Maryann uses the hand not holding a pair of metal tongs to wave in her direction without turning around. “Pork chops and eggs,” she shouts, starting the process of carefully flipping the chops in the pan. “All scrambled. I don’t have it in me this mornin’ to take custom orders.”
Grace nods, happy for the simplicity. “You got it.”
When the food is done, Maryann starts pulling the serving platters down from the high shelves that line the kitchen walls, and Grace refills the sugar canisters and the powdered creamers for coffee.
“What’s the verdict today?” Maryann asks as she spoons ladles full of bouncy, pale yellow eggs onto a platter. “Think you’ll get back to King Breezy?”
Grace bites the inside of her cheek, watching a small mountain of sugar make its way to the top of the glass canister. She thinks about the stubborn colt who’d given her a run for her money earlier in the week, further soiling her name with her uncle. She doesn’t hate King Breezy for not cooperating—he’s smart and mean like his daddy, and she can’t fault him for that—but he certainly isn’t her favorite horse of the bunch right now. “Probably not. Too much other stuff to do.”
“Gonna be hard to break a horse you don’t spend any time with.” Maryann sighs. “Seems like a waste of all Hal’s teachings for that man to have you shovelin’ shit and toilin’ away in the fields.” She rarely refers to Bellamy by his name—he’s always some variation ofthat man,that fool, orthat rotten old bastard.Unlike Hal Hendricks, Braxton’s late horse trainer who took Grace under his wing when she was still a teenager. Maryann lovingly, frequently, and correctly recalls his name.
“Preachin’ to the choir,” Grace says.
Maryann clicks her teeth. “You’re young and spry, and far too smart to be at his beck and call. Hal would hate to see you still kickin’ around this place, wastin’ that talent.”
“He’d hate to see you still here, too,” Grace volleys back. Maryann has no retort for this except a slight quirk of her brow. With a rueful smile, Grace starts to take the full platters and sets them on the plastic folding table they use as a makeshift buffet. “It’s a job,” she says over her shoulder, “and Bellamy’s my family.”
Maryann barks a laugh. “Oh, honey. That sounds less true every time you say it.”
Grace says nothing, and Maryann doesn’t poke her any further, knowing from experience that it’s a futile effort. She shuts the kitchen window that looks out into the dining room and gives Grace a nod that signals her to ring the mealtime bell. As that familiar chime echoes through this place she calls home, Grace wonders when blood ties and a shoddy roof over her head will no longer be enough.
At the table, Grace and the other hands all shovel bites of eggs and pork chops and jelly-slathered toast into their mouths as though they haven’t eaten in days. They drink orange juice and coffee out of foam cups, and they talk shit. All the hands ever,everdo is talk shit.
Grace is minding her own business like she always does, chewing the meat off a pork chop for so long her jaw has started to ache, when Trey, a seasoned hand who loves to rag on her,leans forward from his place a few seats down. He pins her with an amused look that sets Grace immediately on the defensive. “What?” she barks through a half-full mouth.
Trey shakes his head. “She wasn’t listenin’. She never is.”
“ ’Course she wasn’t,” says Pritchet, the oldest of the group. He points his fork in her direction, pursing his lips. “She don’t like to get down in the mud with us pigs.”
Grace grumbles, looking back down at her plate. “Y’all are never talking about anything interesting anyway. Why should I try to keep up with your conversation?”
Trey huffs out a humorless laugh. “Well, sunflower,” he begins, and out of the corner of her eye, she can see a maniacal grin spread slowly onto his face. “I think what we were discussing isquiteinteresting. You see, we were talkin’ about girls and bulls. You ever ridden a bull, Gracie?”
Without looking up, Grace shakes her head. She tosses the gnawed bone from her pork chop down amid the scraps of toast on her plate. “Can’t say I have.”
Trey hums, and his fingertips begin to drum a quick beat on the table. “But you know what they say, right? About girls and bulls?”
“No,” Grace replies, picking up her chin to face him and whatever disgusting remark he’s going to make head-on. Eyes forward. “What do they say, Trey?”
Snickers and snorts sound across the table. Forrest, the resident crybaby, smirks and eggs Trey on with an elbow to his side.
Trey’s voice is low and menacing. “If a girl can ride a bull,” he says, sweeping his hand in her direction, “she can ride a cock.”
A cacophony of whooping and hooting erupts, and Grace watches all their faces as they laugh and nod and chime in withtheir own chauvinistic remarks. She tilts her head and stares at Trey with all the disgust in the world as she bites back, “I’ve seen the kind of equipment you’re working with, Trey.” Her eyebrow kinks as her eyes travel down his form. “Comparing that pinkie dick of yours to a bull may be the most delusional thing I’ve ever heard.”
The jeers and snorts and hums of laughter all end abruptly, like a radio switch being flipped off. The silence that cuts through the dining room in place of the racket is somehow even louder. A dark look blooms over Trey’s face as he stares at Grace, and she maintains eye contact with him, watching as his azure irises turn to ice. She tries to dig into them, to unearth something resembling humanity, but no matter how hard she looks, she finds absolutely nothing behind that cold, unforgiving blue. It’s written all over his features—she’s crossed a line.
The rest of the hands eventually return to their general unsavory conversation, but Trey’s glare doesn’t falter. As soon as her plate is clean, she rises and walks toward the giant plastic trash can near the front door.
“Bye, Gracie,” he calls in a chilling, singsongy voice. “We’ll see you later.”
Grace doesn’t turn around. She clenches her fists, takes a deep breath, and walks out. The sound of their raucous laughter follows her all the way back to the bunkhouse.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
The rest of the daylooks just like any other. Grace manages to unload a trailer full of hay, feed the slew of exotic animals Bellamy likes to collect and neglect, and mend a large gap in the southeast fence before any cattle can wander off. With howboiling hot it is, it’s nothing short of a miracle that she’s able to do it all before dinner, and by the time she lies down in her bunk that evening after an ice-cold shower, her eyelids are drooping.
Hours later, when her eyes shoot open, it isn’t the internal alarm that wakes her. It’s Bellamy, shaking her shoulder so hard she nearly bites her tongue. She sees his eyes first—wide and wild, blazing with a kind of anger she’s seen only a few times during her tenure at Braxton. When he speaks, his voice is low, unlike his usual barking croaks. “Don’t say a goddamn word,” he seethes. “Get out of bed, put on some clothes, and meet me at the southeast fence.”
