The last cow I treated before I left Munich was a Simmental with a twisted stomach, and I keep thinking about her on the drive south, because it's easier than thinking about the farm. I am Florian, thirty-two, a veterinarian with a practice in the city and a grandfather who has just told his notary he wants the family land to go to whichever of us still wants it. There are two of us.
Katharina is at the gate when I pull in, and she has been there a while.
Fifteen years since I saw her, the summer we were seventeen and everyone decided we spent too much time in the hayloft. She is taller than I remember, and browner, and she has our grandmother's way of standing with one hand on her hip as if the farm might try to leave.
“Flo.” No one has called me that since. “You came in the wrong car.”
“It's the only one I have.”
“It's white. It'll be green by Friday.” She takes my bag off my shoulder without asking and walks ahead into the yard, and I follow her the way I followed her when we were seven and she knew where the kittens were.
The barn is the same. The smell is the same: hay, warm animal, the sweetness of silage from the pit. Grandfather is asleep in his chair by the stove and doesn't wake, and Katharina stands in the kitchen doorway with the last of the evening light behind her and says, quietly, so as not to wake him, “He wants one of us to stay. He won't say which.”
“And what do you want?” She looks at me for a long moment, longer than a cousin should. “I want you to be here for the whole summer before you answer that,” she says. Then she puts my bag down at the foot of the stairs that lead to the room next to hers, and waits.
