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They were my debts, after all.
As I climbed the whitewashed steps to the shop, I glanced in the big front windows painted with doodly, quirky scrolling and script spelling out the shop’s name and social media info along with the phrase, Easily distracted by cows. I rolled my eyes and pulled open the door to the sound of the little bell overhead.
It was true. She was distracted by cows and goats and flowers and puppies, and I’d used up a metric ton of energy pretending like I didn’t find it as goddamn adorable as it was annoying.
The shop was lit up by the slanting sun, the space bright and cheerful by design. She’d arranged everything on farmhouse tables and shelves in little vignettes, the front table the biggest and best. It was iron baskets stuffed with hay and fake eggs. Flannel and distressed tins. T-shirts featuring the farm and Farmgirl as well as some with funny sayings like Mother Heifer and the word Bad over a picture of a donkey. It smelled like apple pie, and I noted a few of Presley’s candles burning in an almost direct trail to a wall of soaps and lotions and candles.
In true Olivia fashion, she’d created a little nook off the side of the register where she’d painted black Holstein spots and the phrase from one of her T-shirts—Mother Heifer. The farm’s new logo, Instagram handle, and hashtags sat close enough to the phrase to be in the photo but at a size that it didn’t intrude. Even though the store was technically closed, a couple of women were taking pictures of each other in front of the wall with full-blown grins on their faces.
And there behind the register counter was Olivia, smiling at a customer with a handled brown paper shopping bag featuring the farm’s new logo in her hand.
Oftentimes, I found myself caught in moments such as this, a strange stretching of time where I saw every detail of her all at once. The light illuminating her wild copper hair from behind, blazing it like a halo. The darkness of her velvety brown eyes in contrast to the pale of her skin. The shape of her smile, the little half-circles at the corners. The curves that composed the line of her neck and shoulders, in full display by favor of the cut of her sundress.
That dress held my attention the longest, the gauzy white fabric made of light, the sunshine shading the blurred shadow of her body beneath. Nothing about it was suggestive—in fact, the dress itself held almost no form—but I couldn’t help noting the shape of her, as if I’d caught a whisper of a secret I wasn’t supposed to know.
“Hey, Jake,” Presley said from my elbow in a knowing tone that I didn’t like, simply for its suggestion that she’d heard what I’d been thinking.
I covered my surprise at her presence with, “You know you’re not getting paid for today, right?”
At that, she laughed. “Do you have any idea how much of my own stuff I peddled? Trust me—no payment is necessary. How’d it go out there today?”
“Sounds like it went well, but I dunno how much of it is everybody being excited about it and how much was actual profit.”
“There’s more to life than money,” she noted as we waited for Olivia to finish up.
I gave her a look. “Don’t act like you don’t know that any given farm is one bad season away from dire straits. We don’t do this for the money, but without money, we can’t do it.”
“There’s still more to it than—”
Before she could finish, three puppies and Priscilla charged out of the back corner and toward us, barking. Priscilla was the loudest.
Laughing, I crouched to greet the trio, who proceeded to climb over each other in an effort to lick my face. Before Priscilla reached me, Presley snatched her up.
“Ah, ah, ah—I don’t think Jake wants licks from you too.”
Priscilla donned a mighty frown, but within a second, it was gone—she seemed to remember someone else was within licking distance and went to town on her mother’s face.
“Blah!” Presley angled back enough that it broke contact.
Unhappy, Priscilla barked at her.
Presley offered me a sarcastic smile. “We’ve been playing puppy all day.”
“Sounds fun.” I scooped up the wriggly puppies and headed to the corner where their beds were. But every time I got one in, the other one ran off.
Four tries in, I sighed and gave up.
When I stood and turned, the customer was gone, and Olivia and Presley were shoulder to shoulder, watching me and whispering. Priscilla panted from her perch on Presley’s hip.
“What are you two whispering about?” I asked.
“Well,” Olivia started, “Presley agrees that we should make a calendar. Pretty sure we’d be millionaires.”
I gave her a look.
“Okay, at least thousandaires.” She smirked. “How’d it go out there?”
