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“How’d I do?” I asked, watching in pride as the little tag bounced in the calf’s ear. I handed the tagging gun back to Reece.
“Just like a pro. Next time, though,” he grinned, “the tag does go the other direction.”
“What? Oh!” I said, looking back down at the calf. Unlike all the other animals around us, the number wasn’t actually visible because I had indeed tagged her backwards.
I rolled my eyes to the sky, but Reece just laughed and patted me on the back. “It was an excellent first tag. Come on, I’ll show you how to enter the new calf in the system.”
And so I learned.
Chapter Nine
A week later, I was driving the ATV by myself with confidence. Tagging newborn calves still freaked me out, but at least I was putting tags on the right direction.
A couple of days ago, one of the cows who’d given birth had mastitis—I wouldn’t have even known what to call it. But her teats were gigantic and swollen. So much so the calf—#9—wasn’t able to nurse, and we’d had to take him back into the barn on the back of the ATV.
Nine would have to be a bottle calf. Which was good news for Bessie, because now she had a buddy to play with. They were herd animals, so that was important. But it had been touch and go for a bit making sure Nine would make it. So Reece had stayed on with me another couple days. But they’d gone perfectly smoothly, so today I was on my own. We were now on calf #16 and since calving season was now really cooking, I was busier than ever.
Each day it felt like I gained yet another skill that would have felt completely foreign and alien to the woman I had been only a month ago.
There wasn’t a lot of time to stop and think about it, but at the end of another long day, I slowed the ATV to a stop at the top of a hill as the sun dropped behind the western horizon. There’d been another two calves born today and I’d handled tagging and logging them all on my own, no problems.
I’d been completely terrified when I’d seen the mothers in labor earlier. My first instinct had been to drive the ATV back to home base to grab Reece from whatever project he and Jeremiah were working on, and drag him back out to… do what? Watch me tag the animal? Protect me from the mother cow?
I kept my cool and everything went fine. Reece was right, mostly the births went along fine without any help from us.
It felt great to finally be going it alone because I hated keeping Reece from his other duties when I was getting paid to do a job. It made me anxious to think I wasn’t carrying my weight. So I’d been cooking and doing anything else I could think of to make up for it while still getting trained.
This meant I dropped into bed absolutely exhausted each night.
But keeping busy meant there wasn’t time to think, and that was a plus. I was a big fan of not thinking.
It was harder than I’d imagined. For example, it had been pretty hard not to think about Reece when I was constantly cemented up against him as we drove the ATV all over the thousands of acres of ranch together day in and day out.
We hadn’t talked once about that night since after the first morning when I’d said it was a one-off.
He’d been completely professional. He’d been kind, patient, and joked with me like he did with Ruth around the kitchen table.
But just because we didn’t talk about that night didn’t mean I didn’t think about it. And trying not to think about something was the absolutely surest way to think about something, nonstop. That I had discovered this past week.
So I’d expected today to be better.
And it was.
Sort of.
Without Reece here to distract me, his big warm body and those strong thighs of his wrapped around mine from behind… see, there I went again.
I huffed out a laugh at myself as I watched the sunset. God, there was nothing like these Texas sunsets.
I swallowed hard at the same time. Because there was still an instinctive dread that struck every time the sun started to go down. Borne of a decade’s worth of fear that the sun going down meant that he’d be home soon.
My fingers gripped the handlebars tightly and I closed my eyes, feeling the wind on my face and breathing in the fresh air that was so foreign from the stale, Lysol scent of my house back in California. I was in a pasture with cattle, so there was a slight scent of manure in the air.
Jeff would hate it here.
He hated camping and anything outdoorsy other than jogging. Even that he preferred to do indoors at the 24-hour gym two blocks down.
I looked down at myself—my mud-covered boots, flannel shirt, blue jeans with a rip in the knees. None of it was mine. Ruth had lent me every single item of clothes I was wearing, down to the underwear and socks. I wouldn’t have any money to buy my own clothes until my first paycheck.
