Excerpt from You Have a Friend in 10A by Maggie Shipstead, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Mr. Otterbausch went up there sometimes to get away. He would sit beneath the long white skulls and look up through the aspens' trembling leaves at a patch of sky. The dudes paid the bills, and he knew they had as much right as anyone else to enjoy this country, but some days they seemed as profane a blight on the land as oil derricks or Walmarts or fast-food billboards. They strutted around, purposeful and aimless as pigeons, staring at the mountains and the sky and the trees, trying to stuff it all into their cameras. Wherever he was, Uncle Dex must have been royally pissed off.

Usually Sammy rode out alone when she wasn't with the dudes, but Mr. Otterbausch was happiest when he could make up some excuse for the two of them to ride together. Around dusk, after the dudes and the horses had been fed, he would seek her out to check on this or that bit of trail or retrieve a few steers that he had purposely let loose the night before. Those evenings, when the sky was amethyst and Sleepy Jean's mane blew over his hands as they loped along, it seemed that his longing and the moment when day tipped over into night were made out of the same stuff, aching and purple. While they hunted around for lost steers, he talked to her, telling her all his stories, and she listened without complaint or much comment, though sometimes she would ask "Then what?" and he would talk on with new verve. He worried that she would fall in love with a dude or with one of the wranglers, but she never seemed tempted.

He wanted to believe it was self-restraint that kept him from falling on his knees and begging her to love him, to marry him, at least to sleep with him, but during the rare moments when he told himself he must, if he did not want to spend the rest of his life in agony, confess his feelings, he knew the truth was that he was afraid. She was a full-grown woman now, not some helpless girl. He was afraid she would leave, afraid she would laugh, afraid he would not be able to survive all alone out on the blinding salt flats of her rejection. He might have gone on that way until he was old and gray, but when Sammy had been at the ranch for almost ten years, Mr. Otterbausch called the girlfriend he kept in Bozeman by Sammy's name one too many times. "God damn it!" she shouted, standing naked beside her bed while Mr. Otterbausch cowered beneath the sheets. "You have called me Sammy for the last time, Glen Otterbausch! My name is LuAnn! Remember me?" She grabbed her breasts with both hands and shook them at him. "LuAnn!"

He drove home, tail between his legs, and took a bottle of whiskey out on the front porch. The sun was dropping toward the hilltops where he had first ridden with Sammy, and he sat and looked at it. He didn't actually like whiskey, but it seemed to fit the occasion and was all he could scrounge from the two guys who happened to be in the bunkhouse when he stopped by. The dudes came in for dinner and then were herded off to campfire time. After the lodge fell quiet and the sky was fading from blue to purple, Mr. Otterbausch went over to Sammy's cottage and knocked on the door. Her dog, Dirt, barked once and fell silent when she said, from somewhere, "Dirt, hush up." She answered the door in her usual clothes, except she was barefoot. For a moment, he stared at her pale toes, which he'd never seen before. Then he looked beyond her, over her shoulder, saw a rocking chair with a Hudson's Bay blanket on it. A skillet on the stove. He caught the smell of fried eggs. Dirt sniffed around his boots. The dog had simply appeared one day, walking up the dirt road like Sammy had, and she had acted like she'd been expecting him all along. Because Dirt was shaped and bristled like a brown bottlebrush, the joke with the wranglers was that Mr. Otterbausch had turned one of his old mustaches into a dog for Sammy.

"Boss?" she said. One hand was up behind her head. She was holding back her hair.

"Sorry to disturb, but I've got a favor to ask. Mrs. Mullinax—you know her? the lady from Chicago?—says she left her camera up on the lookout rock. I said I'd ride up and check, and I was wondering if you'd come along. Two eyes better than one and all. Or I guess it's four eyes. Better than two." He laughed.

Excerpted from You Have a Friend in 10A by Maggie Shipstead. Copyright © 2022 by Maggie Shipstead. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.