Chapter 6 #3
“Is fire science your true calling?” Her voice held a brittle quality, as if his answer was incredibly important, a make or break moment.
“I don’t know. It’s all just theory to me right now. I think I won’t know until I actually fight a fire. There’s always a chance I’ll hate firefighting. In which case, I would probably shift over to being a fire investigator.”
Her entire body sagged for an instant as all the rigidity went out of her spine. She caught herself and straightened quickly but not before he saw her visceral reaction to his words.
What was that all about?
“Bonnie, I have to ask you something, but I have a confession to make first.”
“Okay,” she said cautiously.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, searching for the right words.
“I suck at knowing what other people are thinking and feeling. Like, I’m clueless at it.
But I like you. A lot. And I’d really, really like to understand you and be able to tell how you’re feeling.
You know, so I don’t make you angry or sad or upset you by accident. ”
“You don’t make me angry, Gray,” she said softly.
“Give it time. I’ll mess up, eventually. My mom said I have a talent for zigging when I should zag. Especially around women.”
Bonnie smiled warmly. “You’re doing pretty good so far around me.”
He was shocked to feel his face heating up. Was he the one blushing this time?
“What’s your question, Gray?” she prompted.
“Just now, when I said I might not like firefighting, you sort of slumped for a second. I don’t know how to interpret that.”
“Oh. You noticed that, did you?”
“I did.”
“Well,” she paused. “Okay. I’m just going to blurt it out. That was me being massively relieved that might lean away from being a firefighter.”
“I suppose I get why you might not want to see people you care about doing something that took your husband from you.” He frowned. “But why do you care if I do it?”
“Because I care about you, Gray.”
“Oh.” He risked a look at her and was not entirely surprised to see her cheeks were cherry red.
They stood side by side, their elbows touching as they leaned on the half-door and both stared fixedly at the nursing calf in silence for a few minutes.
Eventually, Bonnie said conversationally, “Noah asked me last night if there are more books like the combustion book that he can read.”
“There are.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“I won’t tell him about . . .”
“No. I want you to tell him. He’s smart and deserves to have his mind stimulated and challenged. I’m glad you have the education to keep ahead of him.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Gray replied. “You’re no slouch in the intelligence department yourself. You run a whole town and make it look easy.”
Awkward silence fell between them again.
Down the aisle Cassidy's voice carried clearly: “Noah, you can't name them all.”
“I'm not naming all of them. I'm just naming this one.”
“They’re Jenna’s calves. She gets to name them.”
“But Jenna hasn't named this one yet. I asked Sully.”
A pause. “What’s the name?” Cassidy asked warily.
“Blizzard.”
“That's actually a really good name,” Cassidy said.
“I know, right?” Noah sounded immensely pleased. “His mom is Snowball and he's white and blizzards are white and . . .”
“I got it, Noah.”
The kids turned away from the stall door and Gray noted that Bonnie was very carefully not smiling. He wasn’t doing much better.
“You should hear Cassidy negotiate with him when she thinks she's not being watched,” Bonnie murmured. “She has a real talent for it.”
“She has talent for lots of things,” Gray replied.
Bonnie looked at him sidelong. “She's very serious about that notebook of hers.”
“The ones she designs puzzles in and takes notes in constantly?”
“I read in it by accident.” She was studying the calf in front of them fixedly. “I didn’t realize which notebook it was.”
He was careful to keep his voice neutral. “Ah.”
“She writes down things she observes. She's very accurate,” Bonnie said.
The barn was warm and smelled of hay and animals and the good earthy smell of new life. Down the aisle Noah was introducing Blizzard to the concept of nose-touching, and Blizzard was enduring it with bovine patience.
“Bonnie.” He kept his voice low. “I need to talk to you soon. About the fire.”
She went still beside him, the watchful stillness of prey sensing a predator nearby.
“You said you didn’t want to be ambushed, and this is me giving you advance notice.”
The sounds of the barn moved around them. The cows, the children, Dillon and Sully's low conversation at the far end of the aisle.
“How bad is it?” she asked. Her voice was very even.
The evidence was bad. Real bad. But he didn’t want to say that and freak her out in advance.
He reached over and touched her forearm, just enough so she'd know she wasn't standing in this moment alone. “It's not good,” he said cautiously.
Sure enough, her face arranged itself into a composed mask that gave away none of her feelings.
He added, “I'll be there for you. Every step of the way. Okay?”
Her eyes flickered to his, a quick, searching look as if she was trying to determine if he meant it. If he understood what he was promising.
He did. Maybe better than she did because he knew just how devastating the news was going to be and she didn’t.
He felt the warmth of her arm through the sleeve of her jacket, the subtle tremor that suggested she was more afraid than she was letting on.
“Okay,” she whispered.
“I want to do it right,” he said quietly. “Show you everything so you can see the whole picture.”
He studied her profile, trying to catch some clue as to what she was feeling right now. Her face alternated between revealing nothing and flashing through too many emotions for him to catalog.
“Will I wish . . .” She trailed off, but he guessed where she was going. Will I wish I didn't know? That you never told me any of it?
“Probably,” he said because she deserved honesty.
“But the information’s going to come out eventually, and I’d rather be the one to tell you.
I don’t want you surprised by it. I don’t want the rumor mill to get the facts wrong and for you to hear things that might be even more upsetting than the truth. ”
She smiled faintly. “You’re a big fan of facts, aren’t you?”
