Mind Games

“I’m coming out.”

He watched her scoop dog food from a bag inside a wood chest on the porch before she crossed to where Bray talked to the chickens.

And would’ve sworn they talked right back to him.

It made a picture, he thought when she went inside the coop. Her in that breezy summer dress, chickens swarming all around her.

And his kid, thrilled when she let him add some sort of pellets to a trough. Which the chickens instantly attacked.

Out of the container she took scraps—lettuce, maybe, some bread she handed to Bray to tear up and toss around.

“Just some little treats,” she told Ty. “They like finding them.”

“Are those egg shells in that bowl over there?”

“Yeah, for calcium. They lose some when they lay.”

“Isn’t that kind of … cannibalistic?”

“Just shells, Ty, and we don’t have a rooster to make fertile eggs. Let’s see what they’ve got for us today.”

She took Bray’s hand, led him back to the nesting boxes. Then lifted him up.

“You have to be really careful, really gentle so you don’t break the egg when you pick it up.”

“It’s big!”

“That’s Zippy. She lays whoppers. Let’s hunt in this one. Sometimes they like me to play hide-and-seek.”

They made their way through the nesting boxes.

“Wow, we’ve got five today. You brought us good luck.”

“One, two, three, four, five. Five eggs, Daddy!”

“I’m going to put these in a carton. You get to take them home.”

“Okay.” Bray hugged her legs. Then ran to tell his father the news, though Ty was two feet away.

Thea closed the coop. “Let’s go make pancakes.”

She let the kid help, something Ty knew from experience meant whatever you did took twice as long and made five times the mess.

But her patience appeared to have no bottom, even when Bray took one look at the milk and said: Yuck.

“That’s not like Daddy’s milk.”

“It’s buttermilk.”

“Why?”

“Because it makes delicious pancakes.”

She’d put bacon on some sort of paper on a cookie sheet, and stuck it in the oven. This interested him, as it seemed like less cleanup.

By the time she poured batter onto a hot griddle, he’d had a second cup of coffee and felt human.

And somehow she made a pancake in the unmistakable shape of a monster truck.