“Doing what?”
“Fence... stuff.”
“Good! Great! I’ll help. I’m excellent at fence stuff.”
That absurd statement gets Charlie to at least stop and turn toward her with his hands on his hips. “Oh, and I thought your crime of choice was fraud.”
“What?”
“Like fencing... goods? Selling stolen shit? Never mind.”
“Yeah, that’s a deep cut,” she says, slightly bent over to catch her breath. “But I appreciate the attempt to take your insults to new creative heights.” Gretchen straightens, still panting a little. “Why are you running away from me?”
“I wasn’t running.”
“Fine, then why were you speed walking—” A cough interrupts her sentence, so she throws out her arm to gesture the concept ofaway from me. Then she does a brief check for anythingobjectionable before lowering herself to the grass. “Please don’t take off. I can’t... can’t chase you again.”
“Are you okay?” Charlie asks with a begrudging concern that Gretchen can’t help but cling to.
“Been better.”
He kneels in the grass beside her. “In. Out. In. Out.”
“I know how to... to fucking breathe,” she snaps. But she’s also following his lead, adjusting her breaths to the pace of his words and the rise and fall of his shoulders. Their eyes remain locked. She looks at him like he’s a lodestar, but he looks at her as if he’s a scientist and she’s a living demonstration of the Krebs cycle. The passion from last night suddenly feels very one-sided. Whatever. That’s not why she’s here, Gretchen reminds herself. This should be about the business. Making it easier for Charlie to stay. Towantto stay.
“Good?” Charlie asks.
Gretchen nods.
“Now, what was so important that you felt the need to give yourself an asthma attack?”
“I don’t have asthma,” she says. “I’m just out of shape.”
“Guess I better work you harder, then.” They seem to both register the double entendre at the same time and look away in opposite directions—a silent agreement not to discuss what happened outside Tipsy Lou’s.
“I, uh, wanted to talk to you about some business stuff. We were supposed to chat last night, but then with visiting your grandfather and... everything... we never got around to it.”
“Okay. Well. Like I said, I’m busy with the fence. That wasn’t me making excuses. So if you want to talk, you gotta walk.” Charlie stands and offers Gretchen a hand.
She takes it, letting him pull her up, forcing herself to ignore the heat between their palms. Charlie backtracks to the area of fence he was inspecting before Gretchen spooked him like a scared little rabbit (he would object to that simile, of course, even though that’s exactly what he looked like trying to get away from her) and shoots a new staple into where the wire mesh meets the wooden post.
Gretchen follows him around the pasture’s perimeter, laying out her plans: social media to spread the word about the farm, events to bring people in, partnerships with other local businesses to reach new customers. By the time she comes to the end of her informal proposal, the goats and dogs have wandered over to them, and Charlie has also reached the end of the fencing. He takes his hat off, smacks it against his leg three times, then replaces it on his head. “And who is going to be doing all of this extra work?”
“Me,” she says, as if that’s the most obvious part of this plan.
“I thought part of our deal was that you would help out around the farm. Taking pictures and messing around on your phone all day isn’t particularly helpful to me.”
Gretchen came prepared for almost any objection Charlie could throw her way. She pulls up Instagram on her phone and shows him the profile for a goat farm in Ohio. “This place is only a little bigger than Gilded Creek, and it’s doing a lot of the stuff I want to do. They’re a relatively small dairy operation, but they make a ton of extra money through events. Goat yoga. Cheese and wine tasting date nights in partnership with a local vineyard. Based on how much the tickets cost, I bet they’re making five hundo a weekend on baby goat cuddling sessions.”
Charlie narrows his eyes. “ ‘Hundo’?”
She brushes away the question. Gretchen can’t be certain, but she thinks she might have picked that up from Everett, which is frankly upsetting. “I know this is a lot of work, but it’s the kind of work I’m good at,” she says, weighing her next words. “I know you don’t respect thewhatof what I do, but as I’ve said before, it’s a business. And I do run it really well.”
He frowns, scratches his beard. It doesn’t take him as long to respond as she expects. “Okay. But you’re doing this on top of everything else I need you to do. Don’t even think about trying to use all this to get out of your chores.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she says, surprised to find it isn’t a lie. Somewhere along the last week or so, Gretchen realizes, she began enjoying farmwork. The way it forces her to use her body and lets her mind take a break. How she can see many of the results of it immediately and concretely. Even being around the animals has turned into something she doesn’t mind so much, now that she has a better idea of what to expect. As if to prove this, she plucks a cluster of leaves from a tree and holds it out toward a nearby goat, forcing herself not to flinch as it takes the snack from her hand.
Charlie doesn’t acknowledge this act of immense bravery. “I’d rather not have pictures of me on the Instagram.”
