October in Texas was damned near perfection. Gone was the scorching heat that anchors a pair of jeans to the thighs like a wet straightjacket, hell-bent on dropping anyone not in air conditioning straight to the devil’s back kitchen. Sporadic, deep reds on the sweet gum trees teased the landscape with impending change. Even the cow pies took on the scent of money.

Selling season in the cattle business had a fragrance all its own, and Nathaniel Meier wasn’t above pulling in a potent lungful of the end.

The end. God in heaven, he fucking hoped not.

Nat’s least favorite part of the ranch was the south acreage. Eighteen wheelers barreled down the adjacent two-lane county road to avoid construction fifty miles and another world away, scattering everything from mockingbirds to piss-filled sports drink bottles. The south acreage’s only saving grace was the perfect alignment of the squeeze chutes and ramps so as not to cast morning shadows or blinding sun—two factors that could make loading hundreds of cows onto trailers feel like a fire-ant enema.

His general apathy toward anything beyond Close Call, Texas, was a side effect of being hyper-attuned to the ranch, cradle to loan, as his grandfather had always said. Four generations saw fit to ensure the Meier legacy continued. For now, the burden fell solely on his sunbaked shoulders.

Nat set to work applying fresh rubber stops to the metal gates so the banging wouldn’t spook the animals. Earbuds in place, he ignored the world beyond the periphery fence. The sidewinding melody of a steel guitar calmed his pre-auction nerves—and was why he failed to notice the SUV tires eating up his good grazing grass until they had damned near galloped up his ass.

Rubber stops tumbled out of his hand. His pulse played catch-up, the way it did when he accidentally stepped into a steer’s flight zone. Spine straightened, he slow-crawled a gaze from the pristine tires to the glossy black rims of a late-model Cadillac, as out of place on a ranch as a drag queen singing show tunes would be.

Well, shit.

Austin Pickford exited his trust-fund vehicle. The banker stood in place as if he could spare no more than a minute, as if the pasture were a mine field. Nat supposed to the guy’s imported alligator loafers, the pasture was Cambodia.

Nat swiped the adhesive bumpers out of the grass and resumed circling the curved race. “You visit all your borrowers this often, or can I tell my mother we’re officially courting?”

“Nice to know the impending sale hasn’t affected your juvenile sense of humor.”

“Juvenile? Keep flattering me like that, and we’ll be married by nightfall.” Nat shot him a wink for good measure.

Austin rolled his eyes and jingled coins in his suit pocket.

Nat and Austin had a history straight out of rural Shakespeare—same graduating class, same primal ambition, the occasional quarrel between well-established families, a general distaste disguised as friendship. Austin went away to a private university to study finance. Nat attended state school to try for an ag degree. But Nat couldn’t escape the truth that the Meier family couldn’t do what they did best without the generations-old backing of Pickfords. Close Call Community Trust was the only lender left in town. Banks close to the city didn’t understand the financial cycle of ranching past how much a porterhouse at some country club in Houston set them back. Nat and Austin had history. Around here, history counted for something.

“To what do I owe this honor?” Nat called over his shoulder. As in, spit it out and be on your way.

“Came out to check on you. See if you needed anything.”

Liar. The guy was probably measuring for drapes at the main house before he drove out here. Every time Nat thought about the collateral he’d put up last winter to expand his operation, his stomach threatened to empty, full or not.

“Unless you have a new weigh scale in that fancy trunk of yours, I’m good.”

“’Fraid I can’t help you there.” Austin took a few minefield steps away from the safety of his luxury car. His silk tie lifted and twisted on the stiff breeze. “What I can do is tell you what I’m hearing.”

Nat slowed his gait. Good-old-boy gossip came in two forms: bet-the-farm accurate and grizzled, half-baked accurate—usually while buzzed on Shiner at the roadhouse’s Thursday polka night. Either way, previous generations had hundreds of years of droughts and windfalls between them. The year Nat lost his grandfather’s prized truck was the year Nat learned to pay attention to such things.

“Word is, the market is softer than anticipated. Exports are down. More consumers going to plant-based proteins.”

“All things beyond my control.” Nat shook steel rails as he circled the race. A loose belly pipe snagged his progress. He bent down to inspect the fastening bolts. “We’re selling at the right time. First major auction before all the spring-born calves land on the market. Everything before that is speculation. Nothing more.”

“That isn’t all, Meier. Vet’s been out here daily. That happens, people start to think you’ve got a problem.”

