welcome and the hope of a pat on the head, but they’d both passed on last fall, within a few weeks of each other, dying peacefully in their sleep as good dogs deserve to do. Now they rested side by side in a special spot near the apple orchard, and Walker never got through a day without missing them.
He swallowed hard as he left the truck behind, heading for the house. He’d raised Willie and Nelson from pups, and Brylee had been urging him to replace them, but he wasn’t ready for that. For the time being, he’d rather share his sister’s dog, though Snidely went everywhere with his mistress, which meant he wasn’t around home much.
Walker let himself in through the side door, which opened into the spacious, old-fashioned kitchen, his suit jacket slung over one shoulder, and was heartened to find Brylee there. Blue-jeaned and wearing a T-shirt with the motto Men Suck on the front, her heavy brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, she was splotched with flour from head to foot.
Snidely kept watch nearby, curled up on a hooked rug.
“Hey,” Walker said, addressing both of them, draping his jacket over the back of a chair.
Snidely lifted his head, sighed and rested his muzzle on his forelegs again.
“Hey,” Brylee said, careful not to look at Walker. She’d been baking bread, probably for hours. The air was scented with that homey aroma, and pans full of rising, butter-glistened dough waited, assembly-line fashion, on the counter nearest the stove. “How was the wedding?”
Walker wanted a beer and a quiet chat with his sister, but he had to get out of his suit and head for the barn and stock pens, to make sure the chores had all been done. With six ranch hands working the place year-round, though, the task was more habit than necessity. “It was a wedding,” he said, pausing. He wasn’t being flippant; the church variety was always pretty much the same, that’s all—white dress and veil for the bride, nervous groom, preacher, organ music, crowded pews, tons of flowers.
Every line of Brylee’s slender body looked rigid as she absorbed his reply, and she kept her back to him. Whenever somebody got married, she folded in on herself like this, keeping frenetically busy and pretending it didn’t matter.
“So it went off without a hitch, then?” she asked, her tone so falsely airy that a crack zigzagged its way down the middle of Walker’s big-brother heart. Brylee wouldn’t have wished what had happened at her wedding on anybody, but she always asked that same question after every new ceremony and she always seemed to be braced for the worst.
“I’d say it was perfect,” Walker answered gently. He’d retrieved his jacket from the chair back, but beyond that, he hadn’t moved. His feet seemed to be stuck to the kitchen floor.
Brylee looked back over one flour-coated shoulder, offered a wobbly smile that didn’t quite stick to her wide mouth. “That’s good,” she said, blinking once and then turning to the dough she was kneading.
“What’s with all the bread?” Walker asked.
“Opal Dennison and some of the other ladies from her church are holding a bake sale tomorrow, after the second service,” she replied with brave good cheer, though her shoulders slumped slightly and she was careful to keep her face averted. “To raise more money for the McCulloughs.”
Young Dawson McCullough, seriously injured in a fall from the now-demolished water tower in town, had worked on the ranch since he was big enough to buck hay bales and muck out stalls, after school and during the summer, and he was practically a member of the family.
“And you’re the only woman in the whole county who signed up to bake bread?” Walker asked lightly.
Brylee stopped, stiff along her spine again and across her shoulders. She kept her head up, but it looked like an effort. “Don’t, Walker,” she said softly. “I know what you’re trying to do, and I appreciate the thought, but, please—don’t.”
Walker sighed, shoved a hand through his hair. He opened his mouth, thought better of saying more and closed it again, went on through the kitchen, along the corridor, past the dining and living rooms, and into his spacious first-floor bedroom, where he peeled off the suit and kicked off the dress shoes and put on worn jeans, a lightweight flannel shirt and boots.
The relief of being himself again was enormous.
Brylee was lining up what looked like the last of the doughy loaves on the oven racks when Walker came back through, on his way to the door. She didn’t acknowledge him, but Snidely got to his feet and lumbered along after him, outside, across that wing of the porch that wrapped around the house on three sides, down the steps.
“Women,” Walker told the dog in an exasperated undertone. “Brylee could have her pick of men and what does she do? She pines after the one that got away.”
Tongue lolling, Snidely wagged his tail as he ambled companionably alongside.
Walker was glad to have the company. “The worst part is,” he went on, relieved that nobody on two legs could hear him prattling away to a German shepherd, “she’s just being cussed, that’s all. Deep down—but not all that deep down—Brylee knows damn well that she and Hutch weren’t right for each other. By now, the honeymoon wouldn’t just be over, they’d have crashed and burned.”
Snidely offered no insight, but, in that way of faithful dogs, his mere presence was soothing. He paused to lift one hind leg against a pillar of the hitching post, then trotted to catch up with Walker at the barn door.
Walker flipped on the lights lining the long breezeway and stepped inside, pausing to check on each horse in each stall, making sure the electronic watering system was working and there was hay in every feeder.
Mack, his big buckskin gelding, occupied the largest stall, the one across from the tack room, and he nickered a greeting when Walker stopped to offer a quiet howdy. All the horses, Mack included, had been properly looked after, but Walker had had to see that with his own eyes if he expected to get any sleep. Same with the bulls and the broncos, some in the pastures and some in the holding pens behind the barn.
He sighed again, rubbed the back of his neck, still itchy from the starch in the collar of the dress shirt he’d worn earlier, and adjusted his hat, even though it didn’t need adjusting. With his head full of Casey Elder and the two children they should have been raising together, he’d probably toss and turn the whole night and wake up cranky as an old bear with a nettle between its toes.
Snidely, standing close, thumped the back of Walker’s right knee with his swinging tail, as if to remind him of the here and now.
Walker chuckled and leaned down to ruffle the dog’s ears, and then the two of them went on to check on the bulls snorting and pawing the ground in their steel-girded pens, the broncos grazing in the nearby pasture. Across the Big Sky River, the lights of the ranch hands’ cabins and trailers winked in the shadows of early evening, casting dancing reflections on the water. Voices drifted over—children playing outside, determined to wring the last moment of fun from a dying day, mothers calling them inside for baths and bedtime, men smoking in their yards while they swapped tall tales and laughed at each other’s jokes.
The sounds were ordinary, but they lodged in Walker’s chest like slivers that night. He tilted back his head, looked up at a sky popping with stars and wondered how a man could live square in the middle of a busy ranch like Timber Creek and still feel as though he’d been exiled to some faraway planet with a population of one.
Snidely
