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“Why?” I asked him, spreading pellets out with my own rake.
“She says it’s not normal for young people to be this worked without at least a little bit of mischief.”
This made me laugh because it sounded exactly like something Ellie would say.
“Well, what does everyone end up doing when she demands this?”
“We drive into Kalispell while the older hands watch the fields.”
I laughed to myself. “What do you all do for fun around here? Do you drive the strip? Visit the malt shop? Split an Eskimo Pie?” I said in my best impression of Kenickie.
“Nah, too much snow, and sometimes, if Rizzo has a couple of quarters.”
I glanced up at him in disbelief before I realized he was joking with me and he chuckled. “You’re an idiot.”
I smiled. “All right, so say I go with you into town?”
“There’s a little pub-like grill off Main that we like to frequent. It’s laid back and plays a few tunes. They’ve got a jukebox, sometimes the girls get up and dance on the peanut shell-covered floor.”
“Girls?” I asked, mockingly looking around me. “What girls?”
Cricket and Bridge were the only young women on this ranch. It was a wonder the guys there didn’t trip over themselves to get to them. It probably helped that they’d grown up with Cricket and that Bridge had her own personal bodyguard in the linebacker we all knew as Jonah.
“There’ll be girls,” he said quietly, almost fearfully, which made me want to burst out laughing. “They come from the nearby little towns. Also, Kalispell has enough of them to go ’round.”
o;Whoa. Who does those?”
“Pop Pop,” she said absently, searching through large cabinets.
“Cool.”
“It really is,” she said, briefly gracing me with that clever smile. “I help him with each one. I have since I was little. Well, as long as I wasn’t in school.”
“Get out.” I studied her. “Ever done one by yourself?”
“Never,” she admitted. “I’ve only done three, but Pop Pop was there talking me through it.”
“Still,” I said, more than impressed.
“Got it!” she said, pulling out a large bottle of something.
I edged near her. “What’s that?”
“Ceftiofur crystalline free acid. It’s a sterile suspension. I’m going to try it on a few of the cows in the barn. See if we get a positive reaction. Doc suspected pneumonia from the symptoms we told him over the phone.” She looked at me. “He’s out of town. It’s respiratory for sure, I’m just not sure it’s pneumococcal.”
She grabbed a few more vials and we trekked it out to the barn. She readied syringes and stuck the bovines with ease, rubbing out the muscles where she pricked them, and moving from cow to cow, like she played doctor every day, talking about nonsense all the while. She floored me.
“Done,” she said, disposing of the vials and the syringes.
“What now?” I asked.
“The boys have probably already mucked out the stalls. Let’s mount a few horses and check the fields for any more sickly calves or cows.”
I nodded, invigorated by her determination. I almost forgot about my insane dream. Almost.
Piper invading my dreams brought forth the memories of all my detestable sins—ending with Lola and the photographs and Las Vegas. They ran through my thoughts on a never-ending cycle and completely deflated me. I recognized a goodness in Cricket that appeased those haunting reflections and knew from then on, I would always want to be surrounded by her. Something in her staved them off, and I was determined to find out her secret.
We saddled up and rode out into the field nearest the ranch. It’d snowed over a foot throughout the night and Eugie was having trouble lifting his joints through the height, so I lifted him onto my saddle and he sat cradled in front of me. Cricket shook her head at me.