Nat’s breathing stalled. He tucked his chin to his collar, mostly so his hat brim blocked Austin, the Cadillac, rigs barreling past, the problems back at ground zero where pink eye had spread to four heifers before they caught it and isolated them. Bet-the-farm accurate, that gossip. With pliers from his tool belt, he tightened the offending bolt. And his voice.

“Only problem I have is getting these ramps ready for transport.” As in, be on your way already.

“Hope you’re right. For your sake.”

Nat’s knuckles whitened around the pliers. He thought of a thousand things he wanted to say but only one his upbringing allowed him to say. His dry tongue felt thick and leaden. “Thanks for stopping by—”

“What the hell?”

Austin’s tone was equal parts delight and alarm—enough of a contrast that Nat glanced up. Idling on the highway’s shoulder was a gigantic plastic shrimp on wheels, its antennae snapping on a robust gale. Two cartoon shrimps shaped into a heart with the words “Bae Shrimp” adorned the food truck’s pink paint job.

Before Nat could echo Austin’s sentiment, a passenger exited the cab and waved to the bearded driver. At a distance, the bare-legged and sandaled figure—undoubtedly feminine—looked like a traveling Sherpa: massive backpack, woven poncho of some sort with brightly colored fringe, stained and wrinkled brown hat that looked as if it had been fished out of a shrimp boat rudder in Galveston. But there was something familiar—the energetic way her tan legs slipped through the tall grass like a native species, the confident, fluid strides despite the heavy load, the slight freedom in her hip rotation. It wasn’t until the stranger removed her hat that Nat realized she wasn’t a stranger at all.

Well, shit.

Austin spoke first. “Isn’t that—?”

“January?” Uttering her name felt like a decade-old trip wire set off in Nat’s chest. One false move? Boom. “Yeah.”

Two airhorn blasts penetrated the slow acceleration of the truck’s diesel engine. The crustacean drifted down the road.

January Rose was damned near perfection. Named for the month of her conception—the only stretch when the Texas heat subsided long enough for two people to want to generate heat of their own. Or so the story went. She was magnificent trouble, the kind of charmer that could lead a devout man straight into the devil’s back pocket and leave him wanting more. Ten years ago, Nat had entered her flight zone and she had left his heart stampeded. The only thing worse than that kind of pain was ten years plus one day for her to do it all over again.

* * *

January settled into the kitchen nook in her mother’s trailer—really more of a recreational vehicle—really more like shack blown together by a Texas twister. The living space, if you could call it that, had a history as the hump hideout for ranch hands over the years. But in typical Mona Rose fashion, she had repurposed the old place into a home. She carved out a homespun feel, complete with gingham curtains, guinea hens pecking the ground between her geraniums, and bacon sizzling on the stove the moment the prodigal daughter came knocking. She didn’t have the heart to tell her mother that somewhere between the rice terraces in China and a research boat off the coast of Belize, she had become a vegetarian.

Her stomach growled anyway, partly because her last square meal had been yesterday afternoon, partly because the fatty aroma catapulted her right back to childhood, before she had left so much shrapnel in her wake.

One meal. What could it hurt? After, January would get what she came for and be on her way.

A rustic honey dipper offered January the perfect fidgeting diversion from the decidedly non-shrapnel vision that had welcomed her: open button-down shirt; hat brim obscuring all but lips that moved like an answer to a prayer and an altar of a chin; the same tall, lanky stretch that had always dwarfed her. Nat looked good. Beyond good. Honey-collected-on-the-neighboring-farm good. Right then, the guilt she’d been carrying like a South African Xhosa head-pack since she had made the choice to come back to Close Call, since she had made the choice to leave all those years ago, eased.

She picked up the morning paper, folded so the advice column was prominent. The question to Dear Agnes read:

None of my friends have curfews. My mother is being unreasonable. I am a seventeen-year-old honors student with a bright future ahead. Why can’t she trust me? Signed, Missing Out.

Dear Missing Out: The job of a mother is not to give you what you want, but to protect you until you have all the things you need in this life. From the boundaries she set, I know one thing without doubt. When you walk out the door to be with your friends, your mother counts the moments, checks the clock, pushes aside a thousand what-if thoughts, questions the decisions she’s made, and prays that when you walk back through that door, you’re a better, stronger person than when you left. If having a curfew eases her burden, even in a small way, you owe her that as back pay for her hours of worry. Besides, nothing is open past midnight except legs and the hospital. Your mother sounds like a wise woman. Signed, Agnes

January’s gaze circled back over the phrase nothing is open past midnight except legs and the hospital. A Mona line, if ever January had ever read one. Her mother had said it to her on several occasions. The rest of it, not so much.

