Page 95 of Cattle Stop

Cheryl pushes out the chair next to her and says, “Come have a cup of tea.”

Inside Cooper’s chest is too watery and weak. He’d probably sit down and just let it all spill out, and really, he wants to crawl into bed and pull the covers up. Practice forgetting Whit entirely, like he’s made any damn progress to begin with. “I should probably check on the herd.”

Cheryl pats the chair. “The herd’s fine.”

“That one doe—I’m thinking, actually, if I built her a shelter? Even just a lean-to against the barn so she’ll have some space outside away from the rest of the herd but out of the rain?” Stop, he tells himself, but the words flow out just the same. More work to bury himself in, not that it’d take more than a week to get up. “There’s some lumber in the back. I’d be happy to give it a try, see if it convinces her to stay put.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk?” Kathy asks.

“You know, I think she’s out right now actually.” Cooper backs out the door.

He ducks down into his sweatshirt and bends his head against the rain, though his shoulders are still soaked by the time he reaches the door to his cabin. Inside, he dumps his soggy cereal into the trash.

A goat bleats through the pounding of rain. He closes his eyes. Inhales deeply. When he looks again, the damn doe prances by. She stops, turns, and trots back again, tail held high as she passes past his window.

Put your boots on, he tells himself. Coat, boots, flashlight. Do it, he thinks as he just keeps standing there. He chose this. It’s what he wanted. With a sigh, he slowly gets dressed again and pushes out into the rain.

Chapter Seventeen

Cooper fluffs a flake of hay and sets it neatly in the feeder. A scoop of grain, a trough of fresh water, and that’s that. He gathers up his hammer, the last handful of nails he hadn’t needed, and sweeps his arm in a grand gesture to the doe.

She sniffs at the doorway. Icy rain trickles down the collar of his sweatshirt. She pokes her head inside.

“A palace for one,” he says.

She struts inside, looks around, and dashes back out into the rain, soaking the toes of his boots with a splash as she goes.

“Of fucking course.”

Dramatic, he’d once called goats, and then used the word for them a hundred times more. He blinks as rain drips down his face. He’d told Whit that. Years ago, when Whit had suggested adding a herd of dairy goats so Drew could make chèvre. Cooper shakes his head to whip the rain out of his eyes.

The doe snorts and skips off toward the corner of her pen, her head cocked and her ears pricked with an attitude he’s always been sure no other animal can muster. A cat, maybe. Socks had that sort of prance back in the day, but even he never managed that level of sass.

Enough, he tells himself.

Lunch. He needs lunch. Afterward, he’ll finish cleaning up the last of the scraps of lumber and feed out the rest of the herd’s hay. And then he can change out of his wet clothes and enjoy an evening of dry socks and thawed fingers before he trudges out tomorrow morning to start all over again.

It’s probably sunny at Drew’s. Crisp but warm in the sun, with autumn’s colorful riot of foliage. The barnyard smelling like woodsmoke and the cider Drew makes every year.

Enough. Enough, enough, enough, he thinks as he goes into his cabin.

“Cooper?” someone calls from outside as he tugs off his jacket.

“Yeah?” he shouts back.

He can’t see more than a few feet through the window with rain pinging against the glass and a bank of fog sitting beyond it, so he eases his door open an inch, rain splattering over his sopping wet boots, and calls out, “Cheryl?”

“Someone here for you!”

“Who?” Cooper shouts into the rain.

“Just down there, yep, follow that path,” Cheryl says and Cooper squints at the two figures, Cheryl’s familiar form and someone taller trailing her. “A friend of yours!”

Drew, he thinks, hope leaping in his chest.

But, no. Drew’s been on a plane maybe twice in his life, and he’s not one to drop in for a surprise, not with his herd of cows and the cheese that needs his attention. Probably just that guy from the co-op looking to buy some breeding does, or maybe the farmer down the road selling off some of the summer’s hay that Cooper has been trying to get a hold of.

Cooper takes his hat off and wipes a hand over his face, taking water and dirt with it. “Come in,” Cooper calls out and steps back to make room for them.