Page 7 of Kid Gloves

Through the window, the contractor is teaching my newest handler how to hold a puppy so it learns hands mean safety, and the handler (a kid who's been terrified of getting it wrong for three weeks) is grinning like she knighted him. She talks the whole time. To Kowalski, to the puppy, to the puppy about Kowalski. I can't hear a word through the glass and I still know the shape of it, the way her hands draw the sentences, the way the kid straightens like she's issued him a spine.

Three weeks I've spent telling Kowalski he's doing fine. She fixed him in one morning by making him furniture.

Behind them Tank tracks her every move, and behind Tank, in pasture three, the goats have gathered at the fence in formation, patient as auditors. I count them twice. Eight. The ninth is on my porch. There is a report to be written about how she keeps doing it, and no one to accept it but the board.

Thirty yards from my kitchen window. Temporary. Pending reconstruction. A compliance decision, whatever my brother and his twenty dollars have to say about it.

Her truck's still got soot on the tailgate, and she bounces it up my driveway at a speed I'd cite anyone else for, and something in my chest files a report I decline to read.

"It's a compliance decision," I tell Tank, when he pushes in the office door at 1730 and sits on my boot with all his considerable opinion.

Tank yawns.

Nobody believes me. Including the dog.

Chapter 3

Delaney

The guest house has a rainfall showerhead.

I hate it here.

I want that understood in the official record, wherever Wade Mercer keeps it: I stood under that showerhead for twenty-five minutes tonight, washing two days of smoke out of my hair with water pressure that can only be described as emotionally manipulative, and I hated every second.

"This changes nothing," I tell the showerhead.

The showerhead rains down luxury like it's paid to.

Here's the inventory of my new residence, which I am absolutely not getting attached to. One bedroom with a bed that doesn't require strategy to sleep on. A kitchen where all four burners work — all four, at the same time, like some kind of Vegas act. Central air that comes on with a whisper instead of the death rattle of the window unit I've been nursing since the second Bush administration. And attached through the breezeway, the alleged reason I'm here: a whelping room with rubber floors, a drainage system, temperature control, and puppy-height viewing windows, all of it so much better than what burned down two nights ago that I had to go stand in the yard for a minute when I first saw it, because crying in Wade Mercer's compliance-mandated guest house was not on the whiteboard.

The puppies have no such complicated feelings. The puppies took one lap of the whelping room and decided they'd died and gone to a facility with better funding. Crooked Ear (fine, Biscuit, I've stopped fighting it, the name won the way water wins) claimed the warm corner by the vent within ninety seconds and now defends it like a mortgage.

At least somebody in this family is adjusting.

I unpack the important box last, the one that rode in the cab, and set Gran's things on the windowsill: the blue enamel coffee pot, the photo of her at the fair in 1987 holding somebody else's blue-ribbon rooster like she'd raised it, the horseshoe from her first mare. The windowsill faces north, toward home. Toward the black ribcage sitting in the middle of my property like a bad tooth.

"Temporary," I tell the photo. Gran looks back, mid-laugh, unconvinced. She always could smell a rationalization at forty yards.

The rules speech takes place the next morning on Wade's porch, which requires stepping over Brisket, who has already established a forward operating base there despite the double-strand hot wire that was supposed to make pasture three a maximum-security facility. I have questions about how she's doing it. So does the hot wire.

Wade opens the door before I knock, because of course he does, probably some sensor, probably a memo. He's in a gray T-shirt with a coffee mug that says nothing on it. Even his mug is terse.

"Rules," I announce.

"Good morning."

"I have rules. You're going to hear them." I hold up a finger. "One. The whelping room is mine. You don't rearrange it, you don't optimize it, you don't laminate anything in it. If I come in and find a labeled bin, I will fill it with goat."

"Noted."

"Two. Your handlers ask me before they touch my puppies. Imprinting means every interaction counts, and Kowalski holds a puppy like it's a live grenade⁠—"

"That's why he holds everything like that."

"—and three." Two fingers up, then three. I've lost track of my own hand. "You and I are neighbors and colleagues. That's it. I know how this looks — town's already got opinions, your brother is running a literal book on it — so let's be professionals. Fence line's still there, even if we can't see it. Agreed?"

Wade takes a sip of coffee. Somewhere behind me Gary crows at a quarter to seven, which is, I check, actually almost correct, and the shock of it nearly buckles my knees.