“Tell her I said hell no!”
“Be careful, darlin’. Sometimes that hell no business sneaks up and bites you on the ass. Essie’s got her hand out. I guess you’re going to have to talk to her for a spell before you get to hang up.”
Essie’s voice came over the line loud and clear. She didn’t sound like she was feeble and needed anybody’s help. “Hello, Sage.”
“What’s this about you crawling up on the roof? Don’t make me come out there, Aunt Essie.”
“Shingles were coming loose. Somebody had to fix them and if I thought you’d move out here, I’d crawl back up there again. You don’t be worryin’ none about me, child. You’ve got enough to worry about with a strange man right in the house with you. I don’t know what Ada was thinkin’ about, leavin’ you there with him. He’s been a gentleman, hasn’t he?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ada wrestled the phone from her sister. “Give me that.”
“Grand, what are you two doing? Fighting like little girls?” Sage asked.
“You damn right we are. Don’t you be buyin’ her brand of bullshit! I knew exactly what I was doing when that cowboy walked up on my porch. I saw a vision of the future. My Indian senses get sharper with age. Don’t you dare laugh at me. You got the vision too. You just call it your PGs and paint what you see. I know in my heart he’s the right cowboy to take on the Rockin’ C.”
“I’m starving. Let’s make Reuben dogs,” Creed’s deep drawl came through the phone line. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see that you were talking to someone.”
“Reuben dogs? He eats sauerkraut on hot dogs. He’s definitely a keeper,” Ada told Sage.
“It’s Grand,” Sage said.
“Hi, Miz Ada. The sun is out and we’re diggin’ out. Didn’t lose a single cow and we gained some inside livestock,” he raised his voice.
“Go take care of your cowboy,” Ada said.
“You and Aunt Essie both are losin’ your minds.”
“Call me tomorrow when you have time, and don’t pay no mind to Essie. I wouldn’t leave you with a serial killer.”
Chapter 8
“That one is too big,” Creed said.
Sage walked around the enormous cedar tree and imagined it with lights and tinsel. “But it’s shaped just right.”
“Look up, Sage.”
She threw her head back expecting to see something fantastic like shadows creating a phenomenal idea for a painting or maybe a ball of mistletoe the size of a church punch bowl. But there was nothing but a promising Christmas tree.
“Now look at me and compare the tree to my height. Remember the ceiling is eight feet,” he said.
“Well, dammit!”
“They look a lot smaller in the pasture than they really are. That thing would take up more than half of our living room.”
“You sound like Grand,” she said.
“Does that mean you’ve always wanted a tree that wouldn’t go through the kitchen door?”
“I love Christmas. It’s my favorite holiday and we’ve got tons of ornaments. When I was a little girl, I was afraid if we didn’t get them all on the tree that the ones left behind would get their feelings hurt. It’s crazy but…”
His big hand closed around hers, dwarfing it in size. She liked that. She’d been the tallest kid in the kindergarten class and kept that title until ninth grade when the boys started catching up. By then she’d heard all the jokes about height—How’s the weather up there? Can you see the ground? Do we all look like toys?—and had developed a complex about it.
He led her through the crusty-topped snow to another tree. “How about this one?”
She studied it carefully. “It’s four feet taller than you, which means at least three feet would have to come out of the top to make room for the angel, and it would look like a blob.”
They went another fifty yards across the pasture with the rock formation that Sage had painted so many times getting closer and closer. Finally, she stopped and stared at the rock. Answers were there. They always had been. She just had to stare at it long enough and they would surface.
“You see something to paint or are we still looking for a tree?” Creed asked.
She hadn’t realized that she’d stopped or that she’d been gazing at the rock so long. Creed hadn’t pressured her to go on and find a tree. He didn’t tell her that it was cold and they were walking through snow that came almost to the tops of their boots. He hadn’t even shifted from one leg to the other and sighed deeply. It was those things that he didn’t do that she appreciated as much as all the things he had done that whole week.
“The first time Grand brought me to this spot I was about five years old. Grand and I were going to put flowers on the graves. I hated that. It made it so final that I didn’t have a father or a mother like other kids.
“I saw Grandpa’s profile in the eroded edges of the top rock. Even though he was dead and gone before I was born, I recognized him from the picture that Grand kept on the dresser in her bedroom. The sky was cloudless with only the silhouette of a single bird high up in the sky on the opposite side of Grandpa. There he was with his heavy eyebrows, wide nose with just a slight bump on the top, moustache, lower lip, and chin that dropped into a saggy neckline. And I told her that I was going to paint that rock someday.”
“How long was it before you actually painted it?”
“More than sixteen years. I went home that day when I was five and drew it on a piece of paper and gave it to Grand. She still has it somewhere.”
“It’s quite a formation,” he said.
It rose up out of the floor of the canyon like a huge ocher-colored sandcastle with a sloped side at the back where a cautious
