Chapter 23
L enore watched as the serviceman got to his feet, a groan pulling through his chest and coming out his mouth.
“That should do it,” he said.
Her heartbeat skipped and jumped and hopped. All eyes came to her.
“Let’s go test it,” Brandon said, and she wasn’t sure who was more excited about having electricity in the cabin—him or her.
Definitely you, she thought. She’d been the one living here without it for so long.
She led the way up the steps and into the house, five loud cowboys gossiping like women as they followed her.
Both servicemen had been at the homestead all afternoon, creating the infrastructure for the batteries and running the line from the now partially buried container to her home, and then hooking everything up properly, both on the inside and outside.
Lenore paused just inside the door and looked across the front wall where her shoe racks of pathetic batteries had been. Brandon had cleaned them out to see if they could be used or salvaged, but neither of the servicemen from Power Up had wanted them.
Lenore didn’t currently know where they were, but they didn’t sit in her house, and in fact, a new electrical panel gleamed from the wall at shoulder level.
The solar panels would collect the energy from the sun and store it in the batteries.
When she needed the power, she’d call on it by flipping a switch or plugging something in, and it would come from the batteries through the inverter, which converted it to the one-hundred-twenty volts she needed for lights, a refrigerator, the TV, a vacuum cleaner, and anything else she wanted to power in the house.
With electricity, she could have Wi-Fi—and the whole world opened before her in that moment.
With Wi-Fi, she could start an online store for anything the homestead would eventually produce.
“We’re stopping right here?” Brandon asked, and Lenore quickly got out of the doorway so the others could join her in the house. The water truck was due in only ten minutes, and Lenore had been up for hours and hours and desperately wanted a moment to herself.
She moved over to the corner of the kitchen where a bank of four light switches sat. “I’m not even really sure what all these do,” she said, a nervous giggle coming out of her mouth afterward.
“Just flip them all,” Conrad said, a wide grin on his face. It mirrored the one on every other cowboy’s face.
Lenore looked from them to the light switch and then pushed them all simultaneously. Light bulbs blazed to life in the kitchen, above the dining room table where she ate breakfast, in the living room, and above the entrance where most of the men still stood.
A beat of silence followed—and then a cheer as loud as any stadium egging on their team to win the Super Bowl rose into the air.
Lenore couldn’t believe it. There were lights on in her house . She started to laugh and couldn’t stop, feeling manic and grateful and yet also like this might only last for this one moment, and she better enjoy it while she could.
Then Brandon arrived, sweeping her into his arms, his own laughter loud in her ears. “There’s power in your cabin!”
Someone beyond them whooped loudly. He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her clean off the ground, spinning her around while she desperately gripped his shoulders so she wouldn’t fall.
She laughed with him, and when he sat her down, they faced their friends. “Thank you so much,” she managed to say before she rushed over to them and started an awkward six-way hug, including the two servicemen who she’d only known for the past few hours.
Thankfully, she didn’t cry.
Then Conrad ducked outside with the guys from Power Up , probably to settle up. Henry nudged the cooler with his foot. “You don’t have to use this anymore,” he said.
“Yeah, but I don’t have a fridge either,” Lenore said. “Next time I go to town, I’m going to order one.”
“Solid plan,” Colt said. “Hey, I hear the water truck.” He turned and hurried outside.
While Lenore wanted to bask in the heavenly lights from above, she figured she better meet David, the water truck driver, as she’d probably get to know him well when he came to fill her barrel every month.
Still, she waited a few moments while everyone else cleared the cabin, and then she looked up into the light fixtures, which still held bulbs, wondering if her mother or her father had put them there—and if they’d ever imagined the cabin would have power again.
“I’m doing it, Momma,” she whispered. “Daddy, I’m not going to lose this place.” For a moment, a power beyond her filled her chest, and for probably the first time, Lenore believed what she’d just said.
Brandon and his friends and all of his hard work had done this, and tears filled her eyes as such a pure energy ran through her.
“Lenny!” Brandon bellowed from somewhere outside, and Lenore hurried down the hall and out the back door. Everyone had gathered at the water barrel in the back, and she boogied down the back steps to meet them.
“You must be David,” she said, rushing forward to shake the man’s hand.
“I am.” The tall, nearly round man shook her hand, his laughter infectious and his smile brilliant. “Conrad says this is usable.” He started to walk around the water tower. “I gotta say, I have my doubts.”
Ice instantly formed in Lenore’s chest. “You do?”
“It’s not good.” He kept his eyes on the water barrel and reached up to run his hand along the bottom of it. “Maybe for crops. You planning on taking this into the house?”
“Yes,” Lenore said at the same time Colt did. “I was going to bring the proper piping and fixtures tomorrow,” he added.
“If you all want it for drinking,” David said. “We’re going to have to put some chemicals in it—at least until we can make sure it’s clean on the inside.” He looked over to Lenore. “Where’d you get this?”
“A friend had it in his barn,” Lenore said.
“Well, I can fill it,” David said. “But I wouldn’t drink out of it until we know that it’s safe.”
Panic built within her. “How will I know it’s safe?”
“I can put some water treatment tablets in it,” he said. “But they need to be there for forty-eight hours before you can drink it.”
She thought of the seven cases of water that Arizona had sent that morning. “That’s okay,” she said.
“All right, let’s get ‘er done.” David turned to his water truck and started to pull out the hose that he needed to fill the tank.
Lenore had never seen this done before, and she stayed out of the way while he set up a ladder and hefted his hose up to the opening on the top of the three-thousand-gallon water barrel.
He fixed it in place, got down off the ladder, and turned on the water on his truck.
Lenore could not describe the sound of water hitting that plastic container. It sounded like joy and laughter and a busy bubbling creek running over rocks.
