Last Chance Llama Ranch

by Hilary Fields

  “On it,” said the older woman, out the door in a flash.

  “You hiked seven miles on this?” Jane looked up at Merry with mingled compassion and exasperation.

  “Well, it wasn’t quite like this when I started,” Merry prevaricated.

  “Damn, woman,” she said again. “Either you whacked your wits out when you crashed into that tree, or you’re just plain hardheaded to begin with.”

  “Bit of both,” Merry said, groaning as Jane gently rotated her leg and examined the scars more closely. She leaned back against the sofa’s cushions, thinking of England.

  “You’re white as chalk, child,” said Dolly, returning with a large, old-fashioned doctor’s bag.

  Jane took the bag and started rummaging around inside, clucking her tongue. “Why didn’t Sam stop this? I can’t believe he’d make you walk the whole way if he knew you were in this much pain.”

  Dolly snorted at Jane. “He’d sooner carry Merry down the mountain over his shoulder than let her suffer. And that boy could do it too.”

  The horror of such a scenario made the pain Merry was in seem more palatable. “I didn’t tell him. And please, both of you, promise me you won’t either.”

  “But why?” Jane asked. Her expression was bewildered.

  Dolly spoke for Merry. “Pride. Pure, damn-fool pride.” She waved a hand at Merry. “Look at her. It’s about the only thing the girl’s running on.”

  For the second time that day, Merry’s eyes welled with tears, and it wasn’t just from the pungent horse liniment Jane was rubbing into her leg. That pride is getting in the way of Dolly’s livelihood. She needs an able-bodied ranch hand…and I am anything but. The realization hit her like a fist to the gut. “I’m sorry, Dolly. I never should have come here. But I really thought I could do this.”

  “Stop apologizing, child. You can do this, and you’re gonna.”

  Had Dolly somehow missed the part where Merry had just made intimate contact with the dirt? “But…you need a real ranch hand. Someone to lift heavy stuff, and…and…I dunno—put it on top of other heavy stuff.”

  Jane snickered, and Merry blushed, but Dolly patted her hand kindly.

  “I’ll see if I can’t get little Joey from the village to pitch in and take over some of the chores until you’re feeling better. That kid loves the animals so much I practically have to shoo him away with a broom, and he takes his pay in biscuits, to boot. But even if he does the sweaty stuff for a coupla days, I’m sure we’ll find other ways for you to help out ’til that leg of yours calms down a mite.”

  Merry shook her head. “I can’t let you do that, Dolly. You advertised for a ranch hand, and you deserve someone who can do the job properly.” She made her voice firmer than she felt inside. “I’ll leave tonight.” Though where she would go, Merry had not the faintest clue. To save money, she’d sublet her condo all the way through the end of the year and tossed what little personal stuff she had in storage, planning to hop directly from the Last Chance Ranch to her next DDWID mission, whatever that might be. Now, it was looking less and less like there would be a next mission, since she was failing abjectly at her first, and the corporate overlords at Pulse were unlikely to cut her any slack.

  “Last Chance” indeed.

  “No one’s leaving anywhere tonight,” Dolly said firmly. “I don’t know if it’s the pain talking, or you’re more of a drama queen than I pegged you for. But either way, I ain’t letting you give up on me so quick.” She marched over to the kitchen and opened her sixties-style avocado-colored refrigerator, coming out with a pitcher full of amber liquid, ice, and lemon wedges. Briskly, she poured three glasses of iced tea. She returned with the beverages on a tray, and shoved one tall, sweating glass at Merry. “Drink,” she ordered. “I put lotsa sugar in there, which should help with the wooziness. Maybe it’ll bring you to your senses too.”

  Merry took a swig of the tangy sweet tea. “Thank you, Dolly,” she said thickly. “You’ve been more than kind. But if I can’t do the work, I don’t deserve the hospitality. I’d better get packing.” Merry made to get up, then thought better of it as a wave of nauseating pain washed over her. She took another sip of tea, swallowed hard, beads of chilly sweat popping out around her hairline.

  “Child, didn’t you hear what I just said?” Dolly sounded exasperated.

  “I—ouch!” Merry winced as Jane started wrapping stretchy bandage tape around her leg. It was, she noted absently, the same hot pink as Boudicca’s had been. “I did, but…” She gestured toward the yard outside. “I know there must still be chores left to do. If I can’t even finish out my first week properly, I’ve got no business imposing upon your generosity.”

