Part 2
“Into the water line.” Cora kept one hand on the float guard. “The trench cost more than I expected.”
“How much more?”
“The whole job was fifty-eight hundred.”
Beth let the paper bag fall into her open palm. They had sold the spare tractor for sixty-four hundred dollars in May and agreed to split the proceeds. Cora had used almost all of it before Beth’s share left the account. Beth had been asking about the withdrawals since the June statement arrived; Cora had kept putting off bringing her the invoices.
“I was going to replace yours when the calves sold.”
“You said that money would be there in June.”
Cora looked across the pasture. She knew the color of every cow’s ear tag, which fence charger needed a battery, how long a belt would run once its edges started fraying. She had not asked Beth what happened when the roofer didn’t get his deposit.
“They hit rock,” she said. “The old pipe had split twice. We were carrying hoses all over this hill.”
“I know what a trench is, Cora.”
Beth’s voice stayed level. Cora remembered her sitting at their mother’s kitchen table years ago, working through a shortfall in the farm account on a grocery-store pad while Cora said they would figure it out. Beth had figured it out. Cora had remembered the evening afterward as one they had managed together.
“You could have told me,” Beth said. “Before I booked him. After you paid the trench bill. Any of those days.”
“I didn’t want you worrying.”
Beth looked toward the farmhouse, where Cora’s bedroom window stood open above a roof that still held. She folded the bag once, then again, and put it in her pocket.
“I’ve got the bed in the dining room,” she said. “You haven’t asked why I don’t invite you over.”
Cora had offered to look at the roof in April. Beth had said she needed a roofer, and Cora had taken that personally enough to stop offering. Now she imagined the narrow space beside Beth’s dining table, the floor lamp pulled close to a mattress, and wished her sister had raised her voice.
“I’ll get your money.”
“When?”
Cora pressed the float guard into its bracket. It didn’t need pressing. The trough had worked properly since the new line went in, a bright piece of galvanized metal standing beside the trees she had protected from so many other expenses.
Wade’s truck rolled slowly past the lane entrance. He stopped long enough to say he’d email the estimate that evening, then drove away without asking whether they had reached a decision. Dust drifted between them after the truck disappeared.
“Saturday,” Cora said. “Let me work something out by Saturday.”
Beth took out her phone and checked the screen. She was due back at the store before the afternoon delivery, and Cora knew the look she got when she was calculating how many places she could reasonably be.
“Noon,” Beth said. “Something we can actually do. Not another fall calf sale you’ve already spent.”
“And the trees?”
“I won’t sign anything before then.” Beth walked toward the gate. Cora followed, reaching automatically for the sagging end, but Beth had already lifted it clear of the stone.
After her sister left, Cora stood in the empty lane with a grease mark across the sandwich wrapper. The cows had gone quiet behind her. She had wanted Beth to look closely at this pasture, and now she had.
That evening Cora called the garage about overtime. There might be a couple of extra shifts before school started, her supervisor said, but he couldn’t promise either one yet. She thanked him and put the phone down without adding the money to anything.
On the kitchen counter lay the estimate from the man who delivered hay. Cora moved it away from a ring of spilled coffee. She had already begun feeding what she usually saved for later in the season, and the rested lower pasture could only stretch the supply.
When she first thinned the eight acres, she had imagined finishing them. There would be a season when the right amount of light reached the grass, the fences stayed where they belonged, and the project became ordinary farm work. Instead there were seedlings to protect, brush to cut back, and spots where the cattle needed to be kept out longer.
She could manage those adjustments. Admitting them to people who had called the place a park felt harder than doing them. At the feed store she said it was coming along; with Beth she had learned to say it was nearly done.
Glen Moss, the well contractor who checked the system when the line went in, had told her to keep watching the well through the dry months. Replacing pipe solved a pipe problem. She had nodded, filed his invoice, and continued watching everything she could reach with a wrench.
She found his number beside the refrigerator. Below it was Nell Avery’s, written on a receipt from the last time Nell had borrowed the cattle panels. Cora called neither of them that night.
At first light Friday, she checked the upper trough before opening the lane. Its water level was lower than it should have been. She watched the inlet, rubbed grit from the edge of the float, and waited until the small stream strengthened.
The cows were standing up around her, calves nosing along their mothers’ flanks. She let them take their time moving toward the lower pasture, where there was room to spread out beneath the trees. She would check the other trough, then call Glen before leaving for work.
Midge drank first. Cora stood on the far side, one boot braced against a root, and listened to the familiar gulp and pause. When Midge stepped away, a calf put its nose into the wet mark she had left on the rim.
The water settled below the float. Cora lifted the guard and freed the mechanism with two fingers. The float dropped against the side of the trough, and nothing came out.
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