He Bought the Whole Farm

The phone went off at 4 a.m. and I swear I fell out of bed before I was even awake. That's the thing about being the only vet in a town like Otter Creek. When it rings, you answer, because nobody else will.

"Morrison," I croaked.

"Jacinta? Thank God. It's Hal Pemberton out on Route 9. My mare's colicking bad, she's been down twice and I can't get her up. Please tell me you'll come."

Hal was seventy-one years old and I'd never once heard him sound scared. Now he sounded like a man watching his dog die.

"Hal, listen to me. Walk her. Keep her walking, small circles, don't let her roll. I'm on my way."

I was still pulling on my boots in the truck, one hand on the wheel, coffee sloshing everywhere. Six years I'd been in Otter Creek. Six years of 4 a.m. calls, and for what? Doc Weller retired eight months ago and handed me the keys to a clinic that loses money every quarter. The bank gave me six weeks to come up with a loan package that would let me buy the place outright, and I was already into week four.

Anton Rockwell at the bank had been polite about it, the way small town bankers are polite. "We believe in you, Jacinta. But belief doesn't cover a loan, does it?" No, it does not.

The mare was still standing when I got there, which was something. Sweat all over her, flank twitching, that look horses get when their gut is trying to kill them. Hal held her head and didn't say a word while I worked. Passed the tube, gave the banamine, listened to her belly with the stethoscope until my knees ached on the barn floor.

Around six she passed gas and then manure, and Hal laughed so hard he had to sit down on an upturned bucket.

"She's going to be all right, Hal. Just watch her close tonight."

"You're a good girl." He pressed money into my hand and I pretended not to notice how much it was.

Back at the clinic by eight, Mandy Johansen already had the coffee going. She's been my tech for five years, been through more with me than some husbands go through.

"You look like death," she said cheerfully.

"Thanks. Colic on Route 9. Mare pulled through."

"Course she did." Mandy handed me the clipboard. "You've got four appointments today and a thing I should probably mention. Cade Olson called. Wants you to come by the feed store."

My stomach did a little drop, and not the fun kind. Cade Olson. Olson Feed and Seed. If I was going to make this loan package work, I needed a bulk supply contract with a name the bank recognized, and Olson was the biggest name in the county when it came to feed.

"He said when?"

"This morning. He said, and I quote, 'Tell Doc Morrison I've got something worth talking about.' Then he laughed. Weird man."

I looked at myself in the little mirror by the sink. Hair a disaster, eyes baggy. "He wants something, all right."

"Don't they all," Mandy said, and went back to the dog that was waiting in room one.

***

The feed store smelled like grain and leather and old wood, that smell I honestly love. Cade Olson was loading fifty pound bags onto a flatbed when I walked in, and I mean actually loading them himself, no kid to do it. He's thirty-five, built like the work he does, dark hair going gray at the temples a little early.

"Doc Morrison!" He wiped his hands on his jeans and stuck one out. "Heard about Pemberton's mare. Word travels."

"Saved her," I said. "You called about a contract?"

Straight to it. That's me. Subtle as a brick.

He laughed, that easy laugh of his, and gestured toward the office in the back. "Coffee first. You came straight from a barn, I can smell it."

"Thanks a lot."

"I mean it nice. You look as if you have been elbow deep in a horse since dawn. Sit."

I sat. He poured coffee from a machine that looked older than both of us and leaned against the desk instead of sitting behind it, which I noticed, because I notice things when I'm nervous. And I was nervous, because everything was riding on this loan, and he knew it, everybody knew it.

"Here's my thinking," Cade said. "Your clinic goes through what, eight hundred pounds of feed a month, plus the medical supply stuff you order separately? Sign with me for a six-month exclusive trial run, feed and everything else I can source, and I'll sign the endorsement your bank wants. Anton Rockwell respects my name on paper. He told me so at the fireman's picnic, actually."

"Exclusive," I repeated.

