Chapter Ten
One month later…
Marnie knew something was up the moment she came downstairs and saw Sam’s face. It wasn’t even just his expression, it was his whole posture. Something was dreadfully wrong.
“Sam?” Her voice quivered as she fearfully asked the question. She didn’t know what it was she was afraid of, exactly, but something was bothering Sam, and it wasn’t anything good.
Before she could get close enough to see what it was he was looking at, he gathered the papers up into a pile and turned them over, hiding them from her view. So it was a secret, then. That was bad.
“Come on.” Sam stood up. “Let’s get to work.” His voice was flat, completely devoid of emotion. He didn’t sound happy to be going out to work with the horses, to take out a trek, like he normally did. Right now, he sounded sad. Dejected.
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” she demanded.
Sam sighed.
“Tell me! I’m not going to come and do any work until you tell me what’s going on!” She stamped her foot and pouted, crossing her arms over her chest to prove to Sam that she was serious.
With another sigh, Sam bent down and grabbed her around the waist, slinging her over his broad shoulder like a sack of spuds. “Yes, you are, little girl. We’ve got a trek coming soon, maybe our last one. And I need your help.”
“Put me down, you brute!” she yelled. “What do you mean, our last one? Sam! What’s going on?” He didn’t release her, so she balled her small hands into fists and pounded against his back. “Sam!” she shouted at him, whacking him as hard as she could. “Talk to me!”
She felt him pause slightly and stiffen. Was he actually going to do as she asked him, for once? No such luck. His big hand crashed down on her backside, making her squeal in outrage and pain. “Stop hitting me, little girl,” he snarled. “Yes, this could very well be our last trek.” His grip on her thighs shifted slightly, as he bent to put on his boots. Marnie held her breath, both waiting for him to explain himself and fearful of being tipped off. Instead of punching him, she clutched at his shirt, crossing her fingers for good news.
“That paperwork I was reading, it was a letter from the lawyer, and an agreement for me to sign. This place is being sold, Marnie. That big dairy conglomerate I told you about, the one who made the original offer, they’re buying us out. The treks are finished.”
Marnie had never heard Sam use that tone of voice before, and it scared her. It sounded like he’d just given up, like he just didn’t care what happened anymore.
“Nooooooooo!” Her protest came out as a cross between a screech and a wail, as she tried to digest what Sam had just told her. “But you said… that money I gave you… we’ve been working so hard! No, Sam, you can’t let this happen!”
“It has happened,” he told her flatly. “That money bought us time, but weeks only. We just haven’t had enough trekkers through the place to make the payments. If I don’t accept this offer, which is actually pretty good, the bank is going to foreclose and we’ll be forced to sell anyway. And we’ll end up coming out with a whole lot less.”
“But I don’t want to go.” Her voice was small, broken, just like her heart. She’d finally found somewhere she wanted to call home, and it was being ripped out from under her. Just like the earthquakes had done to her city—broken it down, destroyed dreams, left a path of destruction in its wake. And that’s what the big dairy conglomerate would do here—devastation. They’d bulldoze the old house, no doubt. It needed so much work to bring it up to date that it would probably be cheaper to pull it down and start again. And the barn? That would probably be gone too, to make way for a cowshed. The round pen, the yards, the arena… all that would be demolished, to be replaced by a feed pad, tanker track, races. They’d put in an effluent pond, cut down all the trees. There would be no more horses, no more sheep, no more goats. No more anything, except cows. Stupid cows. On this huge farm there would be room for a lot of cows.
Sam set her on her feet but kept a hold of her, his palm cupping her chin, tilting her face up to look at him. “Neither do I, but we don’t have a choice. Whether we sell now or later, either way, we’re going to lose this place, and there isn’t anything either of us can do about it.”
“No. You’re wrong.” Her eyes filled with tears, blurring her vision.
“I’m not wrong. The deal’s done, Marnie. I’ll be signing the agreement and faxing it off this afternoon. After that, we’ll have a month, at the most, to pack up our lives and get out of here.”
