Chapter 2
I was about halfway home when I heard the horn.
The dog and I had gone a lot farther than I’d realized, almost back out to the main road that led into town.
Maybe that was where he had headed, toward the smells of restaurant meals, the roasted chickens sold in the Greet ‘n Gobble grocery store, and the movie theater with the popcorn pouring out of the kettle into the glass case. I’d worked there as a teenager, scooping it up into bags and spilling it everywhere, and giving my friends free Cokes.
The job hadn’t lasted long.
I was heading back to my car to go look for him, and I decided that if I found him, I would take him to the animal shelter and they could deal with the giant beast there.
If he didn’t want to be with me, then fine, but he couldn’t run wild on the roads where he might get hurt.
But he wasn’t doing that.
I saw where he was when I turned to look at the vehicle honking, because it had made the sound again.
It was the same truck from the night before and the dog was riding in the front seat next to the same man who had changed my tire.
He’d done that and then followed me, I remembered, and I got my phone ready to call for help as they pulled to a stop.
“Hello,” he said, and got out.
The dog did too, scrambling through the driver’s side and running joyfully to me as if we’d been parted for months, not a few minutes, and as if the separation hadn’t been totally his own fault.
“Where were you going?” I asked him.
I tied the scarf around his neck again, doubling the knot this time.
“He was running toward the road,” the man told me.
“And you just happened to be there? Really?”
He acted embarrassed, squinting and then rubbing his jaw with his knuckles.
“Uh, no, I didn’t just happen by. I knew that you lived back here.”
Yes, I did, off this small street where the houses were far apart and there was no one else around right now, no one who could help me if things went wrong with this person.
He was a lot bigger than I was, and I could scrap but not enough to save myself if things turned very bad.
But he stayed near his front bumper while the dog cavorted between us.
“I knew you lived back here,” he repeated, “and I thought I would, uh, drive by to see how he was doing.” The man pointed to the dog, who was obviously doing great.
“He smells a lot better.”
“He took a bath. A few of them.” I put my arm over my chest again and wrapped the pink scarf around my other hand.
He wasn’t getting away, not this time.
Nope, I was going to make him love me!
That had always worked so well in my past relationships.
“Did you think of a name for him?”
My cousin Cassidy had asked me the same thing.
“No, I haven’t,” I answered.
The dog suddenly jumped, putting his paws on my chest and shoving me backwards.
It had warmed up and the frozen ground had turned into muddy ground, so now I had a lot of that on my coat.
“No, sir!” I ordered.
He barked, and the man laughed behind his fist.
“I’m dirty and I almost fell. That’s not funny,” I told both of them.
“No, the dirt’s not funny, and he can’t jump up on you, either. You’re too small and he’s too big.”
Small?
No, I wasn’t. But I felt that way when the guy took a few paces forward and reached out his hand.
“Give me his, uh, leash for a second.” I did, and he escorted the dog back to his truck.
“Now say the word S-I-R.” He had spelled it.
“Sir?” I said, and the dog immediately turned and barked.
“Sir?” I repeated, and he ran to me, tugging the man along with him.
“Oh, my Lord! You think that’s your name? Sir?”
The dog—Sir?
—nearly knocked me down again with a bout of violent affection.
“He does think it!” I said, and started to laugh.
“I have to call you that all the time? How about…Coal? Like Charcoal? Or Basalt? That’s a cool name for a dark dog.”
Sir seemed totally unimpressed, and the man was shaking his head.
“It’s too late,” he told me, and he was holding up his fist again and laughing behind it.
“Well, all right,” I told the dog.
“That can be your name, since it doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice about it. Silly.”
“That’s a beautiful animal. Now that he’s clean, I can see it. I wonder if he’s some kind of purebred.”
That wasn’t what interested me, however.
My focus was back on the man, not Sir.
“What were you really doing here today?” I asked.
“Were you just going to drive up and down these roads, looking for me?”
“I already know exactly where you live.”
I took a big step back, tugging Sir with me.
He probably wouldn’t protect me from this man, though, the one whose truck he had just ridden in.
“How do you have that information?” I asked, my voice taut.