“I am. Even if they’re not what we want to hear, at least they end our speculation and fretting.”
She blurted, “I wasn’t speculating and fretting before but I’m definitely going to, now.”
“I won’t keep you waiting long. I just want to double-check everything one last time.
” He added quietly, “When I show you the evidence, I want you to remember this moment. Remember how I was standing right here beside you. That I’m on your side, come what may.
No matter what happens, you won’t have to face it by yourself. ”
“That sounds ominous.”
He searched her face then said plainly, “I’m not going to sugar coat it for you. You deserve—how does that go?—the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
The kids were still absorbed in the stall, oblivious, but he could tell Bonnie was hyper-aware of him. He read it in the slight turn of her shoulders toward him, in how she didn't pull away from his touch.
Their gazes met and he did his best to convey silently, You can lean on me if you need to.
She did lean. Slightly. Enough that her shoulder brushed his arm.
“Got it,” she said. “I’m not alone. Just . . .” She hesitated. “Just tell me when it’s coming.”
“I'll let you know when everything’s ready.”
“MOM!” Noah's voice cut through the silence. “Sully says I can give Blizzard a BOTTLE!”
“Noah Thomas Watson. Indoor voices around the calves,” Cassidy snapped.
Gray grinned. She sounded exactly like her mother.
Bonnie shot him a chagrined look. “She didn’t learn that tone from me. I swear it.”
He smirked back. “Sure she didn’t.”
“I know, I know,” Noah complained more quietly.
Gray absorbed the chaos—the children, the calves, the barn full of new life and the easy warmth between Bonnie and her kids—and felt the rightness of it settle deep inside him. All of this was good. Grounded. Solid.
Was this what a happy family felt like?
He wouldn’t know. His mom, his brothers and he loved one other. But most of their energy as a family had been devoted to surviving. Keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table. They’d rarely had fun or joked around or just enjoyed one another’s company like this.
Bonnie was smiling at her children as the rosy light of sunset kissed her cheeks with pink and then magenta.
He could hardly tear his gaze away from her, she was so beautiful.
It wasn’t just how she looked, although she was a very attractive woman.
Her beauty came from inside. She lit up with it when she looked at her kids or when one of them made her laugh.
Huh. Did love make people attractive? Or was it the act of loving someone else that made a person so appealing to him?
He filed away the question for future consideration and went back to watching Noah feed Blizzard a bottle.
The pinochle group was in full gossip mode by the following morning.
Gray heard their chatter as soon as he stepped into the diner. The core detail—that the first cream-colored calves had arrived at the Foster Ranch—was correct. The second detail was also true. The calves were enormous.
But that was where the story started to go off the rails.
Ruth Sanger was crediting Gray with singlehandedly saving all the calves’ lives.
Which was patently not true. If anyone should get the credit, it should be Dillon.
He tried to explain this to pinochle posse when they waylaid him on the way past their booths, but to no avail.
Apparently, his part in the great white calf debacle had already been embellished to the point of local mythology.
“I heard one of them is the size of a golf cart,” Walter was saying as Gray set down his book bag.
“That's an exaggeration,” Gray said, without looking up.
“One-hundred-and-twenty-two pounds,” Ruth said triumphantly. “I got it from Irma who heard it from Jenna's neighbor who heard it from Sully that the last calf weighed 122 pounds. At birth!” She looked over at him archly. “Am I right?”
“The information chain does seem solid,” Gray observed dryly. He slid into his usual seat with his back to the corner but looked up surprised as Irma materialized beside his booth without a coffee pot or even a glass of water so she could pretend to be doing her job.
“May I help you?” he asked her.
Irma lowered her voice, confiding, “There's a betting pool. On the calves' birth weights. Walter wants to know if you'd be willing to give him a general weight range for Charolais calves at birth. He says it's not a fair bet unless everyone's working from the same information.”
“Tell Walter the usual range is roughly ninety to one-hundred-thirty pounds,” he said.
Irma's eyes lit up. She was already moving back toward the pinochle table.
He tuned out the ensuing debate from across the diner and studied while they argued about the difference between average and median values.
At about 11:20, Rose set a cinnamon roll on his table. He hadn't ordered one and looked up questioningly.
“Bonnie called,” Rose said. “She asked me to save you one. She said you'd probably be here, neck-deep in a textbook, and you would forget to eat.”
“That was thoughtful of her.”
“It was.” Rose gave him a loaded look that suggested Bonnie wasn’t in the habit of worrying about whether single men in town forgot to eat.
Outside, the cold was breaking. He could feel it in the air, a slight softening, the first suggestion of warmth in the wind off the mountains. The snow on the fields west of town had thinned overnight. In three weeks, maybe four, the valley would be green.
As he ate the cinnamon roll, his mind strayed to the problem of finding someone who could tell him definitively if there had ever been a sprinkler system in the Shoemacher barn.
He’d asked several people in the local area who lived near the Shoemacher place or were horse people, but they’d all refused to talk with him, let alone answer any questions about the Shoemachers or their ill-fated barn.
He supposed it didn’t help that he was a newcomer to town.
An outsider. Folks didn’t seem to like strangers poking around in the town’s business or a prominent local family’s business.
Maybe he’d approached the people he’d tried to talk to wrong. Put them off by being too direct. Maybe he should have pretended to talk about something else and snuck up on asking the one question he really needed answered.
But along with his people skills, subtlety wasn’t exactly his strong suit.
How was he going to convince anyone to talk with him?