"Yeah."
"Two months shoveling pig shit." The thin woman shakes her head slowly, almost admiringly, like the judge has earned her respect. "That a Porsche you crashed?"
"Yes."
"How much does a car like that cost?"
I don't answer.
"Fifty grand? A hundred?" She tilts her head. "More?"
"I don't really want to?—"
"What do you do for a living?"
"I work in— I'm in—" I stop. The honest answer is not much. I manage my social media accounts and I'm technically on the board of a few charities my mother signed me up for, but I can't even name all of them. "I'm between things."
She laughs. "Between things. Must be nice being between things in a Porsche." She looks around the room. "Anyone else here between things?"
Nobody answers, and the thin woman turns back to me.
"Yeah," she says. "That's what I thought."
4
MAGGIE
The plywood is holding up. I nailed it over the hole in the pig barn with whatever I had lying around. It looks terrible but it keeps coyotes out at night and that's all it needs to do until the restitution check clears, which could be any day now.
I'm standing at the gate of the pig enclosure with a bucket of feed in each hand when a truck pulls up. That'll be Luis. He volunteers a few days a week.
"Morning," he calls out, climbing down from the cab. Luis is seventy-something, retired, built like a fridge. He used to run cattle about five miles north before he sold his farm and his wife told him to get a hobby. He found me. Or rather, he found my mother, back when she was still running this place.
"Morning, Luis." I look down. "Oh, morning, Dolly." Dolly is already at the gate waiting for me. She presses her snout against my leg while I undo the latch and I reach down and scratch behind her ear. She follows me to the trough and stays close.
The pigs are scattered across the yard in the morning sun. Barbara is lying on her side in a patch of dirt she's excavated, and Gerald is standing in the shade with Mabel, the two of themside by side like old men on a park bench who don't need to talk anymore. Little Pete, who hasn't been little since 2019, is rooting along the fence line.
The sound of feed hitting the trough brings them in. One second the yard looks peaceful and the next fourteen pigs are converging from every direction. Barbara heaves herself out of her crater and Gerald abandons his dignity. Little Pete tries to climb into the trough headfirst.
"Pete. Out."
Pete ignores me.
I lean on the fence and watch them eat. Fourteen pigs who came from places where they'd never seen sunlight or felt dirt under their feet. And now look at them. They're happy. That's the thing that gets me every single time.
Luis joins me. "Seal's gone on the goat trough," he says. "I can patch it for now but it needs replacing."
"I know." I sigh. "I've already added it to the list."
The list is a notebook on my kitchen counter, currently with forty-seven items, ranked by urgency. The trough seal is around number thirty-two. Number one is rebuilding the pig barn wall properly. Numbers two through five are all things that were working fine before a socialite in a Porsche made them my problem.
"When does she get here?"
"Tomorrow."
He nods. "Go easy on her."
I frown. "Go easy on her? She drove through my fence and my barn." I hang the buckets on the hook by the feed store. "Dolly was on the highway, Luis. In the dark. If a truck had come?—"
