Free Bittersweet Creek by Sally Kilpatrick

not a tiny farmhouse. Heck, she deserved the ability to do or be whatever she wanted. As long as she was stuck with me, she wouldn’t have a lot of options.
    Sweat dripped down from my brow and stung my eyes as I launched everything I had into my own Fight Club.
    She deserved everything that Richard bastard could give her and a million things he couldn’t.
    The beam holding the punching bag groaned, and one of the chain links gave way. The bag thudded to the floor followed by the clink of the chain.
    You gotta sign those papers.
    I wiped away the sweat and bent over to catch my breath. Tomorrow. I would go up there and sign the papers tomorrow. Then I would badger the hell out of Curtis until he made me power of attorney like he’d said he would. If I couldn’t have Romy, I could at least have the old home place.

Romy
    H oly hell, my mother was right about nothing good coming from Satterfields and drinking. Farming and hangovers don’t go together at all.
    Running behind from the previous night’s festivities, I couldn’t help but give the stink eye to the bedroom door that shielded Daddy from me. He snored as he always did: with a roar, a pause, and a gasping gulp of air. After all the work he’d done in his life, he deserved to sleep in at least one morning.
    Thanks to still having only instant coffee in the house, I was running late again. To make matters worse, I’d forgotten to order the boots and thus had to stuff socks into the toes of Daddy’s boots to have something to wear. I tripped over my feet all the way to the barn, then spent too much time staring at the practically empty barn and wondering how I was going to start filling it with hay for the winter. I could buy hay, but I was rapidly running out of funds and Goat Cheese had told Daddy there wasn’t much hay to be bought that year.
    I wondered how many other women stood looking at an empty barn and dreamed of putting a café in the corner complete with friendly barista. Shrugging off the impossible—health code violations galore in the old barn, no doubt—I turned to the garden instead. Making it to the end of both rows through sheer determination, I finished up the green beans. Then I cut some okra and picked tomatoes. The cows obliged me by standing close to the barn and being all present and accounted for—that left me with Maggie May.
    I rounded the corner of the barn and climbed a slat up on the gate to look over into the little pen. Squat and black with fuzzy ears and enormous brown eyes, Maggie stood chewing her cud, oblivious to how lucky she was. That cow was living proof that Hank Satterfield was a soft touch because she was old and now had trouble calving, but he wouldn’t get rid of her because she was the last calf my mother had named.
    Inexplicably rejected by her mother when only a few days old, Maggie had been bottle-fed by my mother, who would come with bottle in hand each morning singing an off-key “Wake up, Maggie, I think I’ve got something to say to you.” Now, why Rosemary Satterfield, staid librarian, had sung Rod Stewart to a baby calf, I’d never know, but the name stuck. And soft touch Hank couldn’t bear to part with the old cow, who now snorted and anxiously paced the pen, her uterus obviously prolapsed despite the vet’s earlier stitches to hold it in place.
    Shit.
    â€œI’m going to get Daddy and call Dr. Winterbourne, so you can stop your fussing.”
    My country accent bounced off the barn. Great. There was that West Tennessee lilt again, the one that would make me the laughingstock of my students, not to mention all of Richard’s friends. Oh, good. More get-togethers where we played everybody’s favorite party game: Let’s ask Romy to speak so we can hear her accent. Maybe she can trot out those quaint weather expressions or explain to us once again that she did, indeed, grow up wearing shoes.
    Damned cow should’ve