"She likes you," Everett says.
"She looks like she's tolerating me for legal reasons."
"That’s how the whole farm feels about her.”
We both laugh and the chickens scatter.
Everett and I check on the rabbit after lunch.
She's in a large wooden crate in the corner of the barn, the flannel nest transferred from the cardboard box, a second piece of cloth added for warmth. She's sitting up, nose going, eyes bright. The splint looks exactly as it did except there's a small mark on the tape from where she must have scratched at it.
"She’s got energy. Means she's feeling better." He crouches down. Doesn't reach in. "Come here."
I crouch beside him. We're close and I'm very aware of his arm next to mine and the warmth he puts out and the smell of him, which is sun and soil and something underneath that I don't have a name for.
"Check the splint. Two fingers, press here and here. You're feeling for heat — if it's hot, there's infection."
He shows me once on his own hand, demonstrating the pressure, and then holds the rabbit still with one large handcupped around her body, so gentle it makes something ache behind my sternum, and I reach in and check the splint the way he showed me.
"No heat," I say.
"Good."
"She's so small." My voice comes out different than I intended it to. Quieter.
"She'll double in size before I release her."
I keep my fingers on the splint a second longer. His hand is right there, still curved around her, and our hands aren't quite touching and the barn is very quiet and I am suddenly, acutely aware that I have been coming to this farm two days in a row and I don't have a story for that anymore that's actually about the rabbit.
I straighten up first.
"When do you think she'll be ready?" I ask. Normal voice. Practical question.
"Two, three weeks." He straightens beside me. "Why?"
"Just wondering if I'll—" I stop.If I'll still be here, is what I was going to say. And I don't know the answer to that and the not-knowing feels different than when I arrived.
"Nothing," I say. "Never mind."
He doesn't push it. He just nods and takes the empty eyedropper to refill it and I stand in the barn with the rabbit and my own thoughts for a minute, looking at this tiny healing thing in her careful nest, wondering if,hoping, I will still be here when she’s released back into the wild.
four
Everett
Ismellthestormcoming.
The bees tell me first when they start moving differently, tighter circuits, heading back to the hives. Then the barometric shift, that particular weight in the air you learn to read after enough seasons. By two o'clock the sky to the west is the colour of an angry bruise and the light has gone flat and strange.
Sloane is in the bean rows. She doesn't notice.
"Storm's coming," I call out.
She straightens up and looks at the sky like she's only now remembering there is one. "Oh." A pause. "Big?"
"Big enough."
She looks at the mountains. The leading edge is moving in fast, dark and banked, the kind of system that means business. "I should go before it…?"