“You said your name,” he answered.
“You said that your relatives would think, ‘Kayleigh only cares about herself.’ You also mentioned that you have a lot of those relatives, and that their last name is McCourt. I looked you up.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I was worried about the dog. He seemed friendly, but we didn’t really know.”
Exactly.
That was exactly what I was thinking about him—not Sir, but this stranger.
He also seemed friendly and he’d been very helpful, but who really knew?
“He’s huge,” he continued.
“Look at his jaws.”
“He wouldn’t bite. He’s a sweet boy, like a giant teddy bear,” I said, but then I thought about how I’d given him a bath and let him sleep with me.
I had probably made poor decisions.
Again.
“I was debating if I should knock and check on you, to make sure that everything was ok. When I saw him, I stopped to pick him up.” He looked at Sir.
“I kept thinking that I should have taken him with me instead. I have a lot of land and room where he could run. You said you had an apartment, and again, an animal this big…he must be a hundred pounds,” he said, studying the dog’s broad chest and back under that beautiful fur.
“A hundred? Really?” I sighed.
“He’s a little over the weight limit in my lease, then. But it’s ok,” I told Sir.
I had that absentee landlord, which was a bit of a problem when I needed repairs, but made me glad right now.
“I’ll walk him every day. Far,” I added.
“Before you do that, you should take him to the vet and see if he has a chip. Some dogs have them with information in case they get lost.”
My hand tightened on the scarf at the thought of giving him up, but I realized that this guy was correct.
“I wouldn’t want someone to be missing him,” I said, and I looked at the man.
“What’s your name?”
“Caleb.Caleb Woodson.”
“I’m going to look you up like you did about me,” I told him.
“It might be nice that you found my address or it might be weird. I’m not sure which.”
“I know,” he said flatly.
“That was why I didn’t want to say it, but I have a hard time lying.”
He was pretty different from me, then, because I’d spent years and years lying to everyone, from my parents, to my teachers, to my friends, to myself.
But when I looked at Caleb Woodson and how he frowned, I decided that he might actually be honest. Maybe he really was thinking that I had taken home a killer dog and he’d wanted to make sure that I wasn’t getting attacked inside the small apartment I’d told him about.
I looked down at Sir, who took that moment to lick my slipper and leave a giant trail of sticky saliva.
I was very sure about him, but I still wasn’t positive about this other guy.
“I’m going to walk him home. If you want, if you’re truly concerned, you could come along. Not inside my apartment,” I cautioned, “but you could follow when I take him to the animal shelter to be checked for an ID chip and dog diseases. I also need to get him a real collar so I don’t lose him again. This scarf is a good color but it doesn’t hold him very well. I wouldn’t mind if you were there, and he seems to like you.” Also, I would have bet that this Caleb Woodson was stronger than I was.
If Sir tried to bolt, I would further bet that he could hold him better than I could.
I walked off—more like, Sir took off and I tried desperately to pull him back and keep the pace, and the truck came slowly behind us.
If I lost this crazy dog again, at least someone would be able to catch him, and it was apparently too late to hide where I lived anyway.
Unfortunately, the issue that Sir had created in the yard was still there, and it made me think of my aunt Amber.
She wasn’t able to talk about bodily functions, so there were special names for those: “going to the powder room” was anything relating to using a toilet, “unfortunate stomach problem” meant that you were puking your guts out.
“Having a you-know day” was the most oblique, and signified a menstrual period.
I remembered her announcement that “Aubree is dealing with her first you-know day” and later, my big cousin Bree had needed to explain to her little sisters all about uterine linings.
Luckily for me, my mother had been able to discuss anatomy and biological processes with the specific and correct terms, so I’d already been aware.
But both my mother and Aunt Amber would have had trouble dealing with Sir’s mess.
A person in a hazmat suit would have, and Caleb Woodson certainly seemed repulsed.
“I guess that’s the downside of a big dog,” he mentioned.
He helpfully held that dog as I got a bag and then, gagging, cleaned it up before my neighbor could come out and see it.
He was a quiet guy (who was quite smelly himself) and we’d never had problems. I didn’t want to start any now.
