Page 8 of Thunder

I did that once already, at a wedding, in a green dress, and it ruined me clear through the night.

I run my twelve head.

I get through them clean, every tag checked against my book, every one of them where she ought to be in the breeding rotation.

By the time I'm done the sun's fully up, my shirt's stuck to my back, and I've almost got my breathing right again.

This is the part I know how to do.

I graduated for this.

Four years at A&M and a degree in animal science and a head full of expected progeny differences and calving-ease numbers and the whole long science of making a herd better, one careful pairing at a time.

I came home to build a program out of it—real seedstock, registered genetics, a Sharp Shooter Ranch brand that means something at a sale barn.

Pops handed me the reins on it before everything broke.

Before I became a stranger in my own family.

The work didn't break.

That's what I hold onto.

The cattle didn't stop needing me the day Dakota stopped speaking to me.

The heifers didn't take Grace's side.

The bull I picked out at Navasota doesn't know or care that my sisters look through me now like I'm made of the same lie our whole family's built on, and there's a comfort in that so deep I'd be ashamed to say it out loud.

I gather my book, my flag, and my now cold coffee.

Up the hill, the main house sits with its porch full of morning light.

I know if I walked up there right now, Mom would make me a plate and Pops would ask about the heifers and it would look, to anybody driving past, like a family.

I don't go up.

I haven't taken a meal at that house since the hospital.

I take them at my own cabin now—Hadley's old place, the Cross cabin, close to the barns and wired for the office I've been building—and I eat them alone with the radio on.

I tell myself it's because I'm busy, because the program's just getting started, because I've got so much work.

It's not because of the work.

It's because a family supper means sitting at a table with sisters who won't look at me and a father whose secret cost me both of them.

I'd rather eat a sandwich standing up at my own counter than perform being fine for people who broke my heart.

There's a particular loneliness to being frozen out by people you live two hundred yards from.

It'd almost be easier if they'd sent me away—if I'd had to leave the ranch, start over somewhere, grieve them clean.

Instead I see them every day.

I see Grace's truck at the vet barn and Dakota's horses in the arena and Mom's car up at the salon.

Every one of them is a door that used to be open and isn't anymore, and I have to drive past all of them to get to my own front step.