The Cowboy's Wife For One Night

He stepped away, picked up his sandwich and turned to go back to his room. The amber bottles on the dresser. The silence.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” she whispered.

“Nothing, Mia,” he said, wishing, for her sake, that he had a better answer. “Not one damn thing.”

She felt like she’d just shut her eyes when the lowing woke her up. The deep guttural cries of a dozen cows in pain rolled over the Rocky M, right into her bedroom.

It’s started, she thought, awake in a heartbeat. Elation fueled her and she pushed off her covers and grabbed fresh clothes from her dresser.

The sky was pink and gray, the clouds milky.

The light at the end of her tunnel looked like dawn and she couldn’t love it more.

In the barn, Chris was already pulling out the tattoo pliers and ear tags.

“Tim’s out there,” he said. “We’ve got one calf on the ground. Two more should be coming soon. All of them look good. Billy’s on his way—he’s making coffee. I figure Billy and Tim can handle the cows. Jeremiah and I can process and you can do the paperwork and float.”

“Sounds good,” she said. “I’ll call Jeremiah.”

Blue stood in his stall, his big brown eyes trained on her. “Not this morning, bud,” she whispered, giving the horse a scratch between the eyes.

They had a landline in the tack room and a list of frequently called numbers written on the white-chipped wall beside it. Halfway down, past Dr. Peuse, the big-animal vet in town, the name Annie was scratched out and Jeremiah penciled in.

She dialed the number, wincing as she thought about the young cowboy and the early morning. But he’d agreed.

Surprisingly, the phone was answered on the first ring.

“Hello?” said a little voice. Crap. It was one of the kids. “Hi, Ben?” She took a stab that he was the middle kid.

“Casey.”

“Okay, Casey.” It was the baby. Wow. When had the baby grown up enough to answer the phone? Of course, all three boys, even Aaron, who had been ten, had looked like babies that day. “Is your uncle there?”

“You bet,” he said.

Mia pinched the bridge of her nose. “Could you get him?”

“You bet.”

The phone clattered, and in a few seconds she heard Jeremiah’s voice and Casey’s excited whisper.

“Hi, this is Jeremiah.”

“I’m sorry. Am I waking you up?”

“No,” Jeremiah grumbled, his deep voice sounding like it was sprinkled with gravel. “Casey took care of that. Casey always takes care of that. Your calves coming?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We could use you as soon as you can get here.”

“No problem. I’ll wake up Aaron and be over there in a half-hour.”

“I owe you, Jeremiah.”

His laugh was weary and she again wondered how Jeremiah Stone, rodeo star, was handling the left turn his life had taken after his sister’s death.

“And I’ll remember that,” he said.

They hung up and she grabbed her pocket-sized notebook, making sure she had the right forms and at least three pens in her shirt pocket. She pulled the beat-up black kit out from under the wobbly table in the corner and checked that she had enough syringes and vitamin E shots.

It was going to be a busy day.

The sun was hot by ten and a furnace by noon. Sweat ran down her back and across her face, but the day was going well.

Most of the calves already born had found the teat and were nursing. There were three cows she had her eye on who had been in a labor a long time and she was getting worried about breech calves.

“You want me to call Peuse?” Jeremiah asked, not looking up from the calf’s ear he was tagging. They stood by the open bed of the truck, which had become their processing center.

“Not yet,” she said, holding the calf with all of her weight. Her muscles burned from the effort.

“We’re good,” he muttered and set down the tattoo pliers. They lifted the calf to the ground, where he stood, wobbled and lowed for his mama.

Mama lowed back and the calf, on shaky newborn legs, staggered to the left of the truck.

“Tim!” she heard Chris yell, his voice laced with panic. She turned away from the calf and mama reunion and searched the far side of the pasture for any sign of her guys.

“Tim, watch it! She’s on her feet! Tim—”

She and Jeremiah shared a quick look of dread and then took off at a run for the small hill and copse of trees in the corner of the field.

Chris and Tim met them at the top of hill. Tim, the almost always silent cowboy, was swearing like a sailor and holding his hand wrapped in a shirt that was quickly turning red.

“It’s not that bad,” he said quickly, getting a look at Mia’s face.

She glanced up at Chris who shook his head. “Two fingers are broken and he should get stitches.”