Then I had to change, since I had mud all over me and after that disgusting clean-up, who knew what else?
When I came back outside, Sir was in the truck again, looking happy.
“The spare on your car is flat,” Caleb Woodson announced.
“Do you have a pump?”
No, and neither did he.
I kicked the tire but surprisingly, that didn’t help the situation.
“I’m really not a murderer, or worse,” he said and I turned to stare at him.
“Hell. I guess that’s what a murderer would say.”
He didn’t look like a murderer or worse.
He looked normal, except better-looking than normal.
I’d noticed it the day before, when he’d gotten out of his truck to help me with my first tire problem: he was someone my cousins would have pointed out in a club, or someone my aunts would have raised their eyebrows at if he’d come to church.
I had always been a sucker for a beard, and I liked Caleb’s dark brown one a lot.
It wasn’t just scraggles like the boys in my high school had grown but was neat and groomed, like his short hair.
That was also dark brown, but his eyes were a greenish-blue color that was very striking.
Sure, everyone would have pointed him out, but they all knew that a handsome face like his didn’t mean anything.
“I’m going to look you up now,” I said, and he waited while I took out my phone.
Social media? None that I could find, and that was weird.
So I typed his name in the search bar and there he was, looking serious in a suit.
“You own a…I don’t know what this kind of business is.”
“It’s a financial services company.”
I didn’t know what that was, either.
There wasn’t much else about him, certainly no criminal history that popped up.
“Just FYI, my uncle Dawson was a sheriff’s deputy,” I mentioned.
“I can ask them to run a real background check, too.”
“There isn’t anything.”
Which might have meant that he was a very good criminal, I mused.
He didn’t look like a financial server right now in his old canvas coat and jeans.
But that outfit made sense due to what he’d mentioned about having a big farm.
“You don’t have your finance job anymore?” I asked, staring at his muddy boots.
“Why do you live here?”
“It’s there,” he answered, pointing to my phone.
“You’ll find it.”
I frowned at him and then tried his name with “Tennessee.” “Oh,” I said after a moment.
“I’m sorry.”
I’d come across a recent obituary for a woman who seemed to be his mother, Lara-Lee Woodson, with the same green-blue eyes.
The picture of her must have been from many years ago because her face was unlined and her hair was glossy, dark brown, but it stated her age and she’d been pretty old when she’d passed.
It also mentioned one son, Caleb Woodson, who was lately of Florida.
I didn’t recognize her at all but I bet that if I put her name and face out to my family, one of them would.
Between us, we knew everyone.
“I came home about a year ago to help out,” he said.
“I’m very sorry.” Reading about him had seemed like a game, but once again, my fun had produced an unhappy ending.
“I’m sorry and I don’t think that you’re a bad person. I would grateful if you’d drive us in your truck to get the dog checked.”
“He’s ready to go, and I’d also be happy to take you.”
I joined Sir in the cab, climbing up on a rusty running board to reach the seat.
I wasn’t short and this was an old truck from back when they weren’t all monster-sized.
I appreciated that. I pulled out the seat belt and…
“Ugh,” I said, looking down at my coat.
I had just managed to clean off the mud and now I had a diagonal black line of grease and dirt running across it.
“What is that? Why was it so gross?”
“Hell, I’m sorry,” he said, also staring at my chest. “This was my mother’s car, and she never had any passengers. That belt didn’t get used.”
I was searching in my pocketbook for a makeup remover wipe, wishing that I had my aunt’s old pageant bag that had held everything that anyone might need in an emergency, as long as that emergency was beauty-related.
“Not even you?” I asked.
“You didn’t ride with her as a passenger?”
“No,” he answered briefly.
That was too bad. “I don’t care about the grease,” I said.
I was going to have to wash this coat or get it dry cleaned anyway, and I could take it in when I brought my cousin’s dress.
That really did have a distinctive skunk odor that Cassidy wouldn’t have appreciated.
Despite being lately of Florida, Caleb seemed to know his way around.
I watched carefully to make sure that he wasn’t driving off anywhere weird, but he took us directly to the county animal shelter where we had Sir checked out.
