Page 53

“What number?”

“Whichever one you believe in.”

Tuck wrote down one hundred and ninety. His handwriting was large and slanted and he pressed hard enough that I could see the pencil marks from ten feet away. He was strong as a fresh fence post, and had the spatial reasoning of a man navigating by smell.

I liked him for it. That was the problem.

The stock tank sat in the dead center of my rectangle like a dare. Eight feet across, steel, full of water from the spring runoff that had never drained because the field had a low spot exactly where I didn’t need one. The tank weighed enough empty to require the loader. Full, it was a small above-ground pool with opinions.

The loader was in hay.

Wyatt had been clear about that. The loader was in hay. The loader would remain in hay. The loader would visit hay and hay-adjacent activities until the cutting was finished, and any suggestion that it might take a field trip to move a stock tank for a rodeo that didn’t yet have a producer, a certificate, or a single confirmed entry would be met with the kind of silence that made livestock nervous.

I could siphon it.

I could siphon four hundred gallons of creek water into the grass and then drag the empty tank with the truck, except the truck was also in hay, and the field would turn into a mud pit, and then I’d have a mud pit with a tank in the middle instead of an arena with a water feature.

I crouched at the tank’s rim and looked across my would-be arena. From ground level, the rectangle looked better. The flags marked clean lines. The creek ran beyond the east fence, cottonwoods catching morning light. The mountains stood white and sure behind everything, the way they always did, indifferent to my surveying.

God, I needed some help with this.

I’d called Ty again. Ty had called me back with a broker in Bozeman, and the broker had come back with a name.

Priya Nair. A producer in Denver.

We’d talked Monday night. She’d asked fourteen questions, answered none, and told me she couldn’t say a word about insurability or permitting until she’d stood on the ground herself. Then she’d sent a list of everything I was supposed to send her. I’d managed four items on it.

She hadn’t signed anything. She was due Wednesday.

Until then I had hope and a tape measure that lied.

Tuck walked toward me, boots wet from the dew, pencil behind his ear.

“Should we measure the other side again?”

“Give me a minute.”

“Sure.” He stood there, waiting with the patience of a dog who’d been told to sit but hadn’t been told on what.

I pulled my phone. Scrolled through contacts I’d burned through in a week. Men I’d ridden with, women I’d drank with, names that had meant something on the circuit and meant less now that I needed something back.

I put the phone away.

“Get the other end of the tape,” I said. “Let’s go again.”

Tuck went.

We stretched the tape across the field one more time, and the number came up different, and I wrote it down without knowing which one was true, and the tank sat in the middle of everything I was trying to build, full of water I couldn’t move, waiting for a machine I couldn’t have.

***

Two days later, the gravel told me before the truck did.

I was on my knees at the northwest flag, trying to pound it straight with a rock because the hammer was in the barn and the barn was a hundred yards and a decision I wasn’t willing to make. The sound of tires on ranch gravel carried differently than wind or cattle — a specific crunch, rhythmic and growing, the sound of somebody else’s schedule arriving at mine.

I stood and looked south down the drive.

Dust hung in the morning air above the road. A vehicle moved through it, dark and low, not a truck. Not anything that belonged on a ranch drive in June.