Robbie watches Lance go in a daze. He’s still holding the calf’s empty bottle; he’s unzipped his coat, but hasn’t shrugged out of it. His boots are still on. And the door is closing behind Lance, whose departure feels like a strange inversion of an ambush. A sudden abandonment instead of a sudden setting-upon.
He’s just unstuck his feet to follow him, without being precisely sure what he’s going to do—stalk after him up the driveway? Plead to know if he’s coming back?—when his cell rings.
It’s his neighbor, Ed. Robbie answers, if only because Ed’s been so impossible to get on the phone. He’ll make it quick.
“Robert Chase!”
“Hi, Ed, listen, could I call you back...?” Robbie steps toward the door, dropping the bottle on the bench. He can see Lance through the glass, walking fast through the snow, both swallowed by the bulk of Johnny’s coat and yet almost too tall for it; it just reaches his waist. Robbie can see the tail of the corduroy shirt clearly, extending past the fall of the coat.
Ed, typically, doesn’t seem to hear Robbie suggest that now might not be the best time, and barrels on. “Oh, I’ll just take up a few minutes of your time, I swear. Sorry I missed your calls. When can I come by and gather up those strays? The weather isn’t ideal, but I’d like to do it while I still have my nephew here to help.”
Robbie freezes with his hand on the door handle. What’s he going to do? Sprint down the stairs after Lance, calling after him? What entitles him to stop Lance if Lance wants to go? He thinks of their few, shared days together, and even though, the day before, he was sure they’d brought to life something vivid, real, and lasting, now he has to wonder if he imagined it. It was dreamlike, those passionate, languorous hours with Lance, learning Lance’s body and feeling like he was rediscovering his own. Standing here alone feels much more like reality as Robbie knows it, the figure of Lance getting smaller and smaller with each step he takes, hurrying away from the place where Robbie kissed him and touched him, and came for him and made him come.
Robbie’s hand falls to his side. He leans forward until his forehead is pressed against the glass panel in the door. The wind must be picking up; he sees Lance duck his head like he’s bracing against a gust. He’s almost to the first bend in the driveway, which will take him out of sight.
“Sure, come whenever,” Robbie tells Ed, resignedly. “I’ll be here.” As always.
“Great, great. We’ll go ahead and head your way now, before there’s any more snow down.”
Robbie says that’s fine, ends the call, and sets down the calf’s bottle on the counter to wash it. And it isn’t until that moment that it sinks in that, when Ed comes for the cows, he’ll be taking the calf, too.
Robbie doesn’t think about Sienna if he can help it. The reasons for that are myriad, and hard for him to unpack. In some ways, the bad memories are interspersed with just as many that are good, which makes it all the harder to reflect on. The complicated things always are.
He loved that horse, and he likes remembering how smart she was, how quickly she caught on to new things, and how bright her eyes got when she saw him coming. That’s rare in a horse. Even a good, fair horseman who can convince most horses to enjoy their work will still find that, to the horse, it’s work nonetheless. The ones who are sincerely glad to see you coming with their bridle are rare. Poco is one of them; Sienna was another.
And in the months after those terrible days of trying and failing to save Sienna’s life, he and his brothers were working together in the best way. He remembers the mustangs coming off the truck with a clarity with which he can recall few other moments in his life. How the ground shook as they came spilling out of the dark rectangle at the back of the trailer, and how the grass parted for them, like the land itself had been waiting for them.
Maybe it was inevitable; maybe if tragedy hadn’t struck with Sienna, something else would have pushed the Chases and Riverside over a new horizon. But he isn’t sure; the timing was all so critical. It had to happen before Danny went to school, before Johnny went on adventures; it took the three of them, together, to make it happen. So, maybe without Sienna—without her terrible sacrifice—it wouldn’t have happened at all.
It’s easier, somehow, to believe that. He likes to think that something good came out of her suffering…something that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
But maybe he’s just taught himself to look for every silver lining, even if he has to make them up. It’s a habit born from necessity.
He can’t see Lance now. What if his ride doesn’t show up? Or what if it does, and Robbie misses a chance to know who he’s with? That last thought makes him feel a moment’s shame, but knowing he has no right to every detail of Lance’s life doesn’t lessen the desire. He pushes open the door, rushes down the stairs, and jogs down the driveway toward the road.
He imagines Lance waiting alone. He had his hood lowered; the glare off the snow made his dark curls silver-tipped, like they’d been touched by the same frost as the bare branches of the trees. Robbie isn’t a runner, but he speeds up anyway, until his breath comes short.
When the point where the driveway meets the road comes into view, there’s no tall, boyish young man shivering on the roadside. Just fresh tire tracks carved through the thin layer of snow that accumulated since the last pass by the snowplow, and still winter air.
Robbie pushes his hands down into his coat pockets and starts back the way he just came. He ran out without stopping for gloves. Still, he doesn’t hurry as he treks back to the house. Sometimes, he likes the cold; it can feel cleansing. Or like a justified punishment.
He’s always liked to take a long ride when he has decisions to make, but with Ed heading over now, he doesn’t have time for that. So, he turns over the questions he has to solve sooner rather than later, starting with the most pressing one. The calf in the barn—the one he and Lance brought back from the brink of a snowy death together. He tries to recall the value of the average orphaned calf, and imagines it doesn’t much exceed the cost of the vet call that Megan made—not that she’ll bill him for that, no matter how many times he asks. Robbie can make Ed an offer he won’t refuse, and that’ll be that.