Then someone yelled, and another man said, “Turn it off!”
It took David a couple of seconds to crank the big wheel to get the water to stop, and Lenore saw why Henry had yelled. Water poured out of the bottom of the barrel in a steady stream, hitting the parched earth and instantly creating rivulets of mud.
“Yep, this old girl has served her time,” David said as he joined them. “I’m real sorry to say it, but I don’t think you can use this tank.”
“No, I don’t think so either,” Lenore said, her hopes crashing to the ground.
Brandon came to her side and slid his arm around her. He wore a sorrowful expression on his face, but Lenore gave him a smile. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re better off than we were this morning, because now we have this fabulous tower that we can put a new tank on.”
“You got any tanks?” Conrad asked.
“Conrad,” Lenore immediately started shaking her head. “You’ve done enough.”
“Maybe he’s got one on the truck,” Conrad said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“This is a water truck, fella.” David laughed, and he had a really, really good air about him. He moved over to the tower, put his palm against it, and gave it a mighty shake. It barely moved.
“This is a great tower,” he said. “And the idea here is fantastic. It could hold five thousand gallons. That might get you through a couple months—especially in the winter.”
Lenore knew how much five-thousand-gallon water storage tanks were, and she didn’t have the money. She probably should let Conrad buy one for her, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask, or even look at him.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll figure out how to get a tank. Or we’ll keep working on the rain catchment system.”
“Oh, it don’t rain enough here for rain catchment,” David said. “But have you considered digging a well?”
Oh, Lenore had considered it.
Brandon stepped away from her, his mouth pressed into a tight line.
“I reckon there’s good water out here,” David continued, completely oblivious to the way the electricity in the air had changed. “My nana had a place out here once, and she had an ice-cold well that never ran out.”
“Out here?” Brandon asked, with extreme interest in his voice.
“Yeah, somewhere out here,” David said. “Maybe just a little further south, actually.” He glanced around like there’d be mile markers out here on the homestead. “It was the old Buttrey place.”
Lenore pulled in a breath. “We bought the Buttrey place.” All eyes came slowly to hers again, but she didn’t know what else to say.
“Was there a well on it?” David asked.
Lenore shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
“Well, my grandparents split the land before they sold it,” he said. “Maybe you bought the part that didn’t have the well.”
“There was no well,” Lenore said.
“But there’s a great aquifer out here,” David said. “You’d probably only have to drill fifty to a hundred feet too. Then you’d have water coming right up out of the ground.” He grinned, like this was great news—because, of course, it was.
“Thanks so much,” Conrad said, stepping in and shaking David’s hand. “Tell me what I owe you for coming out even though we couldn’t fill it.”
“Oh, nothing,” David said as he moved back toward his truck. “I love the drive out here.”
Lenore watched him go—a sort of deflated end to the day—but she drew a deep breath and clapped her hands once. “Thank you so much for coming, you guys.”
She’d spent the day getting to know these cowboys, and they were all amazing. She stepped into Finn and gave him a hug. “It means so much to me, Finn. Really. Thank your wife and kids too.”
She approached Henry. “Tell Angel hello and thank you so much for coming.”
“Anytime,” Henry said easily.
She moved over to Colt, and because he wasn’t married, the hug was a little more awkward, but she still managed to say, “Thank you for your time, Colt. I hope it doesn’t put you back too much at the apple orchard.”
“I’m still going to come tomorrow,” he said. “And bring you the hoses you need.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Lenore said. “The tank doesn’t work.”
“I think I can hook it up to that leak, and we can at least run it to the garden.”
Lenore nodded because she was suddenly too tired to argue. “Okay,” she said.
Plenty more thank-yous and waves and goodbyes were said as she and Brandon walked everyone around to the front of the cabin and got them on their way.
When it was just the two of them, Brandon reached over and threaded his fingers through hers. “Not a bad day,” he said. “Even if we didn’t get water in the cabin, it was a good idea.”
“At the very least,” Lenore said, her mind now stuck on what it might cost to drill a well.
To be honest, it would probably cost as much as a five-thousand-gallon water tank, as those ran between five and six thousand dollars. If she could get somebody to come drill a well—even at fifty dollars per foot and they had to drill down one hundred feet, that would be five thousand dollars.
And where are you going to get five thousand dollars? she asked herself.
She turned toward Brandon. “Thank you so much for today,” she said.
“Of course,” he murmured.
She tipped up onto her toes and kissed him, hoping he knew how much he meant to her and how grateful she really was—and that she had started to fall for him. She pulled away and snuggled into his chest, her arms wrapping around his back. “Would you take me to church with you next week?”
“Yeah, of course,” Brandon said, a touch of surprise in his voice. “I also wanted to ask you something about Thanksgiving.”
“All right,” Lenore said.
“It’s such a long drive,” he said. “And I was thinking we could stay on the ranch on Thursday night. We’ve just got the chickens here, and we can make sure that they have enough feed and water until we get back on Friday.”
Lenore pulled away and looked up at him, trying to decide how to answer. A slip of trepidation moved through her—but it felt an awful lot like excitement as well. “What about the dogs?”
“They can come,” he said. “I’ll take Dumpling to my cabin, and they can hang out there too.”
She nodded. “Where would I stay?”
“With Dawson or Caroline,” he said easily. “Or Duke and Zona. Or Dwayne will be back at his parents’ house, and I’ll have an extra bedroom. You can stay with me.”
She grinned at him. “Sounds like something to be thankful for.” She couldn’t believe the words had come out of her mouth, but she sure liked Brandon. Besides, she wouldn’t be sleeping in the same bed as him.
She stepped back, dropping her hand to his. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go spend the evening in my cabin. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I have electricity.”