And when there was no sign of you—”
Byron’s shoulders drooped slightly, and he sighed. Nodded. Turned to Andrea, who had stopped crying, though her eyes were red-rimmed and her lashes were spiky with moisture. “Give me a ride home?” he asked her.
“Sure,” she said.
“We can always use volunteers around here, Byron,” Becky added. “Folks to feed the animals, and play with them, and clean out kennels.”
Byron smiled at her. “That would be good,” he said. Then after pausing to pat the sheepdog on the head once, in regretful farewell, he followed Andrea out of the building without looking back.
“That poor kid,” Becky said, and her eyes welled up as she stared after Byron and Andrea. Then she seemed to give herself an inward shake. Turning her smile on Steven and Matt, she said, “May I help you?”
“We’re here to adopt a dog,” Steven answered, still vaguely unsettled by the sense of sorrow Byron and Andrea had left in their wake.
“Well,” Becky said, with enthusiasm, gesturing toward the sheepdog, “as you can see, we have a prime candidate right here.”
The dog’s name was Zeke, Steven and Matt soon learned, and he was about two years old, housebroken and, for the most part, well-behaved. His former owner, an older gentleman, had gone into a nursing home a few weeks ago, suffering from an advanced case of Alzheimer’s, and his daughter had brought Zeke to the shelter in hopes that he’d find a new home.
“Can we have him?” Matt asked, looking up at Steven. “Please?”
Steven was pretty taken with Zeke himself, but then, he’d never met a dog he didn’t like. He’d have adopted every critter in the shelter, if he had his way. “Wouldn’t you like to check out a few others before you decide?” he asked.
Matt wrapped both arms around Zeke’s neck and held on, shaking his head. “He’s the one,” he said, with certainty. “Zeke’s the one.”
Zeke obligingly licked the boy’s cheek.
Steven glanced at Becky, who was beaming with approval. Clearly, she agreed.
“Okay,” Steven said, smiling.
He filled out the forms, paid the fees and bought a big sack of the recommended brand of kibble. Zeke came with a leash and a collar, left over from his former life.
He rode back to the ranch in the bed of the truck, since there was no room inside, but he seemed at home there, in the way of country dogs.
Matt sat half-turned in his car seat the whole way, keeping an eye on Zeke, who’d stuck his head through the sliding window at the back of the cab.
“I bet Zeke misses his person,” the boy said.
Steven felt a pang at that, figuring there might be some transference going on. It was no trick to connect the dots: Matt missed his people, too.
“Might be,” Steven agreed carefully.
Matt had referred to him as “my new dad” that day, as he sometimes did. It was probably the only way he could think of to differentiate Steven from Zack. And the boy wanted desperately to remember his birth father.
He had slightly more difficulty recalling Jillie, since he’d been younger when his mother died.
“Do you miss anybody?” Matt asked. His voice was slight, like his frame, and a little breathless.
“Yeah,” Steven said. “I miss your mom and dad. I miss my own mom, and my granddad, too.”
“Do you miss Davis and Kim? And your cousins?”
Davis was Steven’s father, Kim his stepmother. They were alive and well, living on the Creed ranch in Colorado, though they’d turned the main house and much of the day-to-day responsibility over to Conner.
Brody, not being the responsible type, had left home years ago, and stayed gone.
“Yes,” Steven answered. They went through this litany of the missing whenever the boy needed to do it. “I miss them a lot.”
“But we can go visit Davis and Kim and Conner. And they can visit us,” Matt said, as the sheepdog panted happily and drooled all over the gearshift. “My mommy and daddy are dead.”
Steven reached across to squeeze Matt’s shoulder lightly. As much as he might have wanted to—the kid wasn’t even old enough to go to school yet, after all, let alone understand death—he never dodged the subject just because it was difficult. If Matt brought up the topic, they talked it over. It was an unwritten rule: tell the truth and things will work out. Steven believed that.
Matt lapsed into his own thoughts, idly patting Zeke’s head as they traveled along that curvy country road, toward the ranch. Toward the borrowed tour bus they’d be calling home for a while.
Steven wondered, certainly not for the first time, what Jillie and Zack would think about the way he was raising their son, their only child. Also not for the first time, he reflected that they must have trusted him. Within a month of Matt’s birth, they’d drafted a will declaring Steven to be their son’s legal guardian, should both of them die or become incapacitated.
It hadn’t seemed likely, to say the least, that the two of them wouldn’t live well into old age, but neither Jillie nor Zack had any other living relatives, besides their infant son, and Jillie had insisted it was better to be safe than sorry.
He’d do his damnedest to keep Matt safe, Steven thought, but he’d always be sorry, too. Much as he loved this little boy, Steven never forgot that the child rightly belonged to his lost parents first.
He slowed for the turn, signaled.
“Will you show me my daddy and mommy’s picture again?” Matt asked, when they reached the top of the driveway and Steven stopped the truck and shut off the engine.
“Sure,” he said. The word came out sounding hoarse.
“I don’t want to forget what they look like,” Matt said. Then, sadly, “I do, sometimes. Forget, I mean. Almost.”
“That’s okay, Tex. It happens to the best of us.” Steven got out of the truck, walked around behind it, dropped the tailgate and hoisted an eager Zeke to the ground before going on to open Matt’s door and unbuckle him from all his gear. “Now that we’re going to stay put, we’ll unpack that picture you like so much, and you can keep it in your room.”
Matt nodded, mercifully distracted by the dog, and the two of them—kid and critter—ran wildly around in the tall grass for a while, letting off steam.
Steven carried the kibble into the tour bus and stowed it in the little room where the stacking washer and dryer kept a hot-water tank company. He spent the next twenty minutes carrying suitcases and dry goods and a few boxes containing pots and pans from the house to the bus, keeping an eye on Matt and Zeke as they explored.
“Stay away from the barn,” Steven ordered. “There are bound to be some rusty nails, and if you step on one, it means a tetanus shot.”
Matt
