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Always had been.
“Mia.” Chris, who’d been at the Rocky M almost as long as she had, walked over to where she stood. The dogs, Daisy and Bear, trotted behind the wiry cowboy. Daisy and Bear followed Chris everywhere. Everyone at the ranch joked that the dogs thought Chris was a lost calf.
Chris was brown from the sun and every year Mia thought he looked more and more like beef jerky. He was all sinew and grit, though his big blue eyes indicated a hidden softness.
“How are the mothers to be?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at the field of pregnant cows. Calving season was right around the corner.
“Fat and happy.” Chris tipped his hat off his forehead and sighed. “But we’re a week out,” he said. “Maybe less.”
“A week?” she asked. Perfect. More than perfect. The sooner those calves were on the ground, the sooner they could be sold and the sooner they’d be out of this mess. There was a light at the end of the tunnel.
She smiled at Chris.
He frowned at her.
Good old Chris. He could find a dark cloud on a sunny day.
“Any chance we can get some more hands?” he asked.
“No,” she said with a sigh. Not in less than a week.
“Old man screwed up good, didn’t he?”
She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. And she was trying, damn it, to hold on to her sunny day.
“Heard Jack was back. He’d be handy—”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. Even if the sprained knee and broken hand weren’t a problem, the man had barely left his room in five days. She heard him in the middle of the night, taking showers and roaming through the kitchen. She wasn’t sure if it was nightmares driving him from his bed, or pain.
And she told herself, every night, that she didn’t care. But every night it was a battle to stay in her bed. She’d given him enough of herself over the years—she had nothing left for him.
Chris spat into the dirt, the picture of a disgusted cowboy.
“If you’ve got something to say,” she said, “then just get it out.”
“It seems to me we’re carrying a lot of deadweight around here, Mia. And we can’t afford it.”
“You think I don’t know that?” she asked. She was stuck between a rock and cliff. The old man wasn’t taking his meds. Jack…hell, Jack was a ghost.
“I’ll ask Jeremiah,” she said.
Chris nodded after a second, the topic of Jack finished for the moment. “He’s a good man with the animals.”
She pulled on her gloves and grabbed Blue’s reins, happy to be able to solve one immediate problem. “Let’s move the heifers over to the pasture with the squeeze chute. And start feeding them at night. Maybe we can work these calves during the day for once. I’m sick of stumbling out of bed at midnight.”
“You and me both, boss,” Chris said with a laugh. He whistled and Chris’s horse, Beans, walked up like a big tame dog. Over the small rise, Billy and Tim appeared.
The four of them. Four of them and two dogs working maybe a hundred calves?
She could feel Chris’s anxiety and even the dogs deserted him, darting across the field toward Billy, who had a ham sandwich in his hands.
“We’ll be fine, Chris,” she said. “The boys are good. And next year we’ll be able to hire all the extra men we need.”
“You think?”
She smiled, feeling optimism she hadn’t felt in ages, despite the problems in the house. “I’ll hire one just to make you smile all day long.”
“Better make her pretty.”
Mia laughed, feeling the work roll away. Everything was going to be okay in the end. What was that old saying? If it’s not okay, it’s not the end?
That could be the motto of the Rocky M.
“I know you’re worried, Chris. But everything is going to work out.” She pulled herself up onto Blue, who sighed and twitched with pleasure. “You and I have both been here long enough to know that this ranch won’t let us down.”
The men in that house, not so much.
“I hope you’re right,” Chris sighed.
“Mia!” A woman’s voice yelled from the house and Mia turned to see Gloria on the porch, waving a white dishcloth. “We have a problem.”
Oh brother.
6
“He’s not here,” Gloria said, pushing her glasses up with the back of her wrist. Her hands were damp and slick, and Mia didn’t want to know if it was chicken guts or some kind of cleaning solution that made them wet. “Hasn’t been all day.”
They were looking at Walter’s threadbare recliner in the living room. It sat empty. No half-filled glass at its side. No walker.
No Walter.
A mystery for sure. But hardly one that should bring her in from the fields.
“Is he in bed?” Mia asked.
“Empty.” Gloria shook her head, her long, silver-streaked black hair swishing across the back of her purple sweatshirt. “And I’m no nurse. If he’s caught in the bathroom again, you go fish him out.”
