Page 50 of The Goat Next Door

It looks old, it looks broken, and it is going to cost me a ridiculous amount of money to make it presentable. But as I look at the crooked window casing I tried to fix, I don’t feel that sharp, panicked urge to run back to Manhattan.

12

Brooks

“Man secretly in love with his disaster of a neighbor.

See also: idiot.”

— Crossword clue

The radiator on the tractor is clogged with thirty years of dried chaff and birds’ nests, and the heat rising off the engine block is boiling the grease straight off my knuckles.

I’m leaning into the engine bay, my socket wrench balanced against the manifold, when the high, melodic chime of a car horn echoes across the pasture.

Sophie instantly drops her small plastic sandbox shovel and screams, her purple glittery boots skidding across the gravel as she bolts toward the driveway.

“Mommy! Mommy’s here!”

I drop the wrench onto the rag, wiping my hands on my jeans as I straighten up.

A shiny, clean white Nissan Rogue is idling by the mailbox, and before the dust can even settle, the driver’s door flies open.

Lauren steps out, her arms already wide open, a bright, silver bangle bracelet clinking against her wrist.

She’s wearing a long, flowy orange skirt that looks like it belongs in a market in New Mexico, her dark hair cropped short around her chin, and she’s grinning so hard her eyes are just tiny crinkles.

“Oh, look at my bug!” Lauren shrieks, catching Sophie mid-air and spinning her in a wide, dizzying circle that has both of them laughing until they’re breathless. “You got so big! Did you grow three inches? Brooks, did you feed her a growing solution?”

“Just regular pancakes, Lo,” I say, a genuine smile breaking through as I walk over to the car.

Lauren sets Sophie down, smoothing out the kid’s pigtails with quick, maternal hands, and then turns her energy toward me. She steps right into my space and throws her arms around my neck.

We were twenty-six when we had Sophie, two kids in a small town who didn’t know the first thing about a mortgage or a baseline fire grid. It took us exactly seven months of bickering over grocery bills and screaming at the television to realize we made incredible friends but a terrible couple.

When she packed her canvas bags to go to the design institute in Chicago, there wasn’t an argument. There was just a mutual understanding that she belonged in the world and I belonged in the dirt.

“Look at you,” Lauren says, stepping back and swatting my shoulder. “You’ve got grease on your nose. You look like a mechanic in a calendar. Are you eating real food or are you just surviving on Marge’s secondary sugar production?”

“I had a salad on Tuesday,” I say, reaching into the backseat of the Rogue to haul out her massive, paint-splattered duffel bag.

“A salad. Incredible. Progress is being made,” she laughs as she reaches for Sophie’s hand. “So, Soph, show me the garden. Show me everything before your father ropes me into changing the oil on a municipal vehicle.”

We spend the next two hours doing the loop.

Lauren is exactly the same as she was when she left—full of high-octane creative energy, talking about a gallery opening she just did in Santa Fe, her fingers constantly moving as if she’s trying to sketch the clouds while she talks.

Sophie is practically vibrating, hanging onto her every word, showing her every lizard hole and interesting rock between our property line and the old creek ridge.

It’s around three o’clock when we hit the upper pasture fence, the sun high and yellow over the valley.

“Brooks, what is that sound?” Lauren asks. She tilts her head, her earrings jingling in the breeze. “Is someone… singing?”

I listen for a second. The sound is faint, but it’s definitely coming from the Gilded Goat property across the line.

It’s a high, clear, slightly off-key rendition of an old song, accompanied by the regular, rhythmic clack-clack-clack of a plastic wheel turning.

I shield my eyes against the sun, looking across the pasture.