  The failure rankled. Merry had never left a task unfinished. Hell, even that fateful day in St. Moritz, her unconscious body had somehow managed to slide past the finish line.

  I’m terrible at this. She wasn’t fearless, fun, or fabulous the way she’d portrayed herself in her column. No. She was facedown in feces and unable even to get up on her own.

  Which, she realized with a start, is exactly what my readers are tuning in to see.

  Merry sat back on the sofa, brain whirling. Maybe failing, in this case, was actually winning? Maybe being bad at this gig was exactly the point?

  Duh. She could hear Joel’s voice in her head, telling her the more falling on her fanny, the better.

  But was that really fair to Dolly? “Are you sure?” she asked, glancing over at the older woman shyly. “I don’t want to take advantage…”

  “You just sit flat on your fanny and rest tonight, child,” Dolly said, as if she’d heard Merry’s thoughts. “Am I right, Jane?”

  “Damn right, Dolly. This little chickie is roosting for the night. Doctor’s orders.” Jane threw the rest of the medical tape back in her bag, rose, and dusted off her knees. “Merry, if you so much as lift a finger for the rest of the day, I’m going to sneak up behind you and shoot you full of ketamine. You and Dolly can sort tomorrow out tomorrow. Tonight you rest, or I make you rest. You got that?” She waggled the black bag of doom in front of Merry demonstratively.

  “Got it.” Clearly, there was no arguing with these two when they banded together. A wave of relief washed over Merry—she wouldn’t have to figure out what to do with herself quite yet. There was still a chance for her to figure out this DDWID stuff. A chance to succeed, whatever that might look like at the Last Chance Llama Ranch. “And again, I’m really, really sorry, Dolly. I never meant to be so freaking useless.”

  “Shut your flappy trap, child. You ain’t useless. You did a great job for me yesterday, and Sam said you did just fine with the trekkers today. More’n fine. He said you were a big help.”

  “Sam said that?”

  “Right enough. Said the tourists loved you. And he told me you managed to make friends with Severus Snape—something not many do. That scamp makes Buddha look like an angel.” She clucked her tongue. “So you had yourself a bit of an unexpected sit-down at the end of the day. Big deal. You did what you had to do, Merry, and that’s what counts. If you have to take it light for a couple days, well, we’ll find another way for you to be useful in the meanwhile. Won’t we, Jane?”

  “I do recall you saying you’ve been meaning to do inventory in the shop.” Jane scooched Merry over on the sofa and plopped down next to her, then dragged an afghan off the back of the couch and tucked it around Merry.

  Merry looked down at the blankie, eyes moist. It was a stunning piece, a starburst of radiating earth tones ranging from cream to beige to deepest chocolate brown, with swirls of varying grays in between—courtesy of Dolly’s herd, no doubt. She rubbed the supersoft wool between her fingers, petting it. “Inventory?” she asked shyly.

  “Yeah. Only been putting it off for about the last seven years. Yarn’s all over the damn joint, and I have no clue which goes where or how much is left of what batch.” Dolly made herself comfortable in a well-worn armchair across from them, by the spinning wheel Merry
had noticed the day before. She sipped her tea, looking at Merry over the rim of the glass. “You any good with numbers, Merry?”

  “Stats, mostly. I had to keep track of a lot of them before…” Her throat closed. “Anyhow, yeah, I’m not bad with numbers. And I’d be happy to help however I can.”

  “Good. Tomorrow I’ll put you to work. But tonight we veg.”

  “Music to my ears,” said Jane, a grin making her plain features radiant. “It is definitely veg-time.”

  “So what does one do for, ah, veg-time out here?”

  Jane looked at Merry like she couldn’t believe she had to ask. “Amigurumi, of course.”

  And she tossed something soft and squishy into Merry’s lap.

  Allow me to spin you a yarn, dear ones.

  Actually, in this case, I’ll allow Dolly to spin it for me. For my hostess is, in addition to being one badass rancher, also an incredible craftswoman who can spin fleece into gold. The fleece in question being the fine outer coating of the Last Chance’s prize-winning alpacas, and the gold being the fair market value of the fiber Dolly’s wizardly fingers spins into soft-as-silk skeins of beige and white and speckled gray, chocolate brown, and rich midnight black.

