My Groom Walked Out, So His Brother Took His Place novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: Eleven Accounts

The first letter came on a Monday.

It was one page on Stehling Ranches letterhead, and it said they were "consolidating veterinary services" and would no longer need the Roane Large Animal Clinic.

Three more arrived by noon.

Each had a different ranch name on it, and each was signed by someone who had been at my father's funeral.

By Wednesday I had eleven.

My vet tech laid them on my desk in a fan.

"That's forty percent of the book," she said.

"I can count."

"Alvin Stehling's behind it. Everybody says so," she said.

"I know who's behind it."

I looked at the letters.

The bank note on the clinic was due on the first of each month, and my father's equipment loan came right after.

Forty percent was the difference between staying open and selling the building.

I thought about the check I had torn in half.

I thought about the Fourth of July.

He had told me I would regret it.

That Thursday, the Gillespie County Cattlemen's Association met in its hall on the Llano road.

I had been going to those meetings since I was fifteen, sitting at the back with my father, drinking bad coffee out of a foam cup.

I put on a clean shirt and drove out.

I did not tell Jude.

The hall was a long cinderblock room with folding chairs and a flag, and a coffee urn that hadn't been scrubbed since the Reagan administration.

Two hundred men and a few women sat in rows with their hats on their knees.

Alvin Stehling was not there.

His foreman was, and four of the men who had written me letters.

I stood at the back through the old business, the new business, and a long talk about a feed tariff.

When the chairman said, "Anything else?" I raised my hand.

"Bryn," he said, surprised. "Go ahead."

I walked up the center aisle.

Every head turned to watch me.

I stood at the front, in my boots, with eleven letters in my fist.

"I'm not here to ask for anything," I said.

The room was silent.

"I want to tell you what's happened. Eleven ranches in this county have dropped my clinic in the last three days. Every one of them is a Stehling lease, a Stehling partner, or a ranch that owes the Stehling co-op money."

The foreman stared at his boots.

"I'm not saying it's the senator's doing. I'm saying he told me on the Fourth of July I'd regret it."

A murmur ran through the rows.

"I've been your vet for three years. Before that, my father was your vet for thirty. I've pulled calves at three in the morning, I've put down your dogs, I've been out in the sleet at Christmas on your horses. I don't think that gives me a claim."

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