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Wade has three more heifers close, and I'm sitting in a gas station fifteen hundred miles away.

The thing I came here to do is done.

By the middle of March I've pulled more calves than I've had nights of sleep, and tonight's heifer bawls again and heaves against the chains. I set my boots and pull with her, timing it to the push, not against it.

"Is that a cow screaming?" Mackie's voice comes tinny off the straw bale where I've got the phone propped.

"Heifer. She's having a hard time."

Dutch shifts the flashlight so the beam falls where I need it. I don't look up. The legs are through to the knees now, both front feet coming soles down with the nose riding on top of them. I get another wrap of chain and lean back into it.

"Come on. Come on, now, girl."

"Are you talking to me?"

"No," I answer flatly.

Dutch's mouth twitches under the light. He doesn't say anything.

The heifer drops down and gives me everything she has. The shoulders clear, and the whole calf slides out onto the straw in a rush of steam. It hits the ground and bawls, loud and mad about it.

"Oh my God." Mackie's voice jumps through the speaker. "Was that the baby?"

I'm on my knees clearing the nose. I wipe the muck away with two fingers, and the calf shakes its head and sucks in air on its own, its ribs pumping.

"Heifer calf."

"Name her after me."

"All right."

Dutch pulls a fresh flake off the bale and shakes straw over the calf's back to help it dry. The heifer's twisting around to lick, so I let her at it. I stand up with my knees soaked through.

I wipe my hands, grab the phone and walk out of the stall.

"I told my mother," Mackie says.

"What'd she say?"

"She didn't ask one question. She mailed me a case of saltines."

I strip the chains and coil them over my forearm. "She know it's me?"

"She knows."

Seven weeks from now, my first clear stretch puts me back at Sabal Point to pack Hildie's room.

I've already made the decision. Keeping her in Florida made sense when I thought the places she knew mattered more than anything else. They don't anymore. Some days she isn't sure what month it is, and I'm two thousand miles away.

I'm bringing her to Wyoming.

Lis will be right there while I box everything up, knowing exactly what I did to her daughter. I don't ask Mackie what her mother thinks of me. It isn't mine to ask.

Mackie tells me her next appointment is the twenty-sixth, that nothing has changed. She says she has to go, and I tell her I'll call in two weeks before she hangs up.

The barn goes still except for the heifer working over her calf.

"That the girl?" Dutch walks in the hang up his apron.