lived.

The ranch came up on my right with the range white behind it, and there was smoke standing thin and steady from my own chimney, and a light in my own window, and a woman inside both. I turned up the drive with a paper sack of childhood riding shotgun where the mortgage had been, and for the length of that half mile of gravel, the exchange felt like the best trade I'd ever made.

***

I scuffed my boots on my own porch step, which was ridiculous — a man announcing himself to his own house — and did it anyway, because announcing myself was law now whether the door was mine or not, and pushed inside with the paper sack riding my forearm.

She was awake and propped up in the big chair, the quilt tucked to her waist, hair loose and rumpled from my pillow, and the sight of her there did what it always did, which was rearrange my chest like furniture being moved by somebody who didn't ask. Biscuit lifted her head from the floor, confirmed it was me, and put it back down. Shift change acknowledged.

"You're checking the pot," Josie said.

I was checking the pot. I'd crossed to the stove without meaning to and lifted the lid on the oatmeal, and it was scraped down to the finish, clean as a licked bowl, and I set the lid back and said nothing, and she watched me say nothing with her eyes narrowed in the safe way she'd learned.

"All of it," she said. "Per orders. Biscuit supervised. She's very thorough."

"Mm." I set the sack on the table, square to the edge, and took my hat off, and hung it, and by the time I turned back around she'd clocked the sack and gone up on one elbow like a prairie dog. "Ribs first."

"Ribs are a five out of ten and dropping," she recited. "Deep breath catches at the top and holds. No new colors. Same-day reporting, entered into the file." She said it crisp as a duty officer and then ruined the whole performance by pointing at the sack. "What is that?"