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Shipping day starts at daylight on the twenty-eighth.

The trucks come in, and the alley fills, and the calves cross the scale, and Wade runs it. Wade counts. Wade works the gate. Wade talks to the buyer's rep and the drivers. I carry a sorting stick and do what he tells me, and twice he has to tell me twice.

"They look good," the rep says. "Better than most this year."

"I can't take credit. Wade did it."

Later, not looking at me, Wade says, "That ain't true."

"It's close enough."

The last truck pulls out around nine and turns down the county road, and the sound of it fades, and then there isn't any.

The calf check comes a few days later.It covers Dutch's payment and Eli's time, with enough for Dutch's cut on top. It covers the hay. There's a little left over.

Every single thing I was protecting arrived exactly the way it was supposed to.

On a Tuesday night, the phone rings, and for a moment I hope it's her. I answer it only to be disappointed.

"You got about forty head on the road below my place."

I'm even more disappointed that I fucking left the gate open. I know exactly which one it was. I swear to God, I've never been so forgetful as I've been these last few weeks.

"I'm coming."

Wade meets me at the county line with his headlights already swinging across the ditch. We work the road for close to three hours, him on foot and me on foot and the truck idling behind us throwing light. Cattle scatter out into the dark and come back into it. My flashlight dies, and I use the phone. We push them through the gap one bunch at a time and I chain it twice.

"That'll do it."

"I'm sorry about the hour."

"I was up."

He doesn't say who left it open. I don't either. We both know.

A week later, a calf goes off feed, and I don't see it.

Any other year, I'd have caught it. I'd have seen the ears down and the head low and roped it and run it through the chute and started it on antibiotics that same evening. I walk past it three days running. By the time I pull it the lungs are gone, and it dies in the sick pen two mornings after that, and that's on me too.

Vera's chicken goes bad in the refrigerator before I throw it out. After that I stop bothering to keep much in the house.

The light comes into the bedroom and slides along the floorboards and gets to the far wall and goes. The cattle bawl out at the feed ground because it's past time. I hear every one of them, and I lie there.

Around two, Wade's truck comes up the lane. The engine cuts, then the door, then boots on the step.

The front door opens.

He's never been inside my house. Four years and he's never come past the porch. I hear him move through the kitchen, the tap running, the pot, the little rattle of the basket. A man I pay is making coffee in my kitchen.

Then the door closes, and his truck goes back down the lane. I get up. The next morning he's at the corral before me.

"Water's slow on the east tank."

"I'll get it."

That's all. Neither one of us ever says another word about it.

The rest of October I work. Everything takes twice as long. I check the same gate three times. I write down things I used to hold in my head. But I get most of it right, and the part I get wrong I catch before it costs anything.