No chip, they said, but they remarked that his nails were very long, so no one had been clipping them.
They also said that all the matting I’d worked out of his thick coat was another sign that he’d been on his own for a while.
He was underweight, which was a little terrifying.
He was supposed to be bigger?
The good news was that Sir, whose name caused some smothered laughter among the employees there, was very friendly to everyone, which would make it easier for me when I took him to work.
I mentioned that to both of my companions when we got back into the truck.
“Where do you work?” Caleb asked.
“I’m the office manager for one of my cousins. He’s just starting off as a contractor and he needs help, and I don’t care that he can’t pay me much. He struggles with organization, billing, keeping track of materials, and customer contact. He’s busy and he also just got engaged,” I mentioned.
That had been the big news at our family party, that he’d asked Taygen to marry him.
“I knew his fiancée when I was working at the loan office, my former job, and I introduced them. She’d been dating someone else for a while but they broke up this summer and when she met Marc, it was like you could see sparks fly. They’re going to be so happy.”
“Hopefully.” He signaled and the clicking noise was loud in this old truck.
Everything was louder than in the car my nana had passed on to me, from the engine to the wind whistling in around the edges of the rolled-up windows.
“What do you mean, ‘hopefully?’” I asked.
“I know they’ll be great.”
“Something like half of marriages end in divorce. It’s not a propitious sign that they didn’t know each other for very long, either. It’s much more likely to fail.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say, and it’s not true. I introduced them because I know both of them very well, and I’m sure that they’re compatible. Sir, please! You’re squishing me.” He had been leaning hard against my side, and going around that turn had nearly pushed me right through the door.
But he didn’t mind riding in this truck like he had in the cargo area of my small car.
He sat proudly in the middle and I started wishing that he had a seat belt of his own.
“Come on over here,” Caleb told him, and the dog moved slightly across the bench seat so that I could breathe again.
“Are you some kind of matchmaker?”
“No,” I said, “and I have a terrible track record myself, if that’s what you’re going to ask next. I’m awful with relationships.”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding.
“You, too?Why?”
“Uh, I guess I’ve been too busy to put time into them.”
I slid a glance over, and thought again that he was a nice-looking guy.
He must have been plenty busy if he’d avoided getting husbanded-up by a woman down in Florida.
“Not me,” I mentioned.
“I’ve never had a job that I was really devoted to, not until this one with my cousin. My problem hasn’t been time, it’s that I always picked the wrong person.”
“Why? What was wrong with them?” he asked, and on the rest of the way to the pet supply store, I did briefly discuss my last boyfriend.
“I should have known that something was wrong when he told me never to text or call,” I admitted, “and never to post anything about him. Also, the name he’d given me was different from what was on his license and credit cards, and he had about thirty of those.”
“Hell. Was he married?”
“Yes, to two different women,” I acknowledged.
“Neither wife was happy to find out about me and they were even less happy to learn about each other. Anyway, that was years ago.”
“Nobody since?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“And now, I have Sir.” He huffed and I smiled.
He went ahead and behaved himself beautifully in the pet store, when Caleb told him to.
And Caleb was great, as well.
He didn’t seem to get annoyed when it took me a while to choose a collar that would best complement Sir’s coloring or when it took me even longer to choose a tag at the engraving machine they had there.
He didn’t even object when I ran into a girl I’d known from high school and we got involved in a semi-long conversation.
I always met up with people I knew, every time that I went out anywhere in this town.
It wasn’t that large, after all, and I’d been a lot more social before.
As we finally emerged from the store, I looked at the receipt and mentally counted up all of today’s expenses.
I had spent a whole lot but Sir was now nicely outfitted and, I hoped, safer with his tag with his name and my phone number.
According to the animal shelter, there was a lag before I could adopt him.
I had to wait because his former owner might show up, but after that?
He would be officially mine.
Caleb drove me to the tire store, too.
He helped me put on the new one when we got to my apartment and to inflate it with the pump I’d also bought.
All in all, it had been a day with some serious money outlays, which was a big bite into my bank account (especially since I’d just dealt with Christmas).
But it was ok, since I really didn’t do anything.
