Baby Goat on the Roof

“You’re dead to me,” Cas says when I dart back inside the house and catch her dancing through the living room in her red string bikini. Cinnamon scents the room as she waitresses a plate of oatmeal cookies—hot, no raisins—and rotates for her boyfriend Earl, bending forward, making his Adam’s apple bobble.

I was supposed to be getting lost for two hours, but now I want to call Mom about the weird game Cas is playing, and I want to yell at Earl to get out of Dad’s chair, and I want to scream how stupid Cas looks in a bikini holding cookies, but I can’t because there’s a baby goat on the roof.

I shout and shout about the goat until they follow me into the yard and watch it sproing to the tip of the pitch and down again. Its little hooves tap-dance along, frolicking on the dull gray shingles.

We can’t figure how it got up or how it’ll get down, so Earl drags Dad’s rusted ladder from the shed, and climbs up, clomping after the goat in his clunky black boots. The baby goat squeaks like a dog toy then full on laughs, a weird ba-ha-ha sound. Earl chases it round and round, but each time the goat side-hops away, slipping just out of reach.

“Stop playing hero and come back inside,” Cas begs him.

Earl’s eyes swivel, his attention caught between the baby goat and Cas’ red strings, the ones she says he can untie with his teeth if he follows her back inside this second.

“Playing hero?” Earl says, “I’m only kidding around.” He raises one brow, waiting for Cas to get the joke. She rolls her eyes, but I full-on snort. Kidding.

It makes me miss Dad and his dumb jokes. Even though Mom says we don’t need another man around, I don’t think she means Earl, with his lopsided hair and big milky teeth. Earl, who’s still more boy than man with that gulping gaze he gets whenever he sees even an inch of Cas’ skin.

Today, she’s showing miles. Cas moves and Earl wobbles. She bends low, and he nearly busts through the rain gutter. All the while, the baby goat laughs and laughs, darting back and forth, and I don’t know why Cas refuses to help. It would be good practice for chasing her own someday kids, but she only huffs and flops on a deck lounger, readjusts herself so her butt plumps into the air.

Cas whiffs of cocoa butter, and I know for a fact she hates the knobs of her kneecaps, hates that Mom says sunning will make her as leathered as an elephant’s ear, hates me and not just for being underfoot when Earl is over.

I add baby goats to the mental list of things Cas hates, while the goat skips in a figure-eight pattern and Earl scrambles after it, like a dancer on TV, but clumsier. The baby goat looks so happy, and Earl looks happy too.

He waves his cap at the goat and shouts, “Hey!”He whistles and begs Cas to come up, but she ignores him, so I snake up the ladder instead.

On the last rung, Earl takes my hand and I imagine how soft the goat must feel. Its heart pounding. The smooth velvet nubs of its horns coming in.

Earl and I go after the baby goat together. It whips by me and I lose my balance, but Earl swoops me up and holds me steady. We come up with strategies—one chasing, the other catching—and try different snicking sounds, but nothing works. Earl suggests we try trapping the goat in a sheet and I picture limbs punching out, like how Cas’ belly will look if she keeps trying to do it with Earl.

Cas has a woman’s body already. She flops onto her back, cocoa butter slicked, the lines from the lounger leaving white grill marks on her pink pork chop skin. It reminds me we’re getting burned too.

I palm my hot nose and Earl plops his cap on my head while the baby goat nibbles at the edge of the gutter. He chomps on a loose shingle, then chews at the coil of Christmas lights Dad put up years ago. The ones we never took down. The ones with a broken bulb that Mom keeps saying we can replace, and it will all light up again. But we never do.

As we tromp around after the goat, I have half a mind to ask Earl if he’s any good at replacing bulbs or if he plans on sticking around after he’s done sticking it to my sister, but I’m already imagining he will. The same way I imagine Dad will come back and Cas will get nice and Mom will get happy, the way I pray for something to lift us so we’ll all be whole again.

I whisper-think my prayers to the sun, to the pork chop lines on Cas’ legs, to the soft hairs on Earl’s arms. To the baby goat, sproinging again so high it’s practically flying.

Earl sits down to catch his breath and I join him on the hot shingles, marveling at how far you can see from the housetop—dirt puffing up in far-off fields and the hazy mountains beyond—and here on the roof, the warm animal smell of the goat, the musk of our sweat, and cinnamon swirled with Cas’ suntan lotion as she carries the oatmeal cookies up the ladder and joins us. She sets the plate in her lap, laces fingers with Earl and beckons the baby goat with her free hand. It eases toward her, shyly at first then all at once, nuzzling, the same way I would to Cas or Earl, to anyone who’d let me.