A Creed in Stone Creek (6 page)

“It’s okay to get a dog,” Matt announced, all but jumping up and down with excitement by then. “Let’s go.” He grabbed for Steven’s hand, tried to pull him to his feet. “Right now!”

Laughing, Steven stood up. Mussed up Matt’s hair again.

Someone rapped at the door just then, and Steven answered. The ranch hands Brad had sent over were standing outside, thumbs hooked into the waistbands of their jeans, sun-browned faces upturned beneath the brims of their hats.

“Electricity ought to be working,” one of them said, without preamble. “Water, too.”

“Mind flipping a switch and turning on a faucet to make sure?” the other one asked.

“No problem,” Steven said. “Come on in.”

He’d spent a lot of time on a ranch, so he wasn’t surprised to glance back and see they hadn’t moved.

Matt was already switching the light on and off.

The faucet in the kitchen sink snorted a blast of air, chortled out some brown water, then ran clear.

“All set,” Steven said. “Thanks.”

The ranch hands grinned and nodded, and then they got into their beat-up work truck and drove away, dust pluming behind them.

Steven locked up the bus. Matt scrambled into their old pickup and expertly fastened himself into his safety seat, but Steven still checked to make sure every snap was engaged, just the same.

A minute or so later, they were on the road, making a dust plume of their own.

Stone Creek’s animal shelter was a sight to behold, a two-story brick structure with Dr. Olivia O’Ballivan
Quinn’s veterinary clinic occupying part of the first floor. The entrance to the shelter itself was at the other end of the building, so Steven and Matt headed that way.

The walls of the reception area were decorated with original paintings of dogs, cats and birds, of the whimsical, brightly colored variety, and there were plenty of comfortable chairs. A display of pet supplies occupied a corner, fronted with a handwritten sign saying all proceeds went toward the care of the four-legged residents.

There was no one behind the long, counter-type desk, but a young man in jeans and a lightweight sweatshirt crouched on the floor, a scruffy duffel bag beside him, ruffling the lopsided ears of a black-and-white sheepdog.

The girl Steven had seen at Melissa’s office that morning stood by, watching, and for some reason she blushed when her gaze connected with his.

“You could adopt him,” the girl said, addressing her companion.

But the young man shook his head, straightened with a sigh. “Not without a job, Andrea,” he said quietly. His hair was brown, a little long, his eyes a pale shade of amber, and full of sadness. “How would I pay for his food? And what if he gets sick and needs to go to the vet?”

“
I’ve
got a job,” Andrea said. “I can help out with expenses for a while.”

“You work for Melissa,” Matt piped up happily, smiling at Andrea.

Her smile faltered slightly, but it was friendly. She
nodded, then turned back to her friend. “Byron—” she began.

But Byron silenced her with a shake of his head.

Just then, a chubby woman with frizzy brown hair came out of the back, greeting Steven and Matt with a cheerful hello and an I’ll-be-right-with-you before turning her attention to Byron and Andrea and the sheepdog.

“Well?” she asked hopefully. “Have we made a decision?”

Steven thought he detected a note of compassion in her tone.

Once again, Byron shook his head. “It just won’t work,” he said. “Not right now.”

The woman sighed. Her nametag read
Becky,
and she wore print scrubs in bright shades of pink and green and blue. “Your mom must be happy to have you back home,” she said gently.

By then, Matt was down on one knee, petting the sheepdog, and Byron watched with a sad smile.

“She doesn’t know I’m here yet,” Byron answered, his gaze bouncing off Andrea once before landing on Becky. “I got off the bus to hitchhike the rest of the way, but then Andrea came along and picked me up just this side of Flagstaff. I needed to be around a dog to get myself centered, so we came here first.”

Andrea winced slightly, as though Byron had inadvertently revealed some vital secret.

Byron looked at Steven briefly, then at Matt. “He’s a nice dog, isn’t he?” he asked, indicating the hopeful critter.

Matt nodded. “We’re here to get ourselves a dog,” he told Byron. “We have a ranch. Right now, we live in a
bus, but we’re going to have a house and a yard pretty soon.”

Byron smiled, but there was still something forlorn about him. “Sounds like you’d be a good match for this fella, then.”

