could have used the warning ninety seconds earlier.
The wind played tug-of-war for control of the truck. He was between towns. He’d left Golden Grove after finishing a job for a kindhearted widow who liked to bake him cookies. He had every intention of heading back to his solitary cabin to soak up some peace and quiet. Away from people. Away from gratitude he didn’t deserve. Away from life.
But when the wind slammed him again, he wasn’t sure he was going to make it. As that took hold, he realized two things more. An old man, wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a T-shirt, was walking down the road, trying to block the raging wind with an inside-out umbrella. Behind him, not far from a bungalow-style house in need of attention, a wooden barn literally blew apart.
Jax didn’t blink. Didn’t think. He just pulled to the side of the road and jumped out of the truck, directly in the old man’s path.
His actions startled the man. White hair flying in the gale-force winds, the old fellow stepped back in alarm.
Jax had lost a grandmother to Alzheimer’s nearly a dozen years before. He’d watched the disease drain her mind. Her joy. Her attitude. And her caring. But while others grew impatient with Grandma Molly’s changeable faces, he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Through the long years of decline, he’d focused on one thing: that she was the same grandmother who helped raise three little boys when they lost their mother. He knew she loved them to the very end. She just didn’t remember it.
Recalling that, he used his most respectful tone as he faced the confused wanderer. “I thought I’d give you a lift to wherever it is you’re going, sir.”
“You know where I’m going?” queried the old guy as if hoping for a positive response.
“I expect we’ll figure it out,” Jax replied.
“Sounds like a plan!” The old fellow tried to move toward the truck but the wind bested him. Jax took his arm gently and steered him toward the truck door.
A car was coming their way from the east.
Farther out, another car was fighting its way up the road from the west. He helped the man into the passenger side of the truck, then hurried around to reclaim the driver’s seat. He thrust the truck into gear and started forward. “Were you going home? Or leaving home?” He shot the aged man a comforting look and didn’t once mention the lack of attire, but inside he was seething.
Who would leave a sick, elderly person alone like this? Who would let him out of the house wearing nothing but underclothes? If a parent allowed a child to wander like this, they’d be arrested.
The old man pointed toward the bungalow just beyond the destroyed barn. “I reckon I know that place.”
“That’s where you came from?” Jax asked. He had to speak up over the roar of the wind. It raged through the trees and whooshed beneath the truck. He signaled a left turn just as an oncoming car signaled a right turn into the same driveway. “Looks like you have company, sir.”
The word sir made the old man smile. “I could use a bit of company now and again, but my missus won’t be happy about bein’ surprised. She likes the house just so when company comes by. That whole ‘cleanliness bein’ next to Godliness’ thing, you know. That’s a woman thing, I expect.”
Jax wouldn’t know. He’d been steering clear of God, family and women and anything that smacked of commitment or caring or real emotion. Surface stuff he could handle since leaving Iraq. Anything deeper than that sent him on to the next job. The next task. The next neighborhood. Offering his help but never his heart. He pulled to a stop as a middle-aged woman exited the car next to him. The insignia on her door indicated she was from a local home health care agency.
She looked from the old man to him, then the flattened barn and let out a low whistle. “What’s happened here, Cleve? Where’s Libby?” She included both men in the question as the wind helped push them toward the house.
Jax lifted his shoulders. “Don’t know. I found him walking down the road alone as the barn blew apart. I’m Jax McClaren.”
“Carol Mortimer, from the home health service in Wenatchee. Folks call me Mortie. Come on, my friend, I can’t be taking your pulse or blood pressure out here, now can I?”
Her question seemed to confuse the old man further.
She took hold of one of his arms. Jax took the other, and together they tried to guide him into the side door of the house.
He had other ideas. “I promised I’d keep a lookout,” he told them, and for a thin fellow, when he dug his heels into the soft valley soil, he dug hard.
“We can help,” said the woman softly. “It’s Mortie, Cleve. You remember me, don’t you? Where’s Libby? Did she have to go out?”
“Please don’t tell me that someone would leave this gentleman on his own.” That hiked Jax’s blood pressure to new levels.
The wind slammed them. He was just about to lift the elderly fellow into his arms and carry him into the house when a car pulled into the driveway.
It slid to a quick stop and a woman jumped out. The raging wind wrapped her longish sweater around her, and her light brown ponytail whipped back and forth, but it was her face that caught Jax’s attention.
Despair, mixed with a generous serving of worry and determination darkened her blue eyes. Despite that, she was still beautiful like one of those inspirational movie heroines his grandma used to watch.
She ran forward and got right in front of the older man. “Gramps, I think that wind’s a little too strong for any more spraying today, don’t you?”
The old fellow stopped. Stared. Then he blinked as if he’d just come out of a dark movie theater into the light.
The wind pummeled him.
Wide-eyed, he hurried forward of his own volition now. “What are we doin’ out in this?” he shouted as he hustled up the side steps and into the house. “Libby, you know better than to run the tractor in a storm like this, don’t you?”
The young woman went right along with his new train of thought. “I do. And I’m pretty sure you taught me to dress properly before going out in gale-force winds.”
The old fellow was quick to defend his choice of attire. “Well, I was in a hurry, you know.”
The woman—Libby—held the old-timer’s gaze but she offered him a pretty smile, lightly teasing. “Do tell.”
“I was on the lookout for something.”
A quick look of regret flattened her features, but she reengaged the smile swiftly. “Yes, you were. I asked you to watch for CeeCee’s bus while I was spraying the orchard. But that doesn’t come until later.”
“So I didn’t miss anything?” He posed the question quickly, as if worried he might have messed up. “I knew it was important, but I might have dozed off in my chair…”
The home health woman brought him a fleecy pair of pajama pants and helped him into them.
“And there was a wicked crash and
