Page 22 of Cattle Stop

“You don’t want to leave, do you?” Cooper murmurs to a heifer. She arches her neck so he can scratch it, her tail flicking lazily in the spring sunshine. Fuck you, he thinks toward Whit as Whit softly closes the driver’s door. Cooper will fix this, thanks very fucking much.

He finds Drew washing his hands in the cheese room at the back of the barn, his shoulders bent and his head down.

“Hey,” Cooper calls from the doorway.

“You taking off already?”

“No, no, I—” Cooper scrunches up his nose. The words don’t even feel real. “Whit said, uh, the farm? That you’re not, maybe, going to keep it?”

Drew scrubs harder at his hands. “Whit said that?”

“It’s true?”

“What’s truer is that I told him to keep his damn mouth shut.” Drew turns off the water with a hard twist. “It’s just a thought.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“You just got here. I wasn’t going to dump this on you.”

“You could’ve called. I’ve got this newfangled thing called a cellular telephone, real fancy like.”

“You never work on farms that have service. And besides, it’s not a big deal.”

Cooper licks at his lips. Selling the farm is a hell of a big deal. Five generations it’s been, and if Drew ever settled down and had a family, it’d make six.

“You okay?” Cooper asks.

Drew waves toward the house. “Absolutely. What about the giant hole in my attic isn’t fine?”

“Drew…”

“You guys get the cows back all right?”

“Whit didn’t want you to know about that.”

“Kind of obvious when a dozen cows sprint by the window and then you and Whit chase after them.”

“Well, Whit did a shitty job on their fencing.”

“Whit’s done a lot to take on the farm so I can focus on the house and having some damn cheese to sell to a farmers’ market that now no longer exists.”

“Yeah.” Cooper scrapes his foot over the threshold, leaving a mat of manure and hay that he kicks away. “I—sorry. I do want to help with the gates. We went to Brad’s, he’s got some stuff that could be useful.” Cooper squints down the hall toward the rest of the barn. He can’t see them from here, but he can hear the cows shuffling through their pen and there, over the low murmur of the milk pump, Whit’s voice as he talks to one of them. “Drew, you can’t sell this place.”

Drew closes his eyes. “It’s not like I want to.”

“I can stay.” Cooper hears the words before he’s really thought them through. “At least for a bit, until the cows go out on pasture and the season’s underway, if it’d make a difference.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.”

“Coop, that’s, no. I can’t—I can’t even really pay you much, so it’s not a good—”

“Pay me what you can. The rest? Compensate me in cheese, my man, you know I’d do anything for you.” In it to win it, he thinks. What had Drew said to him? Never planning more than five minutes in advance? Well it’s not like this is the first time Cooper’s pivoted on a dime. “Plus, you know how much cheese I can eat when I set my mind to it, and that’s the one thing in this good world I ever want.”

Drew stares somewhere to the left of Cooper. “Don’t you have a job to be getting to? Oregon, right?”

“I only interviewed with them. I haven’t even heard back yet, but don’t tell Whit that, it’d make him too happy.”