“Don’t you want him?” Matt asked. He might have been only five years old, but he was perceptive. He’d picked up on the reluctance in Byron’s decision not to adopt this particular dog.

“He needs a home,” Byron said. “Just now, I can’t give him one—not the right kind, anyway. So if you think he’s the dog for you, and your dad says it’s okay, you probably ought to take him home with you.”

Andrea started to cry, silently. She turned away when she realized Steven was looking at her.

Becky, on the other hand, was still on the other subject. “You’d better let your mom know you’re home, Byron,” she said in motherly tones. “Velda’s been looking forward to having you back in Stone Creek. She probably met the bus. And when there was no sign of you—”

Byron’s shoulders drooped slightly, and he sighed. Nodded. Turned to Andrea, who had stopped crying, though her eyes were red-rimmed and her lashes were spiky with moisture. “Give me a ride home?” he asked her.

“Sure,” she said.

“We can always use volunteers around here, Byron,” Becky added. “Folks to feed the animals, and play with them, and clean out kennels.”

Byron smiled at her. “That would be good,” he said. Then after pausing to pat the sheepdog on the head
once, in regretful farewell, he followed Andrea out of the building without looking back.

“That poor kid,” Becky said, and her eyes welled up as she stared after Byron and Andrea. Then she seemed to give herself an inward shake. Turning her smile on Steven and Matt, she said, “May I help you?”

“We’re here to adopt a dog,” Steven answered, still vaguely unsettled by the sense of sorrow Byron and Andrea had left in their wake.

“Well,” Becky said, with enthusiasm, gesturing toward the sheepdog, “as you can see, we have a prime candidate right here.”

The dog’s name was Zeke, Steven and Matt soon learned, and he was about two years old, housebroken and, for the most part, well-behaved. His former owner, an older gentleman, had gone into a nursing home a few weeks ago, suffering from an advanced case of Alzheimer’s, and his daughter had brought Zeke to the shelter in hopes that he’d find a new home.

“Can we have him?” Matt asked, looking up at Steven. “Please?”

Steven was pretty taken with Zeke himself, but then, he’d never met a dog he didn’t like. He’d have adopted every critter in the shelter, if he had his way. “Wouldn’t you like to check out a few others before you decide?” he asked.

Matt wrapped both arms around Zeke’s neck and held on, shaking his head. “He’s the one,” he said, with certainty. “Zeke’s the one.”

Zeke obligingly licked the boy’s cheek.

Steven glanced at Becky, who was beaming with approval. Clearly, she agreed.

“Okay,” Steven said, smiling.

He filled out the forms, paid the fees and bought a big sack of the recommended brand of kibble. Zeke came with a leash and a collar, left over from his former life.

He rode back to the ranch in the bed of the truck, since there was no room inside, but he seemed at home there, in the way of country dogs.

Matt sat half-turned in his car seat the whole way, keeping an eye on Zeke, who’d stuck his head through the sliding window at the back of the cab.

“I bet Zeke misses his person,” the boy said.

Steven felt a pang at that, figuring there might be some transference going on. It was no trick to connect the dots: Matt missed
his
people, too.

“Might be,” Steven agreed carefully.

Matt had referred to him as “my new dad” that day, as he sometimes did. It was probably the only way he could think of to differentiate Steven from Zack. And the boy wanted desperately to remember his birth father.

He had slightly more difficulty recalling Jillie, since he’d been younger when his mother died.

“Do you miss anybody?” Matt asked. His voice was slight, like his frame, and a little breathless.

“Yeah,” Steven said. “I miss your mom and dad. I miss my own mom, and my granddad, too.”

“Do you miss Davis and Kim? And your cousins?”

Davis was Steven’s father, Kim his stepmother. They were alive and well, living on the Creed ranch in Colorado, though they’d turned the main house and much of the day-to-day responsibility over to Conner.

Brody, not being the responsible type, had left home years ago, and stayed gone.

“Yes,” Steven answered. They went through this
litany of the missing whenever the boy needed to do it. “I miss them a lot.”

“But we can go visit Davis and Kim and Conner. And they can visit us,” Matt said, as the sheepdog panted happily and drooled all over the gearshift. “My mommy and daddy are
dead.
”

Steven reached across to squeeze Matt’s shoulder lightly. As much as he might have wanted to—the kid wasn’t even old enough to go to school yet, after all, let alone understand death—he never dodged the subject just because it was difficult. If Matt brought up the topic, they talked it over. It was an unwritten rule: tell the truth and things will work out. Steven believed that.

