Page 4 of Runaway for the Grumpy Daddy

"It went fine this time." Wyatt's voice didn't rise. It never does; he just gets more exact, and the exactness lands harder than shouting ever could. "One bad night, Boone. One breech that doesn't come, one prolapse, one set of twins tangled up when the nearest vet is forty minutes out on somebody else's emergency — " and here his voice did something I'd been half listening for since Cash mentioned the office light. It tightened. Just a hair, just at the seam, like a strap cinched one hole too far. "We cannot afford losses this season. Not this one."

The words were nothing. Every rancher in the valley says them every spring. It was the not this one, and the way his eyes went to his coffee when he said it, and the light burning in Dad's old office at four in the morning. I filed all three of it together in the same drawer and shut it, for now. Wyatt would say what it was when he was ready or when he had no choice, and not one minute before, because he was Dad's son same as I am, and we all inherited the same broken part.

"So we're doing it," Cash said, delighted, already three days ahead of everyone as usual. "When do they land? Do we know anything? Give me something, Wy — young, old, do they play cards, can they cook—"

"Today," Wyatt said. "Around dusk. Doc's sending them straight out with their gear." He stood, carried his plate to the sink, meeting adjourned. "Somebody should see to the cabin. It's been shut up since fall."

"I'm on Ennis this morning," I said. "Supply run's due anyway." Iodine, calf bottles, another set of OB chains, the list already written in my head. "I'll do the cabin when I'm back."

Wyatt nodded once, and if he thought anything about me volunteering to ready a place for a stranger I'd just voted against, he had the grace to keep it behind his eyes. Cash didn't have any grace at all, and grinned at me over his coffee like he knew something, which he didn't, because there was nothing to know. The cabin needed doing. That was all. Somebody was coming to our place at dusk in the cold, and the work should be done right.

That was all.

***

The ranch drive runs half a mile from the yard to the county road, lined the whole way with fence posts, and every December of my life until this last one, those posts had carried lights.

Dad strung them himself. Every year, the whole half mile, alone — wouldn't take help, wouldn't explain, just hauled the boxes down from the barn loft the day after Thanksgiving and spent two days on a ladder in the wind with his hands going numb, and then for a month the drive up to Carrow Creek glowed like a runway, visible from the county road, visible from halfway to town on a clear night. A man who never said a soft word in his life, lighting up half a mile of Montana dark every winter for reasons he took with him. We used to joke about it when we were kids. We stopped joking and never started asking, which is the Calloway way of handling anything that matters.

This December the posts stood bare. The boxes were still in the loft. Wyatt had said something in November about whether we ought to, and Cash had said something back, and I hadn't said anything, and that was the whole conversation — three men deciding by silence that they couldn't face a ladder and a string of lights two months after the funeral. So the drive stayed dark, and the house stayed dark, and we skipped the Christmas Eve open-house too, the big one, the one the whole valley used to come to, because a party in that house without him in it was more than any of us could carry. Nobody in town said a word about it. Which is how you know they noticed.

I drove out past the bare posts with the radio off and turned north for Ennis.

Forty minutes of valley, and I knew every foot of it. Mid-March in the upper Madison doesn't look like spring — it looks like winter losing its grip, one finger at a time. The range still wore white to the shoulders, and snow held on hard in the shaded draws and along the north sides of every coulee, old and crusted and gray at the edges. But everywhere the sun could reach, the ground had gone to mud — the deep sucking gumbo that eats trucks whole this time of year — and down along the creek bottoms, if you knew how to look, the first green was starting. It comes in low, spring does, out here. Starts at the water and climbs. The bottoms first, then the benches, then the foothills, and the peaks last of all, sometime in June, if they bother at all. You could watch the whole season arrive from the bottom up if you had the patience, and patience is the one thing I've never run short of.

I did the drive in silence. Silence is where I do my best living. Cash needs a radio and a running monologue and preferably an audience. Wyatt needs a plan. I need forty minutes of brown grass and white mountains and nobody expecting anything out of me, and by the time I hit the pavement outside Ennis, I was as close to easy as I get.