"Exclusive. Six month trial term. I get a steady account, you get a banker who stops making that face at you."

And here's the ugly part, the part I'm telling you because this is my story and you deserve the truth. I smiled at him and said, "That's really generous, Cade," while a completely different thought was running behind my eyes. Because Mandy had told me a thing last month, casual as you please, over leftover birthday cake.

Cade's family trust owns the biggest supplier account in three counties. Hartwell Distribution. His grandfather helped found it. Which means Cade doesn't just sell feed. He can get it wholesale, mark it up, and still undercut every quote I'd gotten from Hartwell's actual sales rep. The man was offering me a friendly price when he could've offered me a robbery.

So my plan, right there in his dusty office, formed itself while he talked about freight costs. Get his endorsement. Sign whatever keeps him happy. Then, once the loan closes and the clinic is mine, quietly source from Hartwell direct through the trust connection, or better, find the rival supplier Mandy mentioned, the one out of Cedar Falls. Cut him out. Nothing personal. Business.

Only problem with my plan, and I hate admitting this, is Cade himself. Because while he was talking numbers, he kept watching my hands when I drummed my fingers on the desk, and when I caught him he didn't look away like a creep, he just grinned.

"You count when you're thinking," he said.

"I do not."

"You tap four fingers, twice, then your thumb. Every time I've seen you in here. Buying cat food at seven a.m. in your scrubs, same thing."

"You've seen me buy cat food?"

"Doc, half this town's seen you buy cat food. You buy a lot of cat food."

"And you watch."

"Only you," he said, easy as anything, and went back to loading feed like he hadn't just said that.

I sat there with my coffee getting cold, thinking, oh, this is bad. This is very bad. Because I needed this man's signature, and my plan needed him to trust me, and he was out here being charming and perceptive and loading fifty pound bags like some kind of feed store Hercules.

"Four o'clock Monday," he called from the dock. "Bring your numbers. I'll bring mine. We'll make Anton very happy."

"Monday," I said, and walked out before my face could give anything away.

Monday at four I showed up with my folder of numbers, and I want you to appreciate how rehearsed my "businesslike" face was in the truck mirror on the way over. Ten minutes of practice. Two red lights. "You can do this," I told the mirror. "He's a vendor. Vendors are furniture."

He wasn't furniture. He'd shaved, for one thing, and he had two coffees waiting and a one page contract laid out neat as a Sunday shirt.

"I made it simple," he said. "Six months exclusive, trial run before the five year. You don't like my pricing or my delivery, you walk at the six month mark with no penalty. Fair?"

"That's..." I blinked at it. Six months wasn't in the plan. Six months was nothing. Six months I could sign, close the loan, and be talking to Cedar Falls by spring. "That's actually fair."

"I'm not trying to trap you, Doc. I'm trying to build a customer." He tapped the bottom of the page. "One more line. The church fair's in two Saturdays. I run the feed and garden booth every year, been doing it since Dad handed it off. It's a two person job and my mom's got the quilt tent. Help me run it, one day, and that's the whole favor."

"The whole favor," I repeated, because I had to say something.

"I work alone a lot. It's nice, one day a year, having somebody to argue with about corn prices."

So I signed. Right there, pen scratching on paper, hating myself a little and the loan a lot. When he said six months with a walk away clause, my whole con got easier and dirtier at the same time. Easier, because I could take the deal with a clean face. Dirtier, because he was being decent, and decency is a lot harder to rob than robbery.

"Fair booth," I said. "What do I even do?"

"Hand out sample sacks. Take money. Tell people the goat feed is not for people, which happens twice a year minimum."

"I'll bring my own sign for that."

"That's the spirit." He walked me out to the dock and I swear the man waved until I was out of the lot.

