Page 21 of It's Always Sonny

“Triplet birth,” he says. “This guy was the runt. The other two goats took up so much space in the womb, he was too crammed for his tendons to grow as long and strong as they need to be.” Then to Linda, he says, “I’ll go fix that lock on the goat pen. Be right back.”

“Thanks, Rusty,” she says.

The little goat is still trying to make his way over on his bent hooves, and the heat in my chest spreads with a pang. I walk over to him and crouch down. The other goats bound around me, but I ignore them, only pushing them away when they try to snack on my clothes or hair.

The goat crawls up to me and climbs into my lap. My hand hovers over him. I’m going to need to wash after this, but he’s so pathetic. And cute. With a sigh, I pet his strangely soft and fluffy hair. I’m not a pet person by any stretch of the imagination. He makes an adorable bleating sound, though, and even with his farm stink, this isn’t the worst thing.

“What’ll happen to him?”

Linda kneels next to me and stretches the little goat’s front legs out one after the other. “They typically work through it naturally within a couple of weeks. We can cast his front legs if he can’t do it on his own.”

The mental image of this tiny goat wearing casts is almost too much for me to take.

“What’s his name?”

“He was only born yesterday. We haven’t named him yet,” Linda says. “Any ideas?”

Why would she ask me, of all people? I’m not a pet person, let alone a goat person. I’m more of a GOAT person. The idea makes me snort. “Sweetness.”

“Sweetness?” Linda asks.

“Yes, Sweetness, aka Walter Payton,” I say. “He was the greatest running back of all time.”

Linda’s brow furrows and then clears. “Ah, you’re naming a goat after a GOAT.”

My ears get hot. “It’s a stupid joke. I don’t know anything about naming an animal.”

“It’s not stupid,” Linda says. “It’s very clever. That is exactly how people name a pet.”

“Oh, he’s not a pet. Not mine, anyway.”

“Of course.” Linda nods. “You said this ‘Sweetness’ was a running back. Isn’t that the position Sonny plays?”

Stupid Parker!

I shrug, but Linda sees through me like I’m made of glass. “How have you been feeling since you ran into him last week?”

“Fine. I’m not thinking of him much.”

“Define much.”

I glare, and she smiles. “It’s not incessant. But yeah, I’m thinking of him still.”

“What are you thinking?”

“That I’m never going to find someone like him again. That I’ll never be as happy as I was with him.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I know I’ll never find someone like him,” I say.

“But you really think you’ll never be as happy?”

I frown. I was blissfully, madly, wildly happy with Sonny. My whole life to that point, I’d felt confined to a cell and shackled to the earth, but with Sonny, my chains were broken and I was flying free.

But going from no freedom to utter freedom was terrifying. I had no one to teach me how to go from one extreme to the other, and I was constantly afraid I was getting it wrong. The effort to be enough for him was a blip compared to the effort I had to make with my parents.

But it wasn’t nothing.

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