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away, and when I tried to lead her into the barn, she balked and bolted back out into the field.
    Book snorted his usual snort. “I ain’t going after her,” he said. “That one’s all on you.”
    I ended up tricking Tammy back to the barn with a pile of grain on the ground by the door. When she wandered over to inspect it and then eat it, I jumped out from behind her and shoved her inside — and latched the door before she could bolt again. I had to drag her onto the milking stand and dropped the stanchion over her neck right away. Book went back to the house. Patsy and Loretta stayed out in the field. Tammy, defeated, shoved her face into the trough and let me milk.
    We had to pasteurize the milk, then stir in the bacteria culture and rennet, which is what turned it into cheese. Book told me how to do it while he sat at the kitchen table. “So this is your job from now on, like Mama told you this morning,” he said. “Now what you do is just cover it and let it sit in the fridge or anywhere cool until tomorrow, then you salt it and set it up so you drain off what they call the whey, and then you have your cheese.” He pointed to the stack of plastic containers. “Mama spoons it in there, and that’s what she sells at the farmers’ market.”
    “You don’t add anything else?” I asked him. “You don’t smoke it or flavor it or anything?”
    Book shook his head. “Mama says it’s too much trouble. We’re the only ones in five counties that makes goat cheese, and rich people can’t get enough of it just like that — just the soft goat cheese. They think it’s better than real cheese. More fancier.”
    Looking around, I figured they could use the money. They didn’t have a computer. No answering machine and probably no voice mail — just basic service and a black telephone so old the numbers were worn off the touch pad. They did have a TV and an antenna on top of the house, but no cable and no satellite dish. Aunt Sue had a twenty-year-old VCR that probably ate most of the tapes she brought home from the warehouse.
    About the only thing she had for entertainment that worked properly was a small, tinny, food-stained Walmart store-brand CD player. She kept it on the kitchen counter for listening to her country music CDs. Book told me sometimes he snuck his friends’ heavy metal on when she wasn’t home, but Aunt Sue always knew when he did because she said the nannies heard it all the way out in the yard and it caused their milk to sour.
    We had sandwiches again that night. I made mine with white bread, processed cheese, and wilted leaves from a half-brown head of iceberg lettuce, with a dill pickle on the side, which was pretty much all they had that I could eat. Aunt Sue didn’t allow us to eat any of the goat cheese or drink the goat milk. I thought about telling Aunt Sue that I was a vegetarian, but I suspected she would give me a hard time about it. Plus if all we were ever going to do around there was eat sandwiches, it probably didn’t matter. She and Book both made Dagwoods like the one Book had been eating the night before, with plenty of meat. I felt a little sick watching them wolf it all down.
    They talked about the football team, the schedule, the college recruiters, the asshole coaches, the asshole refs, the game coming up this Friday night, the game last Friday night, which must have been before the school year even started, though I didn’t care enough to ask. Neither of them asked about my day, which didn’t really surprise me. But I thought I should at least make some effort to be friendly.
    “So I think I got my schedule lined up OK,” I said when they both stopped to chew. “It’s not great. I’ve already taken all of the AP classes they have here when I was back in Maine. They might put me in some senior classes in the spring, though, which could be good.”
    Book snorted. It seemed to be an involuntary response to just about everything. “Know what
AP
stands for?
Absolute