“You brought them in with you. I guess the wind blew a bunch down from one of the scrub oak trees. One piece was stuck on your shoulder when you came in the first time. Then you tracked the other two inside.”
“We’ll tie a red ribbon around them and hang them up for the holidays. When are we putting up the tree?”
“Well, it won’t be today, will it?”
“Don’t get all cranky on me, lady.”
“Statin’ facts. Not bein’ cranky.”
“You do put up a tree, don’t you?”
“Yes, we do. A big real cedar tree and we decorate the whole house even if just me and Grand are the only ones who see it. She might be gone this year until the last minute, but I’ll have the whole place decorated up by the time she gets home.”
Creed laid his book aside. “I love Christmas. Momma sends me and Dalton and Blake to the woods the day after Thanksgiving while she and my brothers’ wives do the Black Friday shopping. That night everyone comes home for leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner and we decorate the tree. I won’t be there this year, but we can find a cedar tree and start our own tradition right here.”
There was that word again, or at least a derivative of it.
Us. We. Our.
They all meant a joining of minds to form relationships, friendships, or otherwise. How could things change so quickly? Wasn’t she fighting against it with all her soul and heart?
“If this wind doesn’t stop we might have to dig a tree out from under the drifts before we could even cut it down,” she said and went back to painting.
“It’s doable. When it does stop we’ll go find just the right one and we’ll drag it in here, snow and all. These floors will mop up, and the branches would soon dry in the warm room. Did you ever wish you’d grown up in a big family atmosphere?” he asked.
“All the time,” she said wistfully as she carefully dotted in the angel’s eyes with her smallest brush. “You’ll miss them if you stay, Creed. The canyon is a lonely place.”
“But it’s peaceful and that doesn’t come cheap. And lonely is just a state of mind. Sometimes peace can override lonely if…” He stopped.
“Go on.”
“I was engaged a while back. Head over heels in love with a woman named Macy. She went on a trip and when she came home she said she didn’t really love me. She loved the idea of being in love, but she didn’t think she’d ever really loved me. Turned out she’d met someone else that she did love on that trip. The engagement was over and I kept asking myself what I could have done different. This place has brought me the first peace I’ve known since then.”
Sage’s heart stopped. After that confession, how could she push him out of the canyon? Or maybe he was just playing her so that she wouldn’t put up a fight for her grandmother to back out of the sale. He said he always told the truth and could be trusted, but saying and doing were often two horses of very different colors.
“Well?” he said.
“At least she was honest,” Sage said.
“Yes, she was.”
“It is peaceful here if you don’t mind the solitude. Grand is an old hermit. She won’t ever like being cooped up in a house with her sister or living in a congested part of the world.”
“I thought her sister had a farm.”
“Five acres. One old two-story house. A barn. Two cows, some chickens, and an apple orchard. Not much of a farm really.”
“And is it in the middle of a big town?”
“Shade Gap is a rural community. Barely even anything left there except for a gas station and a picnic ground.”
“Sounds like she’d be real happy there. As for me, there are cows, hogs, chickens, and when there is electricity there’s good country music to listen to. And now Noel is here and there will be puppies.”
“What happens when her owner comes to take her home?”
Creed looked at the poor skinny dog. “No one is coming to claim her, Sage. She’s a castoff that someone tossed out before the storm hit. She’s probably been living on field mice for a week and sleeping in barns. She’s too skinny to have been thrown away just before the blizzard hit. She’s found a home and a friend in you. Darlin’, she ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
Sage laid her brush down and scratched Noel’s ears. “Stop callin’ me darlin’. I’m not and I will never be your darlin’.”
“It’s just my way and I’m not changing,” he said.
As if Noel understood that men were strange creatures who couldn’t be reasoned with, she wagged her tail so hard that it sounded like a drumbeat on the hardwood floor.
“Look, Creed! I swear she smiled.”
“Dogs do that when they’re happy, just like humans.”
Sage rubbed her fur and said, “You’re a good girl. I bet you were raised on Venus with the rest of us girls and not on Mars with a bunch of mean old boys.”
“I read that book,” Creed said.
Sage turned her head so quickly that her neck cracked. “Why would a cowboy like you read that book?”
“Because my brother’s wife mentioned it and because I wanted to understand why women are the way they are.”
“Did you learn anything?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not much. Just that y’all are temperamental. That y’all approach things you can’t change with anger or tears. And that to really understand a woman is impossible.”
He changed the subject abruptly. “Wonder what the puppies will look like? Maybe they’ll have some old redbone in them.”
“Not a chance. Noel wouldn’t fall in love with a huntin’ hound. She’s going to have Irish setter puppies or maybe even beagles, but not an old coonhound, are you, baby girl?” Sage kissed the dog between
