Page 35 of Christmas With A Stranger

He slides the receipt toward me again.

"Then buy the ground."

I look down at his numbers. Twenty years of payments, more cattle, more risk and more money going out every month now that there will be another check going east.

I hold out my hand, and Dutch takes it.

"Man with a kid coming might want to be where the kid is, though. I'd understand that."

"Thank you, Dutch, but that isn't in the plan. I've spent eleven years building this life with my own hands, and with the addition of your property, I can finally make it what it should be." I turn my cup a quarter turn on the table.

"Your life. You have new information now, so I'm just saying."

"She says she can do it on her own. She never asked if I wanted to keep it."

He nods once. "Ground sells better in one piece, if it ever comes to that. Keep that in your back pocket."

"It won't come to that."

Feeding starts at five-forty whether I slept or not. The morning's as black as the inside of a hat. I climb up on the tractor, pull the throttle, and turn her over. She catches on the first try.

Wade put the new glow plugs in her while I was in Florida, and now she starts. You fix a tractor right, and it starts when you need it to. Simple as that.

I leave her idling and take the axe to the water tank.

The ice set up a good three inches overnight, gray-white under the yard light. I bring the axe down, and it bites and sends a crack running clear across the surface. I chop until the hole opens black and the heifers can drink, then clear the chunks out with my glove.

Behind me, Wade's on the bale bed forking hay off in flakes, and the heifers crowd up to it with their breath smoking in the cold.

"Wind's laying down by noon," Wade says.

"Good."

His flashlight sweeps the pen and stops on a red baldy near the fence. He holds it there. "Red baldy's bagging up. Two weeks, maybe less."

Her udder's filling early, tight at the back.

"Watch her."

“Intend to."

He does, but it's my brand on her, so I say it anyway.

I set the axe against the tank and pull the calving book out of my coat. It's a little spiral notebook with the corners gone soft, every heifer in it in pencil with her date beside her. I run my thumb down the list.

The first eight are due February third through the tenth, and February fifth lands right in the middle.

That stretch means checks every two hours through the night, then feeding at daylight. Wade can't cover both ends by himself. If one of those heifers gets into trouble at three in the morning, waiting until sunup is too late.

I put the book back inside my coat. I'm not going anywhere the first week of February. The heifers already decided that for me.

Wade finishes the bale and climbs down. He pulls out in the pickup with one headlight burning dimmer than the other. I stay against the rail.

It takes until after supper for the stove to get the kitchen warm enough that I can push my sleeves up. I said I'd send her money. That was the one thing I got out on the phone before the rest of it went sideways. Money is a thing a man can do from anywhere.

I take the checkbook out of the drawer and open it flat on the table.

I write the date first, January twenty-third, and then her name on the top line, taking my time with the letters. I write the five hundred in numbers and spell it out underneath, five hundred and no/100, the way you're supposed to.