“You friends with Dear Agnes?” asked January.

“Why ever would you say that?” said Mona at a half-titter, palms excessively wiping against her apron, as if her daughter had just asked her if she slept with Garth Brooks back in the day.

She was hiding something.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were living on Meier land?” January said. “I had to ask around town to find you.”

Her mother pulled her attention from the eggs long enough to level a stare. “Would you have come?”

January weighed nostalgia against money. She had the privilege of sleeping outside in adverse weather because she had no money. Nostalgia was a distant second. “I need Meme’s money.”

No better way than out with it. January didn’t want pretense. This wasn’t a memory lane kind of trip. It was a stop-gap that threatened to break her while she waited for a coveted work-travel assignment in Nepal.

“I see.” Frypan shifted to a cold burner, her mother crumbled into the booth’s opposite seat. Embroidered butterflies on the collar of her bathrobe shifted their 3-D decal wings then stilled as if they intended to take flight but were pinned in place.

January reached for her mother’s hand, spottier and thinner than she remembered. “Of course, I came to see you, too.”

“I guess I figured after ten years, you might stick around awhile.” Her mother’s voice wavered, nothing at all to do with the way it always sounded before she had her morning coffee.

“I’m waiting on good things, Mom. I have a good life. It’s just taking longer than I thought for my next assignment to come in, and I need a little of my inheritance to fall back on.” And if I stay, I’ll suffocate, like last time. She had to change the subject. “I see you got my last postcard from Norway.”

January stood, took the two strides to the opposite wall, and marveled at the display. A world map—her world map from all those years ago, empty holes still punched through that made her weak in the knees, even now. And new pins everywhere she had been. Lines of yarn connected the pin heads to postcards she had sent from every corner of the world—forty or more. Enough to spill onto the ceiling for the northern hemisphere and all manner of living surfaces for the southern hemisphere, like an immense tree of life. The Norwegian fjord she had witnessed from a kayak called her back: cold exhales, flocks of gannets taking flight from shore, frozen tears because she didn’t find the serenity captured in the photograph. Maybe if she went again…

“Sometimes I have to go to the library to look up the places. Took me two weeks to locate the Bay of Kotor. Montenegro sounded more like somewheres in a Cary Grant movie.”

“This is amazing. I had no idea you were saving them all like this.”

“Not everyone in Close Call gets such fancy mail. Causes quite a commotion down at the post office. Harlan posts them in his window for everyone to enjoy until I can get into town.”

“Everyone?”

“Whole town. Sometimes even a blurb in the newspaper. Had a nice article when you were working on that project to bring clean drinking water to those children in Guinea.”

“Ghana.”

Sure enough, taped to a potted ficus, a yellowed article from Close Caller-Times, a fancy name for cutting-edge quilting bee and Future Farmers of America updates.

“Guinea. Ghana. All the same.” Her mom shuffled back to the stove and plated the eggs. “I don’t have your money. Least not right now. It takes days for a transfer and sometimes Austin don’t open the bank up but for a few hours if his teller has morning sickness. Lord if that woman don’t look green most days.”

“Days are okay. We can catch up.”

“Unless you have tools in your hand, that might be impossible. Wood bottom floors on the oldest trailer rotted clear through, have to be replaced.”

Mona Rose was a simple woman. Always had been. She grew up the only child of a naval engineer who made it his mission to take things apart so she could puzzle them back together. There wasn’t one piece of equipment, large or small or obscure, that Mona couldn’t fix, blindfolded. Most days, motor grease was her makeup, and she looked more like Rosie the Riveter. In January’s younger days, her mother had been a source of embarrassment, but more than a dozen times in remote places, January wished she had a fraction of her mother’s skill for fixing what was broken.

“So long as you’re here,” her mother added, “you’ll make yourself useful. Busiest time on this ranch. Nat needs all available hands pitching in.”

“Oh no. No-no-no. I can’t be around him.” Her feet itched to reverse course across the open field, back to the moment she told Stan-who-smelled-like-shrimp to pull over near the next tangle of live oaks.

“You can, J-Rose, and you will. Nat gave me a place to live, rent-free, when that apartment in town went up in flames a couple years back. Never takes a dime from me, despite my monthly offer. So, if Nat says aliens are landing at dusk and he wants a barbeque buffet delivered on a homecoming float to greet them, by God, I’ll make it happen with ten minutes to spare.”

“I don’t know how much help I’d be.”

“Didn’t you herd sheep in Australia?”

“No, orphans.”

