Page 16 of Thunder

Flat.

Not a question, not a greeting.

My name in her mouth like something she has to hold at arm's length.

"Hey." I keep it professional, because professional is the only door still open between us. "I've got a first-calf heifer off her feed, snotty, coughing, gone dull. Number sixty-eight out of the group I bred in the spring. I think it's gone respiratory, and I didn't want to wait on it."

A pause.

In the background I can hear her truck, the road noise, a country station turned low. "Temp?"

"Haven't got a good one on her yet. She won't let me close, and I didn't want to stress her worse before somebody who knows more than me put eyes on her."

Another pause, longer, and I know what's happening in it.

I know she's sitting at a stop sign somewhere on this ranch weighing the same thing I weighed.

A sick animal against the fact that coming out here means being near me, and I hate that I've become a cost my sister has to reckon with before she'll drive across her own ranch.

"Put her in the chute," Grace says finally. "Not the pen, the chute, so I can get a temp and listen to her without either of us getting kicked. I'm twenty minutes out. I'm finishing at the Dawson place first."

"Thank you⁠—"

She's already hung up.

I stand there with the dead phone against my ear a second longer than I need to, and I tell myself the sting in my eyes is the dust, the heat, and the worry over the heifer.

Not the fact that my sister used to end every call with love you, see you at supper, and now she ends them by not saying anything at all.

Then I put the phone in my back pocket and I go get Number 68 into the chute, because that part I can do.

I've got the heifer settled and the head gate set and a bucket of water she won't touch when I hear the side-by-side coming, and it's coming from the wrong direction to be Grace.

It's coming from the back of the property.

I don't turn around.

I've gotten good at not turning around.

But my whole body knows the sound of that specific engine because I've spent weeks training myself not to react to it.

A person can't train a pull that deep out of herself in a matter of weeks, no matter how hard she works at it.

"Miss Presley!"

Not Thunder.

His daughter, Raine.

She's off the side-by-side before it's all the way stopped, braids flying, boots hitting the dirt at a dead run.

She's got a barn kitten clamped under one arm in a way the kitten doesn’t love, and she's the best thing I've seen in weeks.

My heart cracks right down the middle at the sight of her.

"Hey, wild thing."

I crouch down to catch her because she's plainly about to launch, and she does, one-armed, the kitten squashed between us and yowling.