My Own People Betrayed Me at My Engagement Barbecue, So I Took the Hill Back novel · Chapter 8 of 24
Chapter 8: The Clinic Table
By Monday evening I had been refused three cups of coffee.
I rode along on Cade's rounds because I wanted to see the county that had decided what I was.
At the first ranch, the wife came out on the porch, saw me in the truck, and went back in and shut the door.
At the second, the rancher shook Cade's hand and talked to his boots.
At the third, an old widow with a sack of pecans in her lap led us into a kitchen that smelled of cinnamon.
"Sit, child," she said. "Your mother made me a pie in 1998 when my husband died, and I never forgot it."
She poured me coffee and said nothing else, and I drank it with my eyes stinging.
"Two out of three," Cade said in the truck.
"The third counts for more," I said.
"Does it?"
"She'll tell the Verein ladies by Wednesday."
He took my hand across the seat and held it the whole way home.
The vet barn stood behind the farmhouse, a long metal building with a concrete aisle.
It had fluorescent lights and a smell of iodine and clean straw.
He had to wash his hands after the last call, and I stood in the doorway watching him do it.
He rolled his sleeves to the elbow.
His forearms were thick and brown and dusted with gray hair, and the water ran over them in the bright light.
I had been watching his hands all day.
I had watched them hold a calf's leg and a rope and a cup of coffee.
I had thought about every one of them somewhere other than where it was.
I locked the barn door.
Cade turned off the tap and looked at me over his shoulder.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Own People Betrayed Me at My Engagement Barbecue, So I Took the Hill Back are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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