Ennis Feed & Supply smelled the way it always smells — grain dust and leather and rubber boots — and Petey saw me come through the door and started talking before it swung shut, the way he always does.

"Boone Calloway. Heard you boys started calving — Millers started Tuesday, lost a set of twins already, don't repeat that. You want the usual list, or is this a special occasion?" He was already moving down the counter, pulling my account. Petey's a small, quick man who's worked that counter twenty years and talks enough for both sides of every conversation that comes through the door, which is exactly why we get along. He fills the silence and doesn't need me to.

"List." I put it on the counter.

He read down it, narrating. "Iodine, seven percent — got the gallon jugs in Thursday. Calf bottles, nipples — take the amber ones, the clear ones split. OB chains — what happened to your chains?"

"Want a second set."

"Second set." He nodded like I'd said something wise. "Sign of a man expecting a hard spring. Everybody's saying it, snowpack like this. Doc Whitmore was in Monday, poor old boy looked wore down to the rims — you hear he took on help? Some tech out of Bozeman. About time, you ask me, he's been doing the work of three men since before my kids were born—"

I let him run while I paid and carried the first load out. It took three trips — the iodine, the boxes of bottles, a sack of milk replacer I added on because the heifer calf in pen three had a mother whose bag I didn't fully trust yet — and it was on the second trip, coming back up the center aisle past the vaccine coolers, that it happened.

A woman was standing at the end of the aisle with two kids, a boy and a girl, maybe six and eight. Town clothes, clean boots, a basket with birdseed and a dog toy in it — visiting family, most likely, doing a fun little errand at the country store. Bozeman, I'd have guessed, and I'd have been right; I heard her say it to Petey later, half-apologizing. She looked up and saw me coming.

I watched it happen, the way I've watched it happen for five years. The glance, then the fast second glance — up, and up, taking the whole height of me, the shoulders, the storm-colored coat, hands like shovels hanging at my sides. And then she reached out, quiet and casual and not casual at all, gathered both kids in against her legs, and stepped backward into the gap between the shelves to let me pass. Put herself between me and them while she did it.

Petey, at the register, winced. I saw him do it. He opened his mouth like he might say something to her — he's Boone, he's fine, buys calf bottles, I've known him since he was twelve — and then didn't, because what would it even sound like.

"Ma'am," I said, quiet, and touched my hat brim, and went on by with my boxes.

That was all. That was the entire event. She didn't know me from Adam — she was fifty miles from home and had never heard a word about the Rusty Spur or any of the rest of it. She just saw what she saw, and what she saw was a man built like something you get your children away from. I couldn't even hold it against her. If I passed me in a narrow aisle, and I had two small kids, I'd like to think I'd do the same. That's the miserable joke of it. She wasn't wrong to be careful. She was just wrong about which man she was being careful of, and there's no way in the world to tell her so, and I quit trying to tell anyone anything five years ago, back when I learned what the telling would cost — and who it would cost it to.

It's Tuesday, is what it is. It's every Tuesday. The story gets to every room ahead of me, and where the story hasn't gotten yet, my shoulders arrive first and write a rough draft.

I took my receipt off the counter. Petey rang me out talking twice as fast as usual, the way he does when he feels bad, telling me the amber nipples were in the second box and to tell Cash the new ropes were in, and I said "Appreciate it," which for me was warm, and he knew it was, and that was as much as either of us was going to say about the aisle.

Driving home, the sun came out over the range and lit the snow up hard, and the mud shone in the barrow pits, and down along the Madison the water was running higher than last week. Thaw coming. Somewhere behind me in Bozeman was a tech with good references, packing a truck to drive out to us by dusk, knowing nothing about the valley, nothing about the Calloways, nothing about me.

Two weeks, I figured. Two weeks, maybe less, before somebody in Silver Bend leaned across a counter and told them what I was. Might as well enjoy the quiet.