She picked up the bigger of the two black ones. “These two should have reindeer names too. Look, Creed, there’s a little white blaze on his hip that we didn’t notice. He is definitely Comet. And the solid black one is Donner.”
“What if they’re all girl kittens?” he asked.
“Then we’ll take them to cat therapists when they are teenagers and get help for the complexes they’ll have because they have weird names.” She laughed.
“You about ready?” he asked.
“Almost.”
She went over to Noel’s blanket and squatted down to pet her. “Did Creed run your legs off this morning doing chores, girl? You look like you could sleep all day long. You take a good nap and we’ll be back in a little while. In a couple of days we’ll go up to Claude and get you some of that fancy dog food in cans. Will you like that?”
Noel wagged her tail and licked Sage’s fingers, but she didn’t move from her blanket. Sage straightened up and went to the kitchen where she put on her old work boots. “Who would have thought I’d be attached to a dog and a bunch of cats or that I’d let them come into the house?”
“You have a good heart, Sage. You wouldn’t deliberately let something stay out in the cold and freeze to death,” Creed said.
“And besides, who’d take in something as cosmetically challenged as Noel?” She giggled.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” he quipped.
“She does grow on you, don’t she? I thought she was the ugliest mutt I’d ever seen when she got here, but she gets cuter by the day.”
He settled his felt hat on his head and handed her a black knit stocking cap. “Yes, ma’am, she does.”
The tractor didn’t move fast, especially through snow. He turned on the radio and picked up a station out of Amarillo that played all country music.
“You like that kind of music?” Sage asked. She’d been to bed with him, kissed him until her knees were weak, and tried to accept the fact that he’d be living on the ranch, but she didn’t even know what kind of music he liked.
“Yes, I do. What do you like?”
“Rap,” she said seriously.
He jerked his head around so quick that his hat fell off and landed in her lap. She picked it up and handed it back to him.
“I’m teasing. I grew up on country because that’s what Grand likes. So yes, I like that station. It does seem strange after a whole week of nothing but silence to have music again. I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed it.”
Brad Paisley began to sing a song called “Long Sermon.” It talked about two boys sitting in church listening to a long sermon when they’d much rather be outside in the sunshine in a boat doing some serious fishing.
Creed kept time with his thumbs on the steering wheel and sang along with the chorus.
“Ever done that?” Sage asked.
“Oh, yeah, I have. How about you?”
“Don’t tell God but I’ve painted dozens of pictures in my mind while the preacher sermonized,” she said.
“Where do you go to church? Claude?”
She shook her head. “We go over to the chapel at Canyon Rose on Sunday afternoons.”
“Afternoons?” Creed asked.
“The preacher comes from Amarillo. It’s just a little missionary church so we have our Sunday service at two thirty on Sunday afternoons. Unless the canyon fills up with snow and the preacher can’t get down the roads.”
“Baptist?”
Another shake of the head. “Methodist. But everybody in the canyon comes to it. Catholic. Methodist. Holiness. We don’t pay much attention to denomination.”
An Alan Jackson song followed that song, and then there was a five-minute spread of news that talked mostly about the power outages and the snowstorm. That was followed by the weatherman telling them that there was another cold front coming across the plains that would hit that night. Temperatures would drop even further, but there wouldn’t be any moisture with it.
“However,” he said, “folks can begin to rest assured if they live in the Palo Duro Canyon that they are going to have a white Christmas. Don’t put the sleighs up yet. You might need them and the horses to get around. And for the next hour we’ll be taking requests for your favorite holiday songs by country artists. And our first request is from a listener in Claude who wants to hear ‘Joy to the World.’”
“I love Christmas carols,” Sage said.
“We used to go caroling in Ringgold. We’d gather up at the church and Daddy would hook up a trailer to the back of his pickup. He’d throw some little square hay bales on it for the O’Donnell crew to sit on as they played. Those folks can play anything that’s got strings on it. And we’d go all over town, then we’d cross the Red River into Terral, Oklahoma, and serenade those folks too.”
“That sounds like fun. We should do it here,” she said.
“Maybe next year,” he said. “We’ll plan it early and get lots of folks to go with us.”
“I’ll Be Home for Christmas” by John Berry started playing.
Grand would at least be home for Christmas. Why couldn’t they all live on the ranch? Grand, Essie, Creed, and Sage?
You can’t have it both ways, Sage. Grand’s voice pestered her again.
“O Come, All Ye Faithful” was the next song.
Faith! That meant trust. She wanted to have the faith to believe that everything would work out for the best in the end, but it wasn’t easy for Sage. That old adage about changing what she could and accepting what she couldn’t came to mind. The last few words that said she wanted the wisdom to know the difference played through her mind like a broken record.
Creed reached across and covered her hand with his. The heat was still there in all its radiant glory. Sparks still bounced off the windows of the tractor cab. She looked out across the snow-covered canyon, but it didn’t take her mind from Creed and the
