Her eyes were growing heavy, but she pulled her old laptop out of the drawer in the coffee table and turned it on. On her bank’s website, she entered her password to be directed to her accounts. Her checking account was perilously low—that was to be expected this close to payday—but the total in her savings account filled her with a delicate hope. It wasn’t a gold mine, but it could cover bills and rent for a short time.
The AC clicked on and she pulled a blanket off the back of the couch. She shivered, whether from the cold or anticipation, she wasn’t sure. She thought of Betsy and Ty’s farm, basically a five-hundred-acre playground for kids, with an assortment of animals added in for good measure. The girls would have a blast—like summer camp. Betsy and Ty would probably love the entertainment.
Before she could change her mind, she grabbed her phone and scrolled until she found Betsy’s number.
“She won’t mind,” she whispered.
But she put the phone down without calling and rested her head against the back of the couch. She pulled the blanket up to her chin and closed her eyes. Mornings were a better time for favors. New mercies and all that.
four
Ty
Ty Franklin’s mornings began hours before everyone else’s. Every night before bed, he set his alarm for 4:30 a.m., an hour he once thought was only for late-night bar hoppers and graveyard-shift workers. When he became a dairy man, he saw that the darkest hour before the sun rose was actually one of the most beautiful in the entire twenty-four-hour masterpiece. He now considered himself a lucky man, awake to the day’s first sighs and stretches.
With coffee in hand he pushed open the barn door. It stuck a little, as it always did. He muttered to himself, annoyed that he’d forgotten to buy another can of WD-40. It was the hinge, just the hinge, but it made sliding the door open louder than necessary. He liked to disturb the girls as little as possible before they shuffled to their places in the milking line.
Walker was already in the barn, attaching tubes and lines. The kid tried hard, but he was just so young. He wanted to be a dairy farmer too, and his daddy, the owner of a neighboring farm, insisted that he get a job in another barn to learn the ropes. A little arrogant, Ty thought, but he didn’t have a teenage son so he couldn’t judge another man’s parenting choices. He just tried to teach the boy all he could while keeping him from overturning milk buckets and scaring the cows.
“Morning, Mr. Franklin.”
Ty nodded. He leaned over Walker’s shoulder. “Rework that line. See that kink there? It’ll keep the milk from flowing. The cow will kick at it and hurt herself.”
“Yes, sir.” Walker fumbled to untwist the cap and straighten the line.
Every morning.
Ty took his cap off, rubbed his forehead, and jammed it back on his head. He made his way through the barn to his small office on the side. Every day he carefully wrote out the details from each milking. The dusty file cabinet in the corner held a stack of yellow legal pads, the pages covered in his tiny, neat script. He knew what Excel was and he knew punching in numbers on a spreadsheet could take the place of him hunching over legal pads every morning. But he liked the security, the familiarity of paper. He’d rather not entrust his life’s work to an invisible cloud.
At five o’clock he and Walker swung open the gate and stood back. The girls shuffled out of one side of the barn into the other. They knew exactly where to go, so all the men had to do was stay out of the way. As number 013 passed by, she paused and swung her head toward Ty. He reached out and rubbed the top of her soft, black-spotted nose. The cows could be as affectionate as a dog—a Labrador even. Nothing quite compared to a fifteen-hundred-pound Holstein sidling up to you, cud breath and all. It made you feel a certain something inside.
Especially if this cow, and two hundred like it, were your ticket to a glorious retirement, as they were for Ty. He wouldn’t be purchasing any thirty-foot fishing boats or houses on Ono Island, but he wouldn’t have wanted that anyway. He imagined himself kicked back on the porch in a rocker with Betsy next to him. Iced tea at their elbows, a bucket of snap beans, or maybe pecans, at their feet.
That was all he’d ever hoped for, ever since he first laid eyes on her their junior year at Auburn. It was as if he skipped all the in-between life and his mind went straight to the end—the two of them in rockers, hands together, enjoying life. At one point, he assumed a few towheaded kids would be there frolicking in the front yard, but the way he saw it, he had 218 cows in his barn and a handful of rowdy farmhands to corral. He had just about as much mischief as he could handle.
Once the girls were all hooked up, happily munching oats while their milk flowed, Ty walked to the barn door to dump out a bucket of water. While shaking it to get the last drips out, he saw his wife up by the henhouse. He usually kissed her good-bye when he wrenched himself out of bed, but this morning he hadn’t. He wasn’t even sure why. She’d been curled up on her side, facing away from him, the outline of her body visible through the thin sheet. Her knees were pulled up, her hands together in front of her face like she was fending off the world.
He traced a light finger down her spine. When her defenses were down—when she was asleep or