  I don’t think anyone’s clued our dear lady in to the true value of her handiwork, for you’ll find the prices at the Last Chance Llama Ranch’s charming little gift shop/yarn boutique brow-raisingly reasonable. Were I able to stitch as well as I bitch, I’d be driving home with a trunk full of balls of pure fluffy heaven. Instead, I’ll be bringing back some rather unique souvenirs of Dolly’s imagination. For, as charmingly rustic as Mrs. Cassidy’s ranch is, she and her craft-happy friends are every bit au courant when it comes to trendy needlework.

  Most notably, Japanese kawaii.

  Ka-what now? You may well ask.

  * * *

  “Ami-roo-who-me?”

  “Ah-mee-goo-roo-mee,” said Jane, not for the first time. Or the second.

  Or the third.

  Housed in a converted outbuilding attached to the main hacienda, Dolly’s shop was a spacious single room, with slants of late-morning sunshine beaming down from several skylights onto worn floorboards scattered with handmade woolen rugs. White wooden shelves reached from floor to ceiling on all four walls, stuffed with skeins of yarn in hues from sorbet to somber, while display tables featured finished pieces from shawls to hats and mittens…and amigurumi.

  “Oh, give it up, Jane. Half the time I can’t pronounce it either.” Dolly, ensconced in an antique rocker, looked blissfully at home with a ball of yarn on her lap and her fat calico kitty at her feet. (The cat looked less sanguine, giving the rocker’s runners a gimlet glare and twitching its tail well to the side.) She’d ceded control of their inventory after an hour of frustrated muttering and cursing, claiming she couldn’t count past her fingers and toes anyhow. Merry and Jane, who wasn’t on call at the regional veterinary clinic today, had taken over the job of tallying skeins, organizing shelves by dye lot and price, and sorting bags of roving—wool that had been cleaned, carded, and dyed, but not yet spun—by quality and color under Dolly’s grateful direction.

  Merry felt surprisingly…useful. After another of Dolly’s delicious dinners, some girl talk, and a night’s rest, she was almost back to her normal self today, though the leg would need to stay taped up for a while. The light work in the shop was just about her speed, and she was discovering she had a bit of a knack for it. After a quick, horrified look at Dolly’s handwritten ledgers, she’d fired up her laptop and created a simple spreadsheet for her hostess to enter data in, and even Dolly had admitted she thought she could figure the “damn thing” out once Merry had walked her through it a time or two. She might even leave the Last Chance slightly better off than she’d entered, Merry thought—or at least not worse off. At the thought, a glow spread in her chest. It took Merry a moment to recognize her feelings for what they were.

  Pride.

  Satisfaction.

  Self-respect.

  Now, shelves organized, bags of raw wool stacked away and skeins priced and sorted, Jane and Merry were sacked out on the shop’s rug-draped futon, taking a well-earned break. Dolly was still at work in her rocker across from them. Her fingers flew like birds tussling as she wielded hook and yarn faster than Merry’s eyes could follow. In her hands, a figurine was taking shape. It looked like a tiny chinchilla, and it was achingly cute, with wide cartoonish eyes and a perfectly round body.

  An ami-goo-thingie-majigy.

  Jane had explained that amigurumi was a Japanese word for a type of crochet craft modeled after anime characters. It was, she said, part of a larger trend called kawaii, which meant “cuteness, lovability, or adorableness,” and included everything from manga to fashion in Japan. And amigurumi dolls. Apparently, you could make just about anything as an amigurumi if you were determined—or weird—enough. Merry looked at the one Jane had lobbed at her last night.

  It was Boba Fett.

  Or perhaps she should call it Boba Felt. But whatever you dubbed it, the fluffy stuffed doll Jane had made was unmistakably bounty-hunterish. Merry turned it over in her hands again. From teeny blaster pistol to realistic jet pack, he was perfect in every detail. “Oh, man,” she said, shaking her head. “My brother would totally flip his gourd for one of these.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother, Mer,” Jane said. (Merry had graduated from Merry to Mer after less than twenty minutes of conversation last night.) “What’s he like?”

  “Total dork. Star Wars freak. Pain in my ass like you wouldn’t believe.” Merry was smiling. “Oh, and he’s also a supermodel.”

  Jane rolled her eyes. “Doting sister, eh?”

  “Oh, no,” said Merry. “I shit you not. He’s one of the top male models in Europe. Hell, pretty much the entire world. You can hardly open a magazine without seeing him half-naked, draped around some starving teenaged girl half his age. I keep teasing him that his shelf life is about up, but the magazines and designers haven’t caught the memo yet. If you saw him, Jane, you’d seriously need a bib.”

