He shook his head, smiling. “You’re not invisible here, Carter. Trust me.”
There was something in his tone, a quiet authority that shut down my usual impulse to argue. I glanced at his belly, at the way his hand cupped the underside instinctively.
“How are you?” I asked. “You look—well, you look ready to pop.”
He grinned, teeth showing for the first time. “Rawley says it’s like waiting for a landmine. Any day now, but you never know which one.”
I winced. “He would say that.”
He leaned back on his heels, dusting his hands against his thighs. “You’re almost halfway, right?”
“Eighteen weeks, give or take. I keep expecting it to go sideways.”
“It might,” he said, then shrugged. “But you’ve got help. Macon’s the best, and Rawley won’t let anything happen to you. Or me. Or even these miscreants.” He nodded at the goats, who were trying to untie my shoelaces in a coordinated attack.
I stared at him, trying to find a trace of judgement or pity, but there was none. Just an acceptance so complete it made my eyes sting.
“I don’t know how to do any of this,” I said, lower now.
Jojo’s hand covered mine, warm and dry. “None of us do. The first time I held a goat kid, I thought I’d drop it. Rawley had to show me three times how to bottle-feed.” He laughed at himself, then squeezed my fingers. “You’re already better than you think.”
We stood there for a long minute, letting the sounds of the barn fill the space—the scrabble of hooves on concrete, the soft hum of the lights, the slow, rhythmic breathing of two men trying to build something out of nothing.
I felt the knot in my shoulders loosen, just a little.
“You ever think about starting your own herd?” Jojo asked, as if he’d just remembered it.
I blinked. “Like… breeding goats?”
He nodded. “You light up when you’re with them. I think you’d be good at it.”
The idea was so absurd I laughed, but then I saw that he was serious. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“We could teach you,” he said, and it wasn’t an empty offer.
I considered it, for the first time. Me, running a bunch of stubborn animals, getting dirt under my nails, learning to repairfences and birth kids and maybe, eventually, not need a manual to do it right. The thought made my chest expand, just a little.
“Maybe,” I said. “Someday.”
He grinned, then stood with a groan. “I need coffee before this baby decides to make an exit. You coming inside?”
I looked at the goats, still orbiting me, then at the light through the barn windows, gold and sharp and full of possibility.
“In a minute,” I said, and meant it.
Jojo left, footsteps soft as always, and I watched him go. The barn door closed with a click, and I was alone again, but it didn’t feel empty.
For the first time, I let myself imagine the future: not the one my father mapped out, but one built on hay bales and sunrises, on the laughter of people who didn’t need me to be anything but myself.
I knelt in the straw, scooped up a baby goat, and held it to my chest. It snuffled at my chin, warm and alive.
“Yeah,” I whispered to it. “Maybe.”
* * * *
It was the smell that drew me—clean and sharp, somewhere between Christmas and the inside of an old guitar case. Macon’s shop wasn’t much to look at from the outside, just a converted tractor shed with windows clouded by a decade of nicotine and sawdust.
But inside, it was a different country: a universe of tools, each in its assigned place, pegboard bristling with chisels and screwdrivers, the workbench an altar lined with shavings as thin as onion skin.