What I’d told him about my financial situation was correct, like that I didn’t travel and I didn’t go out unless I had to.
I ate cheap food, I paid my bills on time.
I wasn’t the same woman from before—truly, I wasn’t.
With the tire on my car and Sir squared away, there didn’t seem to be much reason for Caleb to stick around, except that he’d helped me a lot.
We had started at what seemed like dawn and now it was late afternoon, and I was starving.
“Do you want lunch?” I invited.
“My cousin sent me home with a bunch of leftovers yesterday. That was probably why Sir wanted to get into my car in the first place.”
“Uh, sure,” Caleb answered.
“You don’t mind me coming in now?”
“I guess that if you were going to murder me, you had plenty of chances,” I said.
“I also have a lot of weapons inside, so it’s probably safer than being in your truck.” I actually only had knives from the set that I’d inherited from my nana along with the car, and some pepper spray that my father had given me in high school.
“Use it on any boy who wants to take more than you’re willing to give,” he’d advised me at the time, which had demonstrated how little he knew about my behavior back then.
But Caleb Woodson really did seem normal, which was lucky since I wasn’t exactly sure where that cannister had gone and my nana had never sharpened her knives (and I sure hadn’t done it myself).
He took Sir out into the back, and he didn’t say anything but he brought a plastic bag and I thought that he may have cleaned up after him, too.
I was busy reheating and setting my little table, which I made festive with some candles.
Caleb washed his hands thoroughly when they came in, which made me pretty sure that he had done the pick-up, and he told Sir not to beg for food.
Once again, the dog listened, and the two of us humans sat down.
“This is a good variety,” he said, looking at his plate.
“There’s plenty if you’re not vegan, vegetarian, or in any way dietary-restricted,” I agreed.
“I should have asked.”
“I’m so tired of my own cooking, I’d eat anything,” he said, but he waited for me to pick up my fork before he started in.
“We had a potluck yesterday and I took a bit of everything. I’m always happy to bring home leftovers because I don’t like to cook, and luckily for me, we don’t get together only on holidays. We have a big family gathering almost every Sunday, and I live on that food for a lot of my week. Do you have people around here?” I asked.
“No.” He shook his head.
“My mother grew up on Signal Mountain, but there’s no one there, either.”
“She lived out on a farm by herself?”
I watched him chew and slowly swallow.
“I came home when she needed me,” he said.
“That’s nice. I’m sure she was glad to have you with her, especially if you’re an only child. Is that right?” I asked, and now he nodded.
“Me, too. That was why it was so terrible that I…” I stopped.
“As an only child, it’s worse if you mess up. If there aren’t other kids and you’re a jerk and a loser, then you’re even more of a failure. They put all their eggs into one basket and you took that basket and threw it out the window, then ran it over with your car.”
“Which you can do now, because you have four working tires.”
I smiled, then laughed.
“I’ll still try to avoid hitting any eggs. I don’t like wasting food and I couldn’t hurt an animal, even one that wasn’t born. I almost got sick yesterday when I thought that I hit Sir.”
The dog picked up his head and looked at me, but I didn’t invite him over.
“Do you mind if I blow out a few of these candles?” Caleb asked.
“They have a strong smell.”
“Oh, sure,” I said.
“I was burning all kinds of things last night due to the skunk odor and maybe I’ve gone nose blind. I was trying to dress up the table for us, too. My cousin Prue is really good at decorating and she does cute stuff when we’re over there to eat, like fancy napkins and pretty flowers. We’re all impressed, except maybe our aunt Amber. Well, she probably is too, but she never wants to show it.”
Caleb himself seemed less than impressed with my display, so I blew out the candles and removed them from the table.
So far, I had found out several things about him: he didn’t like strong scents, he didn’t have brothers and sisters, and he had been living in Florida and operating a business that I didn’t understand.
I wanted to know more, too.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Thirty-four.”
I heard my nana’s voice say, “And still not married. I’ll put that down to wild oats.”
“You would have gone to school with some of my cousins, then,” I said.
“Do you remember a girl named Jia? Jia McCourt? And Mary and Aubree, too. You probably know more of my boy cousins. Did you play football?”
