A Decade For Nothing novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Four in the Morning

Lydia's POV

My alarm went off at ten to four in a room above a feed store, and the first thing I did was find my boots in the dark.

The room had a mattress on the floor, a hot plate, and a window that looked at a grain silo.

It cost four hundred dollars a month, and I had paid the first one by selling my mother's pearl earrings to a pawnbroker in Medina.

I had not told anyone that part.

I drove to the dairy in a used truck that Ada's neighbor had sold me for eight hundred dollars, on a payment plan, with a handshake.

At the barn I put on coveralls and a sleeve that went to my shoulder.

Today it was pregnancy checks on forty cows, one arm in each.

It was good work and it hurt.

Disinfectant had split the skin across my knuckles, and a gate latch had burned my wrist on Thursday.

I did not mind.

For the first time in my life, every dollar in my pocket was one I had earned myself.

At twenty to five, the farmer's dog started barking at the yard gate.

A battered pickup had pulled in beside the milk house.

Joel got out of the driver's side with a paper bag.

Levi got out of the passenger's side with a thermos, and he stood very straight.

I stripped off my sleeve and wiped my arm on my coveralls.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi."

He looked at me, in the barn light, with the cow behind me lowing and a smear of something I would not name on my cheek.

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