This place was, objectively, one of the most beautiful properties in Montana.
It was also in a state of aggressive chaos.
She stepped out of her car and immediately heard something screaming in the barn—a high-pitched, insistent braying that sounded like a malfunctioning car alarm crossed with a foghorn. Two geese stood in the middle of the driveway like feathered bouncers, blocking the car from the garage and glaring at Tessa with what even she could tell was hostile intent to do grave bodily harm.
She got back in the car quickly. She had no interest in being pecked half to death or whatever it was guard geese did to intruders.
Makayla appeared in the barn door. She took in the sight of Tessa cowering in her car and the glaring geese and burst out laughing. She strode forward confidently toward the gigantic birds.
Tessa lowered the passenger side window and called out, “Stay back, Makayla. They’re making hissing noises.”
“They’re just Granny’s geese,” Makayla said with breathless delight.
“And they’re aggressively guarding the driveway. I don’t want them to hurt you. Go back by the barn while I chase them away.”
She started the car again and inched the car forward. The geese didn’t budge. She honked her horn. The geese honked back, louder, and still didn’t give an inch.
“I am not losing a game of chicken with a stupid bird,” she declared to herself. She edged the car so close to the geese that they disappeared from view beneath the front edge of her car’s hood. She rolled another few inches forward and felt a very gentle thud as her bumper lightly nudged a goose?—
All of a sudden there was a flurry of wings and necks and beaks flying toward her. She stomped on the brake pedal and threw up both arms defensively. As two very large, very angry geese landed on the hood of her car, it belatedly dawned on her that they couldn’t attack her through the windshield. Her hands fell back to the steering wheel, and she stared, flummoxed at the geese, who now stood on the hood of her car, necks snaking downward to stare inside the car at her.
“Well played, you awful pillows with beaks,” she muttered.
She eased the car forward until she was beside the house and parked the car.
Apparently satisfied that they’d asserted their dominance over the strange lady in the car, the geese took off with loud flaps of their alarmingly large wings. They landed inside the fenced barnyard and strutted triumphantly out of sight.
Jerks.
Tessa stepped out of the car into a sensory experience that was nothing like her apartment above the Bow-tique. The air smelled of hay, lake water, mud, and something distinctly . . . barnyard. Judith would, with a refined wrinkle of her nose declare it the ‘rich effluvia of animals and manure.’
Tessa mentally declared it straight up stinky.
The braying from the barn continued unabated. Somewhere out of sight, a chicken clucked with the urgency of a hen making an important public service announcement.
The front porch had one small rocking chair on it. Fern had been a petite woman, and Mick had built the chair to fit her. He’d been a talented woodworker back in the day. The rocking chair’s blue paint was faded and worn completely away on the gently contoured oak armrests. The spot on the porch next to it, where a second, larger chair had sat ever since the first time Tessa came here, was empty today. The porch boards bore two lighter stripes where it had been, a ghost outline of the rocking chair Fern had left to Arlo.
Tessa looked at that empty space and felt something she hadn’t expected. Sadness. Not for Fern, exactly. For the fact that two people had sat there together every evening for thirty years and one of them would never sit there again.
Makayla was already disappearing into the barn once more.
“Makayla! Wait?—”
But her daughter was moving with the unstoppable momentum of an eleven-year-old who had just been gifted an entire farm full of animals. The stiletto heels of Tessa’s leather knee-boots were sinking into the gravel with every step. She was tempted to kick them off, but the idea of stepping in animal droppings in her stocking feet kept her from acting on the impulse.
The inside of the barn was dim and warm and smelled like hay and old wood. The braying resolved itself into a gray donkey standing in a stall, ears flattened, yelling at nothing in particular. A three-legged dog—a portly yellow lab missing a back leg he’d lost in an illegal bear trap, sat in the barn aisle watching the donkey with an expression of weary tolerance. Behind the dog, a blind goat with a black coat stood close, its nose nearly touching the dog’s tail.
Makayla stood beside the goat, crooning softly to it and petting its back. The goat’s stubby tail wagged so fast it became a blur in response to Makayla’s touch.
In the big stall next to the donkey, two elderly draft horses, chestnut with whiteish manes, horses stood together, hip-shot and half asleep. Even from here, Tessa could see white hairs circling their necks and across their backs—scarring from harness rubbed-wounds that hadn’t been properly cared for when the pair had worked on a farm.
Further down, a llama with patchy, thinning wool regarded Tessa over its stall’s half-door with the imperious gaze of a creature that considered itself far above her pay grade. His coat was flashy, with patches of chocolate brown and snow white where it wasn’t pink skin sprinkled with dark freckles.
Tessa never failed to be startled at how big the llama was—almost six feet tall at the tip of its fuzzy, admittedly rather cute, ears.
The tabby barn cat was perched on a beam above her head, glaring down with the malevolence of a diabetic queen whose insulin schedule had been disrupted. And she was clearly not pleased with her vassal humans.
Tessa stared up at it. “I don’t even know your name.”