  “A bib?”

  “For the drool. He’s that good-looking.”

  “Meh,” said Jane, stretching her legs comfortably under the low coffee table that held several well-leafed-through copies of Crochet Today. “I’m not into handsome guys.”

  A thought occurred to Merry—one that perhaps wasn’t polite to voice in front of her hostess. She shot a glance at Dolly, but the older woman was frowning intensely, absorbed in the skein of yarn she was attempting to untangle, while her cat, somnolent until now, suddenly discovered delayed kittenhood and did his best to undo her handiwork. “So, um, if that’s true, why haven’t you and Sam ever hooked up…?” she asked quietly. “Or, er…have you?” She flushed, horrified at herself. Why Merry had assumed Sam was single, she didn’t know. Maybe he and Jane were married, what the hell did she know? If so, she’d just insulted a woman she was already coming to consider a friend.

  “Oh, hell no,” said Jane, though she spoke low enough for just the two of them to hear. “If there’s anything worse than a handsome guy, it’s a broken guy. Not that Sam’s unattractive, if you ask me. He’s got a certain je ne sais quoi. You know…like, man-juice or something.”

  Merry choked on a laugh. Man-juice? “Um, sure,” she said, giving Jane a minidose of side-eye. “He’s got something going on, alright.”

  Jane shrugged. “Anyhow, Sam’s not really my type. I like confident guys. Homely, confident guys.”

  Sam, not confident? To Merry, he was the picture of self-sufficiency, the proverbial island. She raised a brow. “Isn’t he, like, a certified survival expert? That’s what Dolly told me anyway.”

  “Oh sure. Primitive skills, he’s got ’em in spades. People skills, not so much. Sam’s the guy you want to be holed up in a cave with in the dead of winter when you get lost in the woods. But not the guy you wanna trust with your tender feelings.” She leaned closer to Merry. “I think someone did
the tarantella on his feelings, once upon a time.”

  Merry could see that, now that she thought about it. Sam had a bit of the guarded attitude you saw in guys who’d had their hearts trampled pretty good. She remembered Bob’s quote from the other day. “Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.” Not that it makes me like him any better, she thought. Dickbag is still dickbag, whatever the backstory.

  Thinking about Sam Cassidy was harshing her wool-induced mellow. “Are you going to show me how to make one of these am-um-um-mumbles?” she asked, holding up the amigurumi again. “These little guys are almost obnoxiously cute.” She examined the little doll from all angles, then petted it fondly on its helmeted head. “My readers are gonna do spit-takes in their Starbucks when they get a load of the crazy things you two make.” She waved around the shop’s display shelves, where cartoonish kittens stalked catnip-stuffed mice, Teddy bears taunted yarn unicorns, and wide-eyed owls hooted at lop-eared puppy dogs. And of course, crocheted alpacas and llamas were everywhere. “I bet they’d make great Christmas ornaments if you put a little loop on the top to hang them from. Do you think I could learn to make one of them by the holidays?”

  It would certainly save Merry money on presents for her family. Maybe a tiny figure skater for Mother…She pictured Gwendolyn’s reaction to receiving such a homely, handmade gift from her daughter. Maybe not. “It would be really cool if I learned to knit—”

  “Crochet!” shouted the two women.

  “Sorry—crochet, while I’m here. What, is knit versus crochet like some kind of Red Sox/Yankees thing?”

  “It’s more like an alpaca/llama thing, or a cat person/dog person thing. You prefer one or the other, or you’re not a true devotee,” Jane explained, and Dolly nodded.

  “’Zactly.”

  “But you have both here at the ranch, Dolly,” Merry pointed out. “Not just alpacas and llamas, but your herd dogs and this little guy.” She nudged the spotted butterball with her toe, and the cat happily started bonking his head against her alpaca-socked toes. Dolly had insisted Merry put on a pair of the shop’s signature hand-knit footwear, which her friend Rebecca from the village made using Dolly’s finest wool. Her handiwork was on display at the front of the shop, and Dolly claimed they were her best-selling items, even if they were knit rather than crochet. “Best-selling” must be a relative term, Merry thought, as she had yet to see a single customer enter the shop. However, that was a situation she hoped to rectify, if “Don’t Do What I Did” had any influence at all.