Thirty-eight years old,I told myself.Act like it.
I put the truck back in drive.
The main house came into view as we rounded the cedar break—the limestone rambling low and long, the wraparound porch, the live oaks spreading their canopy over everything, the whole thing sitting in the afternoon light like it had grown there instead of being built. I watched her take it in through the windshield. She didn't say anything. Just looked.
Then she saw the cottage.
And Dolly.
Dolly was on the porch swing. Planted on it the way she planted herself on everything she'd decided was hers, which was everything.
I pulled up and killed the engine.
Millie got out and stood in the gravel drive and turned in a slow circle—the main house, the barn, the stable, the pastures going out to the limestone bluffs in the distance—and I stood by the truck and watched her do it and tried to see it through her eyes. Twenty-four hundred acres of Hill Country that I'd been so deep inside for so long I'd stopped seeing it the way you see something the first time.
She saw it that way.
Her face was—I wasn't going to think about her face.
She turned toward the cottage and stopped.
Dolly looked at her.
Millie looked at Dolly.
A beat.
"That's Dolly," I said.
"Yeah," she said. "I figured."
"She does this."
"Does what."
"The swing." I put my hands in my pockets. "It's hers now. We've had words about it."
"How did that go."
"About as well as any conversation with Dolly goes."
She was quiet for a moment, just looking at this ridiculous goat sitting on a porch swing like a retired schoolteacher, and then she started laughing—that full unrestrained laugh.
Behind the cottage the rest of the herd materialized one by one from wherever they'd been—Loretta first, then Tammy, then Willie trotting over from the water trough, then Merle and Waylon ambling in from the far side of the pasture. George Jones descended from his boulder.
Millie looked at all of them looking at her.
"Hi," she said, to the herd generally.
Loretta headbutted her shin gently.
"That means she likes you," I said.
Millie smiled. "How do I know you're not making that up?"
"You don't."
She laughed again and looked down at Loretta as I turned to the trailer purely to look at something other than her. Sawyer had already unlatched it and was pulling out the first box and I needed to be doing something other than standing in the driveway watching Millie Calloway make friends with my mother's goats.