Matt lapsed into his own thoughts, idly patting Zeke’s head as they traveled along that curvy country road, toward the ranch. Toward the borrowed tour bus they’d be calling home for a while.

Steven wondered, certainly not for the first time, what Jillie and Zack would think about the way he was raising their son, their only child. Also not for the first time, he reflected that they must have trusted him. Within a month of Matt’s birth, they’d drafted a will declaring Steven to be their son’s legal guardian, should both of them die or become incapacitated.

It hadn’t seemed likely, to say the least, that the two of them wouldn’t live well into old age, but neither Jillie nor Zack had any other living relatives, besides their infant son, and Jillie had insisted it was better to be safe than sorry.

He’d do his damnedest to keep Matt safe, Steven thought, but he’d always be sorry, too. Much as he loved this little boy, Steven never forgot that the child rightly belonged to his lost parents first.

He slowed for the turn, signaled.

“Will you show me my daddy and mommy’s picture again?” Matt asked, when they reached the top of the driveway and Steven stopped the truck and shut off the engine.

“Sure,” he said. The word came out sounding hoarse.

“I don’t want to forget what they look like,” Matt said. Then, sadly, “I do, sometimes. Forget, I mean. Almost.”

“That’s okay, Tex. It happens to the best of us.” Steven got out of the truck, walked around behind it, dropped the tailgate and hoisted an eager Zeke to the ground before going on to open Matt’s door and unbuckle him from all his gear. “Now that we’re going to stay put, we’ll unpack that picture you like so much, and you can keep it in your room.”

Matt nodded, mercifully distracted by the dog, and the two of them—kid and critter—ran wildly around in the tall grass for a while, letting off steam.

Steven carried the kibble into the tour bus and stowed it in the little room where the stacking washer and dryer kept a hot-water tank company. He spent the next twenty minutes carrying suitcases and dry goods and a few boxes containing pots and pans from the house to the bus, keeping an eye on Matt and Zeke as they explored.

“Stay away from the barn,” Steven ordered. “There are bound to be some rusty nails, and if you step on one, it means a tetanus shot.”

Matt made a face. “No shots!” he decreed, setting his hands on his hips.

Zeke barked happily, as if to back up the assertion.

Without answering, Steven went inside, filled a bowl with water and brought it outside.

Zeke rushed over, drank noisily until he’d had his fill.

That done, he proceeded to lift his leg against one of the bus tires.

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Matt asked, observing. “He’s going
outside.
”

Steven chuckled. “It’s good,” he confirmed. “How about some supper?”

Matt liked the idea, and he and Zeke followed Steven back into the bus. Steven opened the kibble sack, and Matt filled a saucepan and set it down on the floor for the dog.

While Zeke crunched and munched, Steven scrubbed his hands and forearms at the sink, plucked a tin of beef ravioli from the stash of groceries he and Matt had brought along on the road trip, used a can opener and scooped two portions out onto plates, shoved the first one into the microwave oven.

“Time to wash up,” he told Matt.

“What about the picture of Mommy and Daddy?”

“We’ll find it after supper, Tex. A man’s got to eat, if he’s going to run a ranch.”

Matt rushed off to the bathroom; Steven heard water running. Grinned.

By the time Matt returned and took his place at the booth-type table next to the partition that separated the cab of the bus from the living quarters, Steven was taking the second plate of ravioli out of the oven.

“Ravioli again? Yum!” Matt said, picking up his plastic fork and digging in with obvious relish.

“Yeah,” Steven admitted, joining the boy at the table. “It’s good.”

I might have to expand my culinary repertoire, though,
he thought. Couldn’t expect the kid to grow up on processed food, even if it was quick and tasty.

Maybe they’d plant a garden.

Chewing, Steven recalled all the weeding, watering, hoeing and shoveling he’d done every summer when he came home to the ranch in Colorado. Kim, his dad’s wife, always grew a lot of vegetables—tomatoes and corn, lettuce and green beans, onions and spuds and a whole slew of other things—freezing and canning the excess.

The work had been never-ending.