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"He's a good boy. He doesn't ask for much." She lowers her voice. "He just watches for you."

I sit there with the phone against my ear. Soon is the same word that never once put headlights under that carport, and I gave it to her the way it was given to me. It costs me nothing to say. That's the trouble with it.

"Here's Manny," she says, easy, done with me. "Manny, honey, take this."

The phone knocks against something while it changes hands.

"Carson." Manny keeps it low. "She's having a real good day."

"Yeah."

“Don’t work too hard, now, okay.”

“I won’t."

The line goes dead.

I set the phone in the cup holder. The envelope's on the seat where it's been the whole call, with her name on the front in my own pencil. I pick it up and kill the engine.

The cold hits the second I open the door. My boots crunch on the packed snow at the base of the post. The mailbox has stood crooked since I bought the place, heaved out of true by four winters of frost, and I've never straightened it because it holds mail fine.

Dutch's land is on one side of the receipt in my shirt pocket, and her street is on the other.

I drop the mailbox door and set the envelope inside, flat, with her name up. Money gets there whether I'm on a plane or in a calving pen at three in the morning, and the calving pen is where I'll be.

I push the door shut until it catches on the latch. Then I raise the flag.

It comes up stiff with ice crusted in the hinge, and I have to work it the last inch with my thumb before it stands red against the gray. The mail carrier will stop for it around ten tomorrow.

I stand there with my hand on the box, the metal cold enough to ache through my glove. Out past the fence the heifers are bedded down dark against the snow, and the red baldy's somewhere in that bunch, bagging up early.

I get back in the truck, turn her over, and head up the lane to feed.

At ten that night, I'm on the kitchen floor in front of the stove with the calving book open on my knee. I can't stop looking at the fifth of February.

Her appointment is at eleven, and she said not to worry about being there, but I can't shake the thought of her going alone.

I call Wade before I can talk myself out of it. He picks up on the first ring. "Heifer?"

"No. I need the fourth through the sixth of February. Do you think you can hold the fort down?"

The line stays quiet long enough that I check the screen to make sure the call didn't drop.

"The first eight are due right on top of that," he says.

“Yeah. Probably best I don’t go."

"I'll get Dutch on the night checks. He's been bored since Thanksgiving." Another pause. "I got it.”

“No. Forget I asked.”

He hangs up. Then I call the man in Douglas who's been after my spare saddle for two years and tell him he can have it for what he offered in October.

NINE

Mackie

What child is this, who, laid to rest / On Mary's lap is sleeping?