“Hey, cow.” Her jaw’s tender, and the cow hot and full of pulse. The hair she has left falls into her face. She closes her eyes and rubs her hand over the cow’s short hide. Her fingers are soft from napping in the bath all day, and small tan hairs stick to her fingertips. One of her first memories is of cows. In it she is standing with her back against her father’s legs and looking up at big, wet, bovine noses. Their pink tongues lick their own pink nostrils. Could it have been this farm? She can’t think of a time when her father had driven her anywhere, or taken her on any sort of trip. Maybe, and this thought is a shock, she’s lived here before? But no, there’s only the one memory.
Everything else takes place in the city. The same city where Candice, her bestie, still gets to live and spend her school year reading fortunes at lunch hour and inventing quizzes for boys — Circle Five: cupcake, banana, melon, left, right, hand, feet, puppies, dinosaur, neon, black, kiss, sex. They never know how to answer, boys. She rubs her nose on the heifer. The warmth of the cow radiates through its hair against her lower lip. She cozies up and kisses it.
She and Candice spent all of grade seven lunching in the art room around the Ouija board. The mood of the art room — with its batik and dusty papier mâché — wasn’t voodoo enough for the board, but the point wasn’t exactly Ouija anyway, the point was the boys they hung out with around the board, so they forgave the lack of spook. The room, at least, was private.
Melanie’s hand, partly covered by Rowan’s, moved with the dial.
“B. J. You know what that means.” Candice buffed her nails on her jeans and the boys laughed. “Blow job?”
She hadn’t. She let go of the dial and tugged the back of her pants. They were too loose to hold properly to her hips, but the smaller size at the store had left two inches of ankle bone visible.
“Don’t you get anything?” Candice stood and packed the board back into the box. “I mean, you should. It’s not like your head’s full.”
Rowan’s friend feigned a stretch and slipped his arm around Candice.
“Enough perv,” Candice said. She tugged Melanie’s wrist and walked her into the bathroom. “Look.” Candice leaned into the mirror. “You should at least know what it means.” She twisted her mouth and wiped the corner of her eyes. “This eyeliner is the worst.”
“Now I do.”
“You what?”
“Know what it means.” Melanie turned the bathroom taps on full and shut herself in a stall.
“Your place after school?” Candice grabbed the stall and hoisted her head and shoulders over the door. “He likes you, you know. Rowan.”
“Don’t look.”
“You’re not peeing or anything.” Candice switched off the lights and left the bathroom.
Later they did end up at Melanie’s apartment — Candice liked that Milo was always out. “Got any bananas? Cucumber?” Candice opened the fridge.
“Let’s go to your house.” Candice’s mom would make iced tea and dump them at the University, where Candice was supposed to practise piano in a music room.
“Come on,” Candice said. “Call Rowan. When’s your dad back? Oh right, he’s never back.” She surfaced with a zucchini. “This is what you do.” She lifted the veggie to her lips. “You circle around, and then lick the length and put your mouth on it.”
“Let’s go out, then,” Melanie said.
Candice nibbled the zucchini’s skin. “Okay, but you should change.”
“Why?”
“Whatever.” Candice tossed the vegetable to Melanie. “I wish I had pants cool enough to wear every day.”
But that was when she was thirteen. About a year and a half ago. None of that seems real anymore. Except for the pants, and they’re still not cool. Who cares? Who gives a crap? She’s stuck here now. She lifts her head off the cow. Hay and grain dust hangs in the cloud of animal humidity. What would Candice say about this place? You got your wish. Your lame-ass comfy farm. And family.
She misses wandering the basement at the Uni, trying to find unlocked doors to practice rooms. Fooling around with the insides of the pianos while her father mopped up barf or blood at his hospital job. She’d scratch the felt blocks or run her nails over the thick wires. There was so much going on inside the instruments, little joints and hinges that sat and waited for, for what? Something to do. She even misses her father’s awkward stories when he came home from work, when he’d sit across from her at the table, reeking of bourbon and piss, and try to talk.
She scratches the bristly hairs along the cow’s spine. The cow lifts its nose from the feed trough and flicks its ears. She’ll have to get supper. But that’s later. Right now there’s perfect contentment in leaning on the cow and waiting for the reliable, automatic shutdown of the milkers. There’s the lovely, boring pulse of fifty chewing cows, the warmth she’s retained from the bath, and the loosening effect the steam had on her lungs. Here, things are easy.
The milkers shut down. She pops the machines from each cow, grabs the tin of bag balm, and squeezes the udders for heat and hardness. All good — supple and flabby after milking. A rough patch on an older cow. She drags her fingers through the salve and works it into and around the teat. Then she turns off the lights and shuts the barn door behind herself.
Outside, the snow is spread like a sodden blanket over the pasture. She can’t see her father, if he’s still out there in the night. He might have trudged home. The lights in their house are off, but that means nothing. He sits in the dark so often. He doesn’t take care of himself. And when he tries to — that nasty stuff last night. She crosses to the house, picks up the shovel from beside the porch stairs, and chips at the iced steps. After a while the blade works between the ice and the wood and it all pries off in one satisfying slab.
She props the shovel against the rail and opens the door. Her father sits at the kitchen table — no tablecloth, the surface sticky with cup rings and piled with dishes. His hair, overgrown, hangs over his stupid tubular neck scarf and brushes the top of a faded wool sweater that’s Austin’s, her grandfather’s. She steps out of her boots, walks to the stove, and, keeping the shaved side of her head away from Milo and toward the clock and kitchen window, crosses her arms. He jerks his gaze down and bites the hair that hangs over his top lip and looks back up. Puckered forehead and watered eyes. His cheeks, no, the entire bottom of his face seems swollen, but that could be the beard. He should trim it — too much orange when his skin already looks sandpapered. He runs his fingers over the rim of a Mason jar — his home-stilled spirits — on the table beside a stack of bowls.
“I quit school.”
He pushes the jar aside and pulls a tarnished sugar dish and a lighter out of the mess of plates and cups.
“Okay.” He flips over the dish.
“What do you mean, okay?” She uncrosses her arms. His lanky fingers leave streaks on the oxidized silver. The tarnish is deeper — charred mauve — around the patterned rim and three ornate feet. At some point it was polished half-heartedly. “I quit school.”
Milo tilts his head and tenses his shoulders, like he’s both acknowledging that he heard her, and asking her why she’s upset — what did she expect? Why is she upset? What did she think he’d say? From the room down the hall her grandfather starts to moan. Her father picks up the sugar dish, blows in it, and sets it upright. He flicks the lighter. The creamer, tea, and coffee pot that the dish belongs to sit on top of a cupboard. A little dent in the coffee pot, but otherwise similar to ones she’s seen in pawn shops. Surprising Milo hasn’t hocked it. The house is all her grandfather’s stuff, and he hasn’t touched any of it. Maybe with the still he doesn’t need to. He spins the lid off the Mason jar.