Creed chuckled. “Do I get to choose where you hang them?”
Sage blushed crimson. “No, that’s my decision.”
“Some days a homely old cowboy just can’t win for losing.” He sighed. “Let’s go fetch the box with the stand in it and get this tree standing upright.”
The decorations were stacked neatly in one of the three bedrooms in the bunkhouse. Back when Grandpa Presley was still alive they’d had all three bedrooms filled up and the hired hands did their own cooking. But one by one Grand had let them go through the following years, and by the time Sage was old enough to remember, the bunkhouse was used for storage. Later, after she’d come home from college, she’d used the big living room and kitchen combo for her spring, summer, and fall work space, but it had been years since the water and gas had been turned on to the place.
She wondered if Creed would bring the whole ranch back to its original status: five or six times as many head of cattle, hay fields, and much, much less mesquite dotting the land.
Creed read the writing on the masking tape stuck to the top of the blue plastic bin. “Tree stand. Outside lights. I pictured cardboard boxes.”
“That’s the right one to start with. We used to keep them in cardboard boxes, but the mice kept getting in them so we replaced the boxes with bins.”
“Okay, let’s go get it upright so it can drip on the floor while we string the barn lights. Then we’ll mop up the mess and start decorating,” he said.
She picked up a second box marked tree lights. “Mr. Organization.”
“It takes a fair amount of that to run a ranch.”
They were almost to the house when they stopped at exactly the same time and turned their ear toward the highway.
“Snowplows!” she said excitedly. “That means the electricity will be back on before long and I can do laundry.”
“Me too! I’m almost out of clean socks and there’s a whole basket full of dirty clothes in my room. I dreaded washing by hand,” he said.
His room! Grand’s room!
The whole concept was so tangled up that it made Sage’s head hurt, so she pushed it away. Today she was decorating the tree and putting up lights. When it was all done, she intended to send pictures to Grand. And when she saw the pictures, it would make her so homesick that she would come home, maybe even before Christmas Eve. She could bring Essie with her and Sage would look after both of them. Hell, she’d give Essie her bedroom and clean up the bunkhouse to live in. She liked to go there to paint in the spring and fall anyway, and with very little work, it could be a nice big comfortable house just for her.
“What’s on your mind, Sage?” Creed asked when they reached the back porch.
“Decorating,” she said.
“You’ve been pretty quiet all morning. Something happened out there at the rock formation. What did you see?”
“What is probably a glimpse of the future.”
“And that makes you mad?”
“Why mad?” she asked.
“Because it did not make you happy or you would have reacted differently.”
“Not mad, but sad. I don’t adapt well to change. I like my rut. I love it, as a matter-of-fact. It is my stability, my rock, and I know what’s happening next.”
“That’s not life, darlin’.”
“I know, but I don’t have to like it.”
* * *
Creed fastened the tree stand onto the trunk of the tree and stood it upright in front of the window. And like the sun coming out after days and days of dreary rain, Sage’s mood turned from dark to sunny instantly. She clapped her hands and kissed him on the cheek in her excitement.
“It’s beautiful. It’s the best one ever and I mean it. Look how perfect the limbs are and it’s just the right height for the angel. She won’t even hit her head on the ceiling, and we don’t have to trim anything off. I wish the snow wouldn’t melt off.”
Creed laughed. “Darlin’, you can’t have fire and ice both. Now let’s go get that barn and fence ready to light up before we take off our coveralls.”
Putting the lights around the barn wasn’t an easy feat in the snow, but by noon they had them in place and the cord taped down to the barn floor all the way into the tack room. Sage held her breath and plugged them in. They were old and that meant if one was shot none of them would light up. Then the painstaking job of unscrewing one bulb after another began until they found the one that was the dirty culprit with the blown filament.
She stuck it in the socket and hurried outside.
“Well, shit!” she yelled and shook her fist at the lights around the barn.
Creed was busy twining the next roll around the top string of barbed wire on the fence.
“Problem?” he asked.
“We’ve got a blown bulb somewhere. I’ll get a good one from the bin.”
“Why?”
“Because these are those old lights and if one is blown none of them work. And you have to replace them one at a time to see which one is bad.”
“Sage, there is no electricity.”
She popped her palm against her forehead. “Duh!”
“Don’t beat yourself up. I still turn the light on in the bathroom every time I go in there and the oil lamp is right there to remind me.”
“Crazy, ain’t it? If you are finished, let’s go get two boxes of decorations and start on the tree.”
They had barely shut the door to the bunkhouse when a rat came out of nowhere, ran across the toes of Creed’s boots, kept moving until it hit Sage’s leg, climbed up one side of her jeans, scooted across her butt, and hurried back down the other side.
Like a contortionist she tried to turn her upper body around on the lower. She slapped at her butt without touching it, screamed, and did