***

The fair came fast, the way Saturdays do when you're dreading them. The green by the Methodist church was packed by ten, tents and folding tables and a guy selling honey with a live bee on his hat, which I have questions about to this day. Cade's booth sat near the front, stacked with fifty pound sacks of deer corn and chicken feed and those little sample bags he'd stuffed himself, apparently, at his kitchen table Wednesday night.

"You stuffed two hundred bags," I said.

"Two hundred and forty. Mom helped until the second glass of wine."

"Your mom helped?"

"Anton's wife runs the cake walk, I mix up my committees. My mom's at the quilt tent." He handed me an apron. "Welcome to retail, Doc."

Reader, I have done teeth on a bull, I have pulled a hoof abscess in a snowstorm, and that fair booth was work. Old ladies haggling over cracked corn. Kids poking the grain. One man who absolutely wanted to argue about soy prices and used my booth as his courtroom for forty minutes. Cade handled all of it laughing, and worse, he kept handing me water without me asking, and once he put his hand on the small of my back to steer me around a sack, just a second, and I thought about it for an hour.

"You're good at this," he said around two.

"I'm good at not killing people, is what I'm good at."

"Same skill set as retail, mostly."

Then the sky went green. You know that green, if you grew up anywhere with weather. The whole fair went quiet for one second, then everybody moved at once. Somebody's tent went over with a bang, the PA guy said the word "shelter" about nine times, and the rain came down like the sky had dropped it all at once.

Cade grabbed my wrist. "Popcorn tent. The Methodist one, it's got real poles."

We ran. I'm not proud of how I knocked over the honey guy, but the bee survived, so we're square. We dove under the popcorn tent along with maybe thirty other people and the storm hit full, thunder cracking right over us, rain so hard the tent roof drummed. The old ladies running the popcorn machine just kept popping, which I respect enormously.

"Weather," Cade said.

"Yep."

"Big weather."

"You're a genius, Cade."

He laughed, and then it got quiet between us in that way, you know the way, where thirty people are around you and somehow it's just the two of you. He was soaked through his shirt. So was I. My hair was doing a thing. I didn't know what my hair was doing but I felt it doing it.

"Can I ask you something, Doc?"

"You usually do."

"Why'd you really sign the six month?"

And my heart did a whole gymnastics routine, I'll tell you. "What do you mean, why? The deal's good."

"The deal's good," he agreed. "But you tapped your fingers twice and then your thumb before you signed. Same thing you do at the counter. You're a counter. You count."

"It's a nervous habit."

"Sure." He turned toward me, and there was maybe a foot between us and the popcorn machine going pop, pop, pop. "Jacinta."

Nobody had used my first name all day. Six years in this town, I'm Doc Morrison at the bank and at the diner and everywhere. "That's my name."

"Jacinta, can I kiss you?"

Straight out. No windup. The rain hammering the roof and an old woman handing out popcorn balls and this man asking permission like it was a signature on a line.

And here's where I should've thought about Cedar Falls. Should've thought about the plan, the con, the little ledger I kept in my head where Cade was a signature and nothing else. I didn't think about any of it. That's the honest truth of it.

"Yeah," I said. "You can."

He kissed me. Not a movie kiss, nothing sweeping, just warm and a little uncertain at first, his hand coming up slow to my jaw, me grabbing a fistful of his wet shirt because the ground felt unsteady and I figured he'd do as ballast. The popcorn machine popped. Thunder rolled off east. He pulled back maybe an inch.

"Okay?" he asked.

"Okay," I said, which was a lie, because it was not okay, it was a disaster, because I had a contract in a folder at home and a phone number for a Cedar Falls supplier in my desk drawer and I'd just kissed this man in a church tent like my rent depended on it.

"You're thinking," he said. "Your fingers."

I looked down. Sure enough. "Shut up, Cade."

"Yes ma'am." And he kissed me again, and this one I don't have to describe secondhand to myself, do I? This one had a hand at my waist and popcorn salt on his lips and lasted long enough that one of the Methodist ladies cleared her throat with real