Wild At Heart (Wild 2)

“Yeah, but I need to rinse out the trough. Dirty little birds like to step in everything.”

“Like this?” I aim the nozzle at the bottom where the chickens must drink, and squeeze the trigger, sending several birds scattering away from the spray.

Roy grunts, which I assume is a yes.

Once it’s cleared of all shavings and debris, I begin filling the top, my attention rolling over the chicken-wire enclosure and the raised wooden chicken house—that I’m assuming Roy built. “This is a lot nicer than ours.” He used real wood as opposed to sheets of discarded plywood. The roof is covered in cedar shingles.

“That’s ’cause Phil couldn’t nail two pieces of wood together to save his life.” Roy shifts on his feet, his good hand twitching at his side, as if fighting the urge to grab the hose from me and take over. It’s like he doesn’t know what to do with himself if he’s not keeping busy. I’m starting to see why he has an army of wooden creatures in his cabin. I’ll bet that’s what keeps his hands occupied during the long, cold winter nights.

“Yeah, we’ve noticed. There’s a piece of trim in our main floor bathroom that’s six inches too short.” The gap was conveniently hidden by a magazine rack when we first came through. “And all the shelving units in our cold cellar are crooked. One’s so bad, you can’t even put breakables on it because they’ll slide or roll off. Jonah put a level on it and it was like twenty degrees off.” Phil was probably drunk when he put it up.

“You always talk so much?”

I chuckle. “Yeah. According to my father, anyway.”

“And what happened to him? You talk him to death?”

I’m guessing Roy’s just being Roy and didn’t mean anything deliberate by it—how could he? He doesn’t know me. And yet I feel the stab of his words, as if they were wielded with intention.

“He died last September. Of cancer.” My fingers instinctively reach for my pendant as a ball flares in my throat. For comfort, and perhaps strength, because if Roy says anything else about my father, I’m liable to leave here in tears.

I’ve caught myself wondering what it’d be like to have Wren Fletcher sitting next to me on our new porch, overlooking the lake and the mountain range, smiling softly as I prattle on about nothing and everything as I always seemed to do, whenever he was around.

I’d do anything to see him fly in for a visit, to talk to him again.

After another long moment of brooding, Roy eases into the coop and to the little chicken house to collect the eggs.

Saying nothing more about anything at all.

* * *

I smile through a sip of my morning latte. One of the baby goats—a white one with caramel patches—just leapt off a hay bale and is bouncing around its two siblings as if it has springs on its tiny hooves. “What kind of goats are these?”

“Nigerian Dwarf,” Roy says from his spot in the next pen over, his wrinkled fingers working on the goat’s udder, a steady-timed squirt of milk shooting into the metal bucket. When I arrived at seven this morning, with another bowl of fresh strawberries, Roy answered the door looking like he’d just rolled out of bed—his shirt rumpled, his salt-and-pepper hair standing on end, his gray beard scruffier than usual, the bags beneath his eyes heavy. I noted, from the front door as he poured himself coffee, that the bottle of OxyContin has still not been cracked.

And his foul mood certainly proves it.

He refused to let me carry the metal bucket out here and snapped at me when I reached for the barn door to unlatch and push it open. I’m learning, though, that if I ignore him and continue with what I’m doing, his resistance fades quickly. I see what Teddy meant about his bark being far worse than his bite.

He didn’t argue with me when I left him here to go to the chicken coop to refill the chicken feed and water. I even opened the hatches to the roost and collected five eggs from inside, which was weirdly exciting, seeing what the hens had been up to overnight. It felt a bit like a childhood treasure hunt.

The smallest of the three goats nips at another’s side and then bounces away, making me laugh. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but they’re cute.”

Roy makes a sound. “Those and Nubians are the only milkers I like. The others taste too musky.”

“What are you going to do with these three?”

“The two females will be ready to sell next week. I’m keeping the male for breeding.” He pauses. “You want one?”

“No. I already have one goat I don’t need, thanks.”

“Yeah, a useless wether. At least you’d be able to get milk from these.”

“I have a dairy allergy.”

He snorts. “Your generation and all your sensitive snowflake issues.”

I ignore that. “What do you do with all that milk in the fridge?”