Page 1 of Kid Gloves

Chapter 1

Delaney

Okay. New plan.

The old plan was sleep. The old plan was eight uninterrupted hours, a Saturday with no vet appointments, and pancakes if I felt fancy. The old plan did not involve standing in my yard at two in the morning in one boot, watching orange light roll out of my kennel barn like it pays rent there.

"Fire," I tell Brisket, because someone should say it out loud and the goat is closest. "The barn is on fire."

Brisket looks at the barn. Looks at me. Chews.

Great talk.

Then the smell reaches me — smoke and hot tin and something underneath it that my brain files away for later because right now there are nine puppies in that barn, and every single thought in my head goes quiet except one.

Get them out.

The side door is the near one and I'm through it before I can develop anything as useful as fear. Inside is heat and noise, smoke stacked along the rafters like dirty wool, and beneath all of it, the sound that's going to live in my chest for the rest of my life: nine Malinois puppies, six weeks old, screaming their tiny federal heads off. Mostly weaned, thank God — their dam went home to the breeder co-op Tuesday, spared this — but six weeks is six weeks.

"I know," I call out, dropping to a crouch where the air still counts as air. "I hear you. Everybody's mad. Complaint department opens at nine."

The whelping pen is twelve feet in. The fire is at the north end, past the feed room, crawling the wall studs like it has somewhere to be. Twelve feet. I've walked this aisle ten thousand times with coffee in one hand and a puppy under the other arm.

I grab the transport crate off its peg, kneel at the pen, and start loading puppies two at a time, which is the maximum, because Malinois puppies are less like dogs and more like angry cursive. One of them — the big male with the crooked ear, the one I've been pretending not to call Biscuit because you shouldn't name government property after breakfast, and because the county's already got a Biscuit on the books, Callie's old hound, and around here Biscuit is turning out to be less a name than a rank — gets a mouthful of my braid and commits to it.

"Not the moment," I tell him.

He disagrees. We go to the door as a unit.

Cool air. Stars. I dump the crate at the fence line, count, two, and go back.

Here's a thing about me, so we're clear on who you're dealing with: I re-shingled my own roof in July with a YouTube video and a grudge. I do not call for help. Calling for help is a thing you do when the people you'd call have ever once shown up, and my track record on that is what my banker would call under-collateralized.

Trip two. Two more puppies. The smoke is lower now, breathing down at me, and the something-underneath smell is stronger by the north wall. Trip three. The girls this time, all needle teeth and outrage. Trip four, and the heat has opinions, and I hear a crack from the rafters that I decide not to think about, and my eyes are streaming, and I am talking the entire time — to the puppies, to the barn, to nobody.

"Almost done. You're fine. We're all fine. Gran, if you're watching, cover your eyes, this is going to get ugly."

Last trip. One puppy left — Crooked Ear's sister, small and furious, wedged in the far corner of the pen behind the water bowl like the corner has a basement she can dig to. I go flat on my stomach where the good air lives, reach through, and get a handful of scruff and disapproval.

The ceiling over the feed room comes down behind me on the way out. Not close. Not far, either.

Then I'm on my knees in the yard with a screaming puppy against my chest, and the barn (my barn, Gran's barn, the barn where I learned to bottle-feed before I learned cursive) exhales fire through the roofline, and the goats have formed a semicircle around me like a Greek chorus with anxiety, and somewhere behind the house Gary the rooster starts crowing at two in the morning because Gary's clock has never once worked and tonight of all nights he decides the sun is coming.

"It's not dawn, Gary," I say. My voice does something wobbly. "It's just my life."

Nine. I count them again in the crate, hands moving on their own. Three, four. Seven. Nine. Nine warm, furious, smoke-scented puppies, every one of them yelling at me, which is how I know they're okay.

I sit back in the dirt and let myself have exactly one breath about it.

One.

Okay.

Phone. The volunteer department is fourteen minutes out on a good night, and I'm dialing when I hear it — boots hitting dirt on the wrong side of my property, fast, coming from the north fence.

The north fence is eight strands and chest-high, because on the other side of it lives Iron Creek K9, three hundred acres of federally contracted order run by a man who once sent me a certified letter about my goats.

Wade Mercer clears it without breaking stride.