Or will it? Ed is a strange guy. Maybe he’ll decide he isn’t selling. There’s only a very small chance of that, and yet, the possibility makes Robbie uneasy. He’s still mulling it over when Ed’s familiar pickup appears down the driveway, towing a small, rusty stock trailer, its gates rattling like gunfire as it lurches over the banked snow on the curve. The noise flushes the horses out of the run-in shed, even Dusty. They dance around excitedly, tails flagged high, snorting out visible clouds of steam. Despite his anxiousness, Robbie finds himself smiling at their antics. Riverside has become a pretty sleepy place if an unfamiliar trailer can rile them up this much. Back when he was training, they were used to people—and other horses—coming and going almost daily. They’d barely raise their heads at the sight of a rig. Now, it’s a novelty.
Ed’s nephew is with him, Robbie sees as they climb out of the truck. Or at least, Robbie assumes that’s who he’s seeing. They’re a study in contrasts, to a comical degree. Ed has a body type Robbie’s dad would have described as a “beanpole”—taller than Robbie, arms and legs like sticks, his coveralls so loose that they’re practically flapping. He’s wearing a camo hat with earflaps.
His nephew is short, soft, with pink cheeks that don’t look like they’ve ever needed a razor. He looks like he just stepped out of a catalogue for the Gap, dressed in a wool coat, flannel-lined jeans with the cuffs turned up to flash their red plaid lining, and a navy hat with a red pom that matches the scarf expertly swathed around his neck.
Robbie is so surprised, he finds himself staring. But he shakes himself out of it when he realizes that not only has the kid noticed, but he’s starting to blush.
“Robert!” Ed calls in his booming voice, which is completely incongruous with his scrawny frame. “Where should I back in?”
Robbie considers mentioning the calf, and then, instead, he says, “Right there,” and points to the gates to the pen the cows are observing from, almost as intently as the horses.
Ed nods and hops back into the driver’s seat of the pickup, pulls through the circle drive, and then starts to back toward the gate. Only, the angle is all wrong, Robbie can see at once, and the trailer veers left—whereas the gate is to the right—so Ed puts the truck back in drive and pulls forward to try again.
What is Robbie going to do with a calf? He’s not running a petting zoo. He should probably just tell Ed everything that Megan told him, hand him the bottle, and wish him luck. He’ll probably do fine.
But Robbie thinks of the special attention and monitoring it takes to care for any fragile animal, and worry spikes in his chest at the thought of sending her off with his careless neighbor.
This time, Ed’s efforts to back the trailer result in it going right, but so fast and so sharply that Ed nearly jack-knifes the rig before pulling forward again. Robbie imagines, based on the way the pickup’s rear tires spin in the snow for a moment before getting traction, that Ed is getting frustrated and therefore a little aggressive with the gas pedal.
So, Robbie will just offer to buy the calf. Maybe he’ll overpay, but he has all the money from the house’s insurance sitting in an account, untouched. Even spending a grand would barely make a dent.
Finally, Ed has gotten himself backed up to the gate. His nephew waves him on until he’s six or eight inches from the fence-line, and then Ed hops out and walks back to open the trailer gates.
The cows are pretty docile and seem to know the score. They back up into a corner of the old shed and act like they’re going to be stubborn, but there’s nowhere for them to go and they’ve been hauled around enough to know that the three humans can out-maneuver them and do intend for them to go into the waiting trailer. So, after circling the pen, dodging Ed and his nephew’s half-hearted efforts at herding them, and twice being turned back by Robbie where he stands close to the gate, the cow with the white band around her belly gives them a long, assessing look, then turns and trots toward the waiting trailer of her own volition.
Robbie takes a deep breath. There’s not always an obvious difference between a pregnant cow and one who’s just calved. He can tell a difference in the belted cow himself, but is it only because he’s studying her so closely?
He watches Ed, who’s watching the cows as they hop on the trailer. The belted cow jumps in first, her two companions behind her as close as shadows. Robbie holds his breath, but Ed just closes the trailer door behind them and latches it.
Some of the tension in Robbie’s chest eases. Ed obviously doesn’t realize anything is materially different about the belted cow that left his property and the one he’s taking back home. But, now, Robbie has nothing to distract himself from the fact that Ed is taking three animals off the ranch, animals Robbie doesn’t trust him to care for. He thinks of the belted cow’s stubbornness, the bewildered expression she had when he pried her newborn calf from the ice, and how many times she kicked him when he got her squeezed behind a gate and milked her. Still, he’d rather she stayed in the pen where he could take care of her, and now, instead, she’s back at the mercy of an untrustworthy man.
Ed turns to him, and Robbie half-expects him to ask what he owes Robbie for the hay and the trouble of having the cattle, but then again, he isn’t surprised at all when Ed just grins and salutes.
“Thanks, neighbor. Hope I can return the favor some time.”
He turns to head toward the cab of the truck. Robbie knows this is the moment he should mention the calf and make his offer to buy. There’s no way Ed will refuse to sell him an animal he doesn’t even know exists at this moment. And even if he’d been anxiously awaiting the calf’s birth, all livestock has a price.
But sometimes people are irrational. Sometimes people tell you no, just out of spite. Robbie can’t bring himself to interrupt the silence as Ed and his nephew open and close the truck doors and pull away. Ed waves out the window. Robbie waves back.
The horses lost interest in the truck and trailer when they realized it didn’t have any horses as passengers. But while the others have gone back into the shed, Poco is standing at the gate, gazing hopefully at Robbie.
Robbie looks at him and blinks. “I’m a thief,” he confesses, abashed.
Poco flicks his tail; his right ear swivels back, then forward again.
“I don’t know. Don’t you think that’s worth feeling bad about?”
Quickly losing interest in human moral dilemmas, Poco turns and makes his way toward the hay bale, leaving Robbie alone, staring down his driveway for the second time in an hour, wondering how well he really knows himself.