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At one in the afternoon, I park in a gateway to let the horse blow and go to sleep sitting up with the engine running. It's eleven minutes, and I know that because I check.

Wade watches me climb down stiff at dark. "You're going to fall off something."

"Not planning on it."

"Nobody plans on it." He gets in his own truck and drives home.

Our calls slowly start to slip. I forget the charger twice, and both times the phone dies out in the field. When our schedules do line up, they happen later, and then my calls start going to voicemail because she’s long asleep by the time I’m able to call.

By the second week, we’re texting more than talking.

Both down. She rolled halfway over and scared herself.

She sent that at ten forty her time. I read it at eleven fifty-two my time.

Wish I'd seen it.

Nothing has gone wrong. No cattle are dead, nothing major has broken, and Wade and Eli show up every morning. The babies are gaining, and Mackie isn't pushing me. But somehow, I’m still out of hours.

One night I stand in the kitchen at twenty till eleven with the phone in my hand and work out that it's twenty till one there. I put it back in my pocket.

The house is quiet. The stove ticking as it cools is the only sound. I shove a piping hot mouthful of ramen in standing up.

I get the calving book off the shelf by the door and bring it to the table under the one light I have burning. The bowl burns my fingers, and I drop the spoon down a little too quickly.

The front of the calving book is the records, tag numbers, dates, and which heifers pulled hard. The back pages are where I keep the money. I turn there and take the pencil out of my breast pocket.

I start with what a ten-day trip east costs now, not what it cost in June. If I leave for ten days during fall work, Eli covers full time. He's been on part days at a hundred and seventy. Ten of them is seventeen hundred. The cheapest window I can find on a ticket runs about three-ten. The rental for ten days is another two ninety after the fees they don't show you until the end.

I look at what comes out. I don't write anything beside it, multiplying it a second time to be sure I didn't slip a decimal.

That's twenty-seven thousand six hundred a year. I turn the page and work the other side.

In June I had the calves going five ninety at weaning. Wade weighed a sample in August and sent me the real ones, and they're going five fifty, five fifty-five, because the summer ran dry through July. Two hundred forty head. I run it at what the video sale has been bringing, and it comes to less than June said, a good bit less.

Off that comes the hay. The forty acres that never got cut cost me ten thousand five hundred to buy back in round bales off a man two valleys over. Then Eli's summer wages, already paid and already gone, stacking on future ones.

Then Dutch's first land payment, due November first. That number doesn't move because the calves came in light. If I clear enough above it, he gets his cut on top.

I run it again with the price a nickel lower, the way it might go. The third time I try it with the calves at five forty-five, because I would rather be wrong low than wrong high.

Every version of it lands in the same place. There is not room in that check to pay a man to be me for ten days once a month, and buy a ticket on top of it.

The fall calendar is written in the margin from back in July, and I put my finger on it.

Weaning starts on the fourteenth. Once I split those calves off their mothers, I feed twice a day, and I don't sleep. And I don't go anywhere, because a fresh-weaned calf finds every hole in a fence and every way there is to get sick. Shipping is the twenty-eighth.

There's no clean stretch left anywhere, not the fourteenth through the twenty-fourth and not anywhere I slide them.

I close the calving book and put the pencil behind my ear. Ten days was true when I said it. Now I'm going to have to tell her it's going to be longer.

Dutch calls the barn phone on Thursday around noon and tells me to come by after my afternoon chores. He never calls. In four years, he has driven over or waited for me at a fence line, and he has not once picked up a telephone to get me to his side.

Around four, I finish and take Mercy, one of my younger horses, out. I ride over without a saddle. It feels good to have her back under me.

There's a small paper sack on the counter with my name on it when I walk in. He's got two beers on the table with the caps already off, and he nudges one toward the empty chair. I sit and take a gulp.

"Tank running right now?"