“No, I didn’t, and I didn’t go to the high school here,” he said.
“I was at boarding school.”
“Oh, like a fancy eastern one? Or military?”
“In Chattanooga,” he told me.
“This is delicious. What is it?”
“It’s my aunt Leanne’s spoon bread,” I answered, but I had more questions now.
“Why did you go to boarding school so close by? It’s a little bit of a drive to Chattanooga, but not that bad.” If I went at my normal pace and didn’t have a tire blowout, I made it in thirty-five minutes.
It took forty-five if I had my dad in the car with me as he pumped the imaginary passenger brake and clutched at what he called the “save-me-Jesus handle” above the door.
“My mother wanted me to board,” he answered.
“She was busy.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding as if that made sense.
It did not. “So, what are you doing now in Tennessee? Are you still working on your financial services?”
“I am, and I’m trying to bring my mother’s farm back to life. She had a lot of fruit trees, mostly apple and pear. She was also trying for peaches, but she wasn’t taking care of much of anything in the last few years.”
“And you want to return it to how it was?”
He was looking at his plate of food, which was almost empty.
“I want to improve it,” he told me.
“She had a vision and I’d like to make that happen. But there’s a lot.”
I asked him more questions, and he had some for me.
He wondered about my family, those million and two McCourts.
He asked about my job, how I managed the office and how I’d learned to do that.
“Not in college,” I said.
As he’d driven us in his truck, I’d read more about him and his business, and I’d seen that he had a few degrees.
“I never went. I’ve worked at a lot of different places and I guess I picked up skills along the way. Not that I meant to,” I added.
“This is the first time I’ve cared about what I’m doing and it’s because Marc’s great. I want his business to succeed.”
“So you work hard, but you don’t play much. You said that a few times and you told your friend that you aren’t doing anything on New Year’s Eve.”
“What friend?”
“The woman at the pet store asked where you were going out, and you said you weren’t.”
“She was someone I knew slightly, many, many years ago. Way back when we were in high school,” I explained.
I hadn’t realized that he had listened to our conversation.
“How long ago were you in high school?”
I sighed, because this made me depressed.
“I’ll turn twenty-five in not too long,” I told him.
“It’s almost a decade since I graduated.”
“It’s probably more like seven years.”
“That’s close to ten,” I said, and as a financial person, I would have thought he’d have had better rounding skills.
“Anyway, that girl and I were only acquaintances back then, and that was why I didn’t introduce you. Or, did you want to meet her?” She was pretty and she’d always been ready for fun, but not in the way that Aunt Amber would have meant, like that she was “having fun” with too many guys.
“You two could go out, which might be good if you feel like you’re not too busy for a relationship. But who knows if she wants one? Lots of women aren’t interested in that. Maybe she is, or maybe she isn’t.”
“I didn’t want to meet her.” He looked at me.
“I can’t remember what I was talking about.”
“New Year’s,” I prompted, and he nodded.
“Right, I wanted to know why you told your acquaintance that you weren’t going out. She seemed surprised.”
“I used to be a big partier in high school and after high school, too,” I explained.
“I stopped. I don’t drink or do anything else, not anymore.”
“Ok,” he said, nodding slowly.
“If you don’t want to, there’s no reason that you—”
“Because I had a real problem,” I continued.
“I was an addict. I mean, I am an addict. So, I can’t drink or smoke or do anything. I had to go to rehab twice. I was a mess and I hurt a lot of people.”
“Ok,” he said.
He didn’t nod again.
“That’s why I’m not going out,” I told him.
I stood and took my plate and his.
“Sir, come say goodbye.”
The dog stood and ran over, and Caleb got involved in talking to him about being a good boy and how he wasn’t allowed to jump on anyone.
We would see if those lessons were absorbed, but I bet not.
Then Caleb looked at me as I opened the door and he held Sir back with his knee.
“Thank you for lunch, Kayleigh.”
“Sure,” I replied.
“Thanks for driving me around today. Good luck with your farm.”
“Sure,” he echoed.
The dog and I went to the front window to watch his truck drive away.