He nods once and leaves the tack room.
I hear his boots on the barn aisle, steady and even, walking away like nothing happened.
Because to him, nothing did.
He saw an injury. He treated it. End of story.
I stand in the tack room and press my bandaged hand against my chest and feel my heart hammering against it and know—with the same certainty I know how to hold a rasp, how to read a hoof, how to position myself under a thousand-pound animal—that I am in very, very serious trouble.
I don’t breathe normally until I’m off Sharp Shooter Ranch.
Earl has a bad day.
I come home from the ranch to find him on the couch instead of the porch, which is the first sign.
Earl Dawson doesn’t lie down during daylight hours.
He considers it a personal failing on par with leaving a gate open or letting a horse stand in wet mud.
The man once worked a twelve-hour branding day with a broken rib because “the cows don’t care about my bones.”
The chemo hit him hard this round.
He’s gray-skinned and hollow-eyed and when he coughs it sounds like something inside him is coming loose.
I make broth because it’s the only thing he’ll keep down and sit with him while he sleeps.
I even check his temperature twice, call the oncologist’s after-hours line, and get a nurse who tells me everything I already know: this is normal, this is the treatment working, this is what fighting cancer looks like from the inside.
This is what it looks like.
A seventy-year-old man who could once throw a calf over his shoulder, curled under a quilt on a couch, too weak to walk to the bathroom without help.
I help him, hold his arm and don’t say anything about it because Earl has his pride and his pride is the scaffolding that’s keeping what’s left of him upright.
He doesn’t need my commentary. He needs my hands. Steady, capable, there.
By evening he’s better.
Not good—better.
Sitting up, taking sips of broth, watching the news with the sound turned low.
I’m in the kitchen cleaning up when I hear the truck.
Heavy diesel.
Not mine.
I look out the window and see a silver F-350 pulling up the drive—new, immaculate, the kind of truck that costs more than most people’s houses and has never hauled anything dirtier than a golf bag.
I know the truck. I saw it last week.
Wade Lockhart.
I dry my hands on a dish towel and walk outside before he reaches the porch.
I want to meet him in the yard, not at the door.
