Part 2
“I don’t know yet,” Vera said. She took out her phone and called Walt before she could turn that answer into something more comfortable. “Cancel the livestock pickup. I’ll pay you for coming out.”
Beth waited while she finished the call. Then she took back the agreement and folded it along its worn creases. “The closing stays where it is.”
“Yes.”
“And their expenses come out of your share.”
Vera agreed to that, too. There wouldn’t be much left after the estate’s bills and the money Beth had advanced for their father’s care. She had been counting on her share for an apartment deposit and a little breathing room while she found work.
Beth pulled a chair away from the kitchen table. They sat down with the livestock paperwork and crossed the pair off the property to be sold separately. By the time they finished, Vera had committed herself to two animals, four weeks of borrowed shelter, and an expense she hadn’t yet calculated.
She moved into the farmhouse’s downstairs bedroom that afternoon. Beth left clean sheets on the bed and a frozen casserole in the kitchen, then drove home without promising to return the next day. Vera watched her taillights disappear and went to read the feeding sheet again.
At dusk, Otis put his nose into the empty feed bucket and sneezed hard enough to startle himself. Clover turned her head, then went back to eating. Vera laughed once, alone in the doorway, and reached for the bucket before he could tip it into the bedding.
She slept through her first alarm and woke furious with herself. The cow and calf were fine. She checked them, called the clinic with a question about the written plan, and set a second alarm on the phone.
Jess arrived with a delivery at ten. She carried the feed receipt into the milk room and found Vera making a list on the back of an old service invoice. Beneath FEED, VET, FENCE, and SOMEWHERE, the page was blank.
“You fix restaurant equipment?” Jess asked, looking at the invoice heading.
“Used to.”
“You fixed that gate yesterday.”
“Gates don’t have circuit boards.”
“Neither does Edith Shaw’s freezer door. The catch doesn’t hold, and she’s got a chair shoved against it. She asked at the store if we knew anybody.”
Vera looked at the number Jess had already written on the receipt. She’d stopped taking service calls when David needed someone at home all day. After he died, she kept intending to turn the phone back on, but each month made the first call harder.
Jess lifted the empty bucket from the sink. “Want me to say you’re unavailable?”
“No.” Vera reached for her phone. “Let me talk to her.”
Edith lived eleven miles west of Hollow Creek, beyond a bend where the road narrowed between limestone and a steep pasture. Vera drove the old service truck with the atlas still on the passenger seat. At the first stop sign, she caught herself waiting for David to tell her whether they had time for coffee.
Edith met her at the kitchen door. There were apples on every available surface and a brown armchair braced against the upright freezer in the back room. She showed Vera a dishpan of ice she’d chipped from the edge that morning.
“I don’t need a new freezer,” Edith said. “I need this one to close.”
“Let me look before I agree with you.”
Vera checked the hinges and the door alignment, then examined the worn latch. Edith held a flashlight without shining it into her eyes. When Vera asked for a towel, she handed over an old one instead of apologizing for the laundry.
The replacement catch in Vera’s parts drawer fit the existing mounting holes. She had bought two for a bakery job the summer before David got sick, used one, and forgotten the other. She checked the door seal after the repair, then made Edith open and close it herself.
Edith tried it three times. On the third, she leaned her shoulder against the door as if she distrusted an easy result. It stayed shut when she stepped away.
Vera wrote the bill at the kitchen table. She charged for the part, the service call, and the time she’d worked. When Edith pushed a twenty-dollar bill toward her separately, Vera started to refuse it.
“That isn’t a tip. You’re twenty short on the total.”
Vera checked her addition. Edith waited with her hands folded while she corrected the bill, and neither of them made a joke about it. Vera took the money and tucked it into the zippered pocket where she kept receipts.
Outside, she noticed a low livestock shelter beside a fenced field. The gate was chained back, and weeds stood around an empty trough. A stack of old sheep hurdles leaned against the wall beneath the eaves.
“You keeping anything out there?” she asked.
“Grass,” Edith said. “Some mice. What have you acquired?”
Vera told her about Clover and Otis, leaving out the sound in the sorting alley and the hay above the cow’s eye. Edith asked about their condition, their feed, and the date the farm had to be empty. She didn’t offer the field.
“You’ll need hay bought before everybody remembers winter,” she said. “Start there.”
On the way home, Vera stopped at Voss Equipment to price a used stock tank. Alan Voss came out of the warehouse wiping his hands on a rag. He looked at the truck before he looked at her, then walked slowly along its service body.
“Beth said you might sell this.”
“She shouldn’t have.”
“She said might.” He stopped by the driver’s door. “I offered six thousand. Same offer, if the engine and the paperwork are as she described. You keep your tools.”
Vera could picture the amount in her checking account with an ease that made her ashamed. David had rebuilt the shelving himself, making the lowest drawer shallow because she’d complained about kneeling for small parts. A streak of gray primer still showed beneath the door where he’d meant to finish the paint.
“I’m using it,” she said.
Alan nodded and went to find the stock tank. He didn’t tell her the offer would disappear, or ask what David would have wanted. That left her with nobody to be angry at.
Back at the farm, she found three messages on the service phone. Jess had given her number to Edith, and Edith had passed it on. There was a bakery mixer, a dishwasher that stopped partway through a cycle, and a broken warming-cabinet hinge at a church kitchen.
Vera returned the first call from the barn doorway while Clover ate. She returned the second sitting on the farmhouse steps. On the third, the caller asked whether she could come tomorrow, and Vera said yes before she had looked at the other addresses.
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