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The line goes quiet. Three full seconds of Wyoming coming down the wire. Wade knows what he's hearing. In four years, I've never once hired a second man because I couldn't be there to do the work myself.

"All right," he says, and hangs up, because that's Wade.

I turn to the numbers. I write the extra Eli days against the number I came up with when I talked to Dutch. The new one is worse. His wages come out of the October calf check. So does Dutch’s payment.

I stare at both numbers, then add Eli’s days, anyway. The original numbers were a guess. This is the real one.

I circle it once. Then I close the book.

Monday the twenty-seventh, she’s past thirty-two weeks, so Rao moves her to twice a week. Her blood pressure has been creeping up, but everything else still looks good.

I add the appointments to my phone.

That evening I'm on Lis's balcony working her grill, the little one she's clearly never touched. The chicken on the left goes black before I understand what happened.

"You burned it," Mackie says from the doorway.

“That’s a fine layer of careful blackening. People pay good money for that in Jamaica.”

"Is that a ranch thing?"

"It's a man who's never used this grill thing."

She laughs, and I flip the good pieces, and we eat the ones that made it.

Later there's a ballgame on with the sound off. Neither of us is watching. She's stretched on the couch with her feet in my lap, and I work my thumb up under the arch of the one that's been giving her trouble.

She makes a low sound. "Don't stop."

My dick twitches hard enough that I have to shift under her feet. I mutter a curse and keep working my thumb into her arch.

Lis comes through at nine-thirty in her robe. "Night, Mackie. Night, Carson." She says both names carefully, one and then the other, not making them one in the same sentence.

Mackie's eyes are already closing. "You've got about four minutes before I'm out."

"Then I've got four minutes.” I keep my thumb moving.

I drive back to Hildie's afterward and lie down in my old room. I don't open the airline app. I know I need to book a flight back. I can't stay here for four more weeks, waiting for her to have these babies. I can go work, and then come back.

But I don't do it. I think about her on the sofa, her bare feet on my lap, and wonder how I'll leave her.

I turn off the lamp. The fan runs overhead. Wyoming doesn’t get the last thought tonight.

The bridge table sits under the window on the far side of the day room, and Hildie is holding court. She has her cards fanned tight against her cardigan, elbow cocked, guarding them like a woman who has been beaten once and never intends to be again. Dolores leads a card. Hildie takes it clean, snaps it onto the pile, and pins it there with one finger.

"That's mine, Dolores. You can look at it all you want."

Dolores mutters something into her lap. One of the other two women, the one in the green visor, laughs so hard she has to set her hand face-down.

I stay where I am against the wall. I don't drift closer. I don't ask her anything. I learned that much in Wyoming, when every question was a door I was pushing her through, watching her fear come up on the other side. So I watch her win, and I let it be that and nothing else.

She glances up between hands and finds me.

"Wes. Sit down, you're making the room look untidy."

I pull a chair to the edge, not too close. Later, when she's tired of taking Dolores apart, she looks at me without hesitating. "Carson, walk me back."

Thirty minutes ago I was my father. Now I’m Carson. The cards never gave her any trouble. That is the important gift we've been given since being back here, her cards.