Page 12 of Kid Gloves

Kowalski raises his hand. Kowalski has started raising his hand. "What if they cry?"

"Kowalski, when you learned to drive stick, did your daddy get in the passenger seat and go it's okay, baby, you don't have to?"

"He said if I stalled his truck on the highway I could walk home."

"Your daddy understood drive development." The yard laughs. She doesn't run a class so much as a weather system. "Boring for balks, party for tries. Go."

I watch my people — men I trained, on protocols I wrote — get visibly better in forty minutes, and the strange thing is what it does to me, which is nothing like territory and everything like relief, an off-loading I haven't felt since I don't track when. Cash drifts up to the rail somewhere in the middle of it and watches beside me in his particular silence, arms folded, eyes following her hands.

"She teaches like Dad used to," he says. Six words. From Cash, a filibuster.

"Better," I say.

He considers. Nods once. Drifts off toward the kennels with the ghost of something in his face I decide not to name, because if I start naming what's in my brothers' faces, someone will return the favor.

At the fence, the shy female — the washout, the flag I moved — walks the plank bridge on the third try, tail up, and Delaney doesn't cheer. She looks away, supremely bored, exactly as advertised, and the pup struts like she invented lumber, and I write the day up that night in language Whitaker's office will never appreciate: subject methodology exceeds documented best practices. Recommend permanent⁠—

I stop typing there. Interim, the file says. The file and I are not currently speaking.

By the weekend the whiteboard reaches double digits, and I've stopped pretending it's punitive.

Incident #9—Subject: BRISKET. Located inside Kennel Building A. All kennel doors remained secured. Method: under investigation. K9s Atlas and Dolly declined to react, suggesting prior familiarization. Troubling.

Incident #10—Subject: GOATS (eight, various). Coordinated perimeter test of pasture three, 0400 hrs. Two breaches. Corrective action: hot wire amperage increased. Note: subject Brisket observed the operation from porch. Command element?

Incident #11—Subject: D. BOONE. Reorganized kennel A drainage without work order. Drainage now functions. No corrective action available.

Incident #11a—Amendment. Subject also repaired the wash-bay door that has stuck since 2023. Maintenance was notified of the repair. Maintenance asked how. Subject's methods remain proprietary (observed: baling wire, one [1] hair tie).

Kowalski's mother, per Jake, has begun printing the board for her Bible-study group, who are reportedly praying for Brisket's reform. I asked whether they were praying for the facility instead. Jake said the group had discussed it and considered the facility a lost cause.

I catch her reading the board Friday evening, arms crossed, in my jacket. She laughs at eleven (one loud unguarded bark of a laugh she'd never issue if she knew I could hear it) and then she takes the marker off the ledge, hesitates one second, and writes.

Incident #12—Subject: W. MERCER. Left porch light on for enemy livestock. Soft. Corrective action: none. Do not correct.

She caps the marker and goes, calling Tank, who does not come, and I stand at the window with the day's reports unread in my hand, doing the math I've been refusing to do all week.

The math: she's been here six days. The kennel drains. Kowalski can hold a dog. The washout pup killed a tarp this morning and asked for another one. My brothers are twenty dollars deep in my personal life, my mother is planning a Sunday I have not agreed to, there's livestock on my porch with squatter's rights, and at 0600 tomorrow I will find some reason to be at the bite yard fence, because that's where she works the shy female, and watching her do it has become the best six minutes of my operational day.

The jacket. The word. Now the marker.

I un-cap it and stand at the board, and this is where I'd write the finding if I wrote findings I couldn't defend: subject is not a disruption to this facility. Subject is the missing system. Fire took her building and she rebuilt in a horse trailer by lunch. I lost one career nine years ago and built three hundred acres of fence around the crater. One of us is the compliance risk, and it has never once been the woman narrating courage to a six-week-old dog in the dark before dawn.

I write: She is a compliance risk.

I look at it. The building is quiet. Tank watches me from the doorway with his chin on his paws, unconvinced.

I erase it and write the true version underneath where number thirteen should go, and it sits there in the empty office looking back at me, she is not a complication, and I get one full second of feeling honest before I hear it: the specific creak of the hallway board by the coffee maker.

Jake, mug in hand, reading over my shoulder.

"Not one word," I say, erasing it.

"Nope." He toasts me with the mug, backing out of the doorway, grinning like Christmas came early and brought cash. "Telling Wanda."

Chapter 5

Delaney