Marnie wrenched her face out of Sam’s grasp. She felt too insignificant with him holding her like that. And right now, she didn’t want to feel insignificant. She was too upset to be insignificant. Straightening her shoulders, she stood on her tiptoes to make herself as tall as possible, which was still a heck of a lot shorter than Sam. “All we need is more time,” she announced, as if this was the most obvious solution in the world.
“We don’t have more time,” Sam snapped. “Do you not think I’ve thought this through? We’re out of options. Selling up is the only sensible thing to do.”
“Fuck sensible! Sensible is for old boring people whose dreams have died.”
“Our dreams have died,” Sam murmured. He was most definitely not the crying type but right then, it sounded like he was about to. Marnie’s heart clenched. Then Sam straightened up and frowned down at her. “And if you swear again, little girl, I’m going to cart you back off to the house and wash your mouth out with soap. Is that clear?”
A shiver went down Marnie’s spine. She loved his stern dominance. Seeing him battling with his emotions and letting her get away with stuff she wouldn’t ordinarily get away with, was almost as hard as hearing Sam tell her the place had been sold.
Sam raised an eyebrow. “I said, is that clear?”
Heat shot straight to Marnie’s loins. “Yes, Daddy,” she murmured. “But I still don’t want to leave.”
Sam put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close, kissing her forehead in that way she loved. “Neither do I. But the deal’s as good as done. Let’s just enjoy this trek, hey? You can come on this one. We’ll go to the waterfall. It’s a nice ride.”
Tears burned the back of her eyes and blurred her vision. How was she going to saddle up horses when she couldn’t see? Wiping them away with her sleeve was pointless because her eyes filled up again. Trixie knew something was up. As soon as she saw Marnie, she came trotting up to the fence, nickering, stretching her neck over the rails as far as it would go. Marnie went to her. Probably, Trixie would be one of the first to go. Her stomach clenched. She couldn’t do this, couldn’t say goodbye. Trixie was the first horse she’d been up close to, the first horse she’d really touched. She didn’t want to leave her behind. Giggling through her tears, she kissed the outstretched velvety muzzle, squirming as Trixie’s whiskers tickled her cheek. She’d miss this girl.
The ache in her heart worsened as she went about her chores. She should have been happy, mucking out stalls for probably the last time. Knowing she wouldn’t have to shovel any more shit should have made her happy. But it didn’t. She would clean up horse poo every day for the rest of her life, if it meant she got to stay here with Sam and he didn’t have to sell up.
Tears streamed down her face as she gathered the brushes and hoof picks she would need to groom the horses before tacking them up. When she’d first arrived she’d been terrified of the big beasts, she was too scared to get too close, too afraid of their size to run a brush over their body. Now she loved it. She knew all their names, knew their different personalities. She knew Taxi would stand there no matter what, but Ranger hated his near fore hoof lifted up. She knew Cosmo liked to nuzzle her neck and would nip her if she didn’t rub his nose enough, and she knew that Boxer would play up if he didn’t have on the right bridle. What would happen to all these horses? Sam had already said he wouldn’t be able to take them all.
She couldn’t cry like this. Sam still needed her, and the least she could do was be professional one time before it all came to an end. Wiping her eyes, she carried the tools out to the horses who stood patiently as they had a hundred times before, and she started combing out Taxi’s mane with a reverence she never imagined she’d feel working with a horse.
Sam was doing the same further down the line, his face set in a hard mask she knew was holding back a whole lot of emotion. The hollowness of it all kept resonating through her chest and belly. How could this be the end? It couldn’t be the end.
“What’s going to happen to them?” She risked the question, even though it made her choke up just to form the words.
“We’ll keep a couple. The rest we’ll have to sell.”
“Sell?”
“I reckon we can get ten acres after everything is paid out,” he said. “So we can have three or four there, but the rest will have to be sold to new riding homes. Can’t have twenty horses on ten acres.”
“Which ones will you sell?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “I haven’t got that far yet.”
“I don’t want to sell any of them.”
“I know,” he said, his jaw clenched tight.
Marnie closed her mouth. She knew Sam was just as upset as she was. Probably a lot more. Blinking back tears, she did as she was told and got on with the job she’d never wanted for what might be the very last time.