“Cattle aren’t all that different from kids.”

January’s gaze drifted to the postcard tree. Some of the photographs had charred edges. Her mother had written her that she had run out of the building that night with two things—her father’s naval box and every single one of January’s postcards. Until now, she had forgotten her mother had risked her life for the breadcrumbs of contact she sent. The least January could do now was make an effort.

“Until the money comes in.” January laid down the law in the firmest tone she could muster, though she was at a serious negotiating disadvantage with the cash in some far-off fund. “Not a day longer.”

Breakfast passed with enough carbs to power through the Great Wall marathon and enough town gossip to remind January why she’d fled, though if she had learned anything in her travels, the people defined the place. Liberians were generous of spirit and humor. Brits were guarded but genuine. Pacific Islanders, grateful and spiritually elevated. Close Callers? Content.

Content suffocated. Content was pinning butterflies through the thorax until their wings stopped beating and life slipped away. Content was the last thing January Rose wanted from life.

Until it wasn’t anymore.

* * *

Nat wasn’t above utilizing modern trappings to work the ranch—drones, tagging animals with GPS and tracking herds in real time, genetic panels and artificial insemination for complete control over stock quality. Hell, he’d even fantasized about learning to fly a helicopter so he could be one of those bird-cowboys. But there was something grounding about climbing into a saddle, setting out to corral thousand-pound animals with wits and instinct and a few good men, Australian shepherds nipping at the heels.

And Nat could use a bit of grounding.

At the south end, he had left Austin with the assurance he’d get his money, on time, paid in full, then beat a hasty retreat. Everything after that snagged in a barbed-wire fantasy that involved January Rose sprinting toward him, their embrace a spinning hug like that erection pill commercial that came on during rodeo broadcasts. By the time he had climbed back on his ATV, sans all his equipment, and reached the main house, she was wearing a lacy baby-doll dress and cowboy boots, carrying a bouquet of wildflowers, and saying I do.

Nat went straight to his kitchen sink and doused his face with cold water.

God in heaven, he was fucked.

He unpinned the Community Bank and Trust calendar from the wall and stared at the horse-faced-maidens-milking wallpaper that his grandmother had put up in the 1950s. Much to his grandmother’s dismay, ranch hands over the years had taken to naming each one with a unique moniker, usually in permanent ink: Moxie Crimefighter, who packed heat in the form of two well-drawn pistols in hip holsters; Boomqueefa, who expelled a suspicious cloud of dust in her wake; Abstinence, dressed in a nun’s habit; and Tiara Rose, the maiden January had coined her “compliant twin,” complete with homecoming scepter and a chain tethering her ankle to an X in the ground marked Close Call.

The day January doodled on the wallpaper had been the day he’d read the writing on the wall. Literally. They’d spent an entire summer tangled in the bed of his grandfather’s vintage 1939 Ford truck, scratchy wool blanket from Mexico against their heated skin, sometimes dancing the horizontal two-step, nearly always making plans—her, to explore the world, him to explore her wilds every day for the rest of his life. Nat knew she would leave, but he fell for her anyway. He just needed a visual reminder that one more time of being a moron and the fall would likely kill him.

He poured a fresh cup of tar coffee and headed out to the barn with a resolve to avoid the bahiagrass pasture, Mona’s stomping ground. Willie already had the saddle blanket on Poe, nine hundred pounds of black horse flesh better than any modern trapping. Instinctual, orderly, symbiotic. Horse and ranch foreman. Being around the grizzled old hand, a touchpoint to Nat’s grandfather, the most respected patriarch to the Meier clan, felt comfortable. Nat’s pulse stabilized for the first time since a plastic prawn coughed up trouble in a gypsy poncho.

Nat generated some noise on his way to the stalls so as not to startle Willie.

“Morning, Nat.”

Willie didn’t bother to turn in greeting. His dark hands skimmed the gelding’s hind-quarters as if memorizing the contours afresh; his eyes remained on a fixed point somewhere in his mind. A toothy smile lit his expression. Guy was the happiest person Nat knew. Nat asked him once how much vision he had left. More than you had been his response.

Nat hadn’t doubted that for a minute.

“Looking entirely too chipper this morning, Willie.”

“Got a replacement for Jared.”

“On such short notice?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Willie’s cheeks were like plums—all raised and rounded the way he got when he was dealt a good hand with the special deck—braille for Willie, nude women splayed on farm equipment for the rest of the crew. Guy had a terrible poker face.

“What?” Nat dragged out the word, all suspicion and good humor.

January rounded the far stall.