Chapter 26
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Bailey looked around her house at the odds and ends that just needed to be scooped up and put in the last remaining box sitting on the counter. “I think that’s it,” she said.
Julie, her best friend at the clinic in Butte, went outside with a coat rack and Bailey’s DVD player. She’d forgotten she’d mounted that thing in the built-in entertainment center, and she’d had to send Jackson to the store to get tools, as hers had already been packed.
Honestly, she didn’t need a DVD player in Coral Canyon, as she’d be so busy establishing her new clinic, hiring help, and being swamped with family, she couldn’t imagine a quiet evening with a movie playing the way she often did here in Butte.
Jackson re-entered the house and swooped up the electronics cords and put them in the box.
Stephanie, Bailey’s next-door neighbor of the past fifteen years, stuffed one last thing in the trash bag and then tied it once. “I can’t believe you’re moving.”
Bailey could barely believe it herself. “I might come back,” she said, half-laughing and half-crying. “If I can’t get my clinic to take off there, I’ll come back.”
“Oh, you will not.” Stephanie moved over to her and hugged her.
She was married to a great man, and they had three kids under the age of ten.
She reminded Bailey so much of Bryce’s aunts and uncles, though they had ten years on her, but Stephanie had a big heart, and she welcomed everybody into her life.
Bailey had babysat for her a couple of times, and they often went to lunch when Bailey could get away from the clinic.
She’d borrowed eggs from her when she needed to make cookies for her staff, and she’d taken Stephanie extra gallons of milk that she’d gotten from farmers as payment when she helped their cows.
She told herself it was okay to cry as Stephanie moved into her and hugged her. Tears streamed down Bailey’s face as she clung to the woman who had reminded her of how good life could be.
Stephanie cried too, and as they parted, Julie and Jackson joined the huddle. Bailey hugged them all, laughing now through her tears. “It’s going to be fine,” she said.
“And you’re not coming back,” Julie said. “You sold the clinic.”
“I know.” Bailey nodded her head and wiped her nose with a tissue that Stephanie handed her. “And it’s good. This is good. This is what I need to do.”
“It sure is,” Jackson said, and together, the four of them left her house.
Her daddy had volunteered to come, bring her uncles, and they’d all help her move, but Butte was a long way from Coral Canyon, and Bailey hadn’t wanted him to do that. She was thirty-six years old, and she could handle the move herself.
She’d cleaned out her house a lot in the last few months, and everything had fit just fine in the twenty-foot moving truck, which would also tow her SUV to Coral Canyon. She could go slow, as she planned to take two days to get there by stopping in West Yellowstone for a night.
She squared her shoulders and told herself that she had done much harder things in her life than moving from one town to another.
She gave her friends one more hug, and then watched as Julie and Jackson got in their vehicles, and Stephanie walked down the road to her house next door.
Bailey put the key in the ignition of the moving truck and started it, the first leg of her journey finally beginning.
“You need this,” she said aloud to herself. “This is a whole new chapter for you, Bay.”
Yes, she was repeating something her mother had said, and while that probably would have irritated her to no end only a few years ago, now Bailey didn’t mind it so much.
Her mother was a good woman who’d raised three children and been married twice.
Once to a terrible man—Bailey’s father—who she hadn’t spoken to in thirty years.
Graham Whittaker had literally saved them both, and Bailey’s gratitude for him knew no bounds.
Before she put the truck in reverse, she texted the group string that had her, her daddy, her momma, and both of her younger siblings on it: I’m all packed and loaded, and I’m heading out now.
The weather looks good, Momma said. You should be fine.
Text us when you get to Yellowstone, Daddy said.
Robbie sent celebration horns, and her youngest sister, Rita, said, Yay, yay, yay! I can’t wait until you’re here!
She wasn’t sure why Rita cared so much, as she didn’t live full time in Coral Canyon but attended a vocational school to become a chef in Jackson Hole. She only came home as often as Bailey did, as her training was quite intense, and she still had two years to go.
But Bailey sure loved being loved by them, and she promised everyone she would text them when she was safe and sound in West Yellowstone.
Then she pulled out of her driveway, feeling the SUV bump along behind her, and she got on her way toward a new future for herself…
in the small town she swore she’d never return to.
Bailey finished pulling her SUV into her new garage in the house on the northern highway in Coral Canyon.
The wind whipped across the front of her property, which faced north, the line of trees that acted as a windbreak on the west doing almost nothing against Mother Nature’s wrath.
She jogged back to the moving truck and managed to back it up the narrow driveway, only having to pull forward and correct herself twice.
This driveway was much longer than the one in Butte, as her house sat back off the main highway about fifty yards.
She liked that, as well as the mature landscaping in the front yard, which included a duck pond and plenty of tall trees, which would further block the vehicle noise from the road.
In fact, when Bailey had come to look at the house, she hadn’t been able to hear it at all.
She’d bought five acres, as she hadn’t purchased something right in town, and she’d be able to bring sick animals here, as well as have her own pets, as the property was zoned for horses, goats, and even dairy cows.
Bailey wasn’t about to become a milkmaid, but she liked that this property gave her distance between her family up the canyon and her veterinary clinic, which sat in an almost straight shot south, on the other side of town from where she would be living.
Her house sat about halfway across the northern highway, so she could go east or west to town and down to her clinic, and she planned to time both routes in the next couple of weeks before the clinic actually opened.
She’d also be conducting interviews and hopefully hiring the support staff and vet techs she needed.
For now, she set all of that aside, turned off the truck, and went to open the big lift gate in the back.
The sky swirled with gray clouds, as a storm had come in that was worse than predicted.
If she could just get a few things inside and set up, she’d be ready to start her life here in Coral Canyon.
Unfortunately, her bigger furniture sat at the front of the truck, which meant she had to unpack everything to get to it.
She started on the job, because she’d made great time and had done most of the driving on the first leg, only having to come from West Yellowstone to Coral Canyon today.
She’d gotten lunch in Jackson Hole, and it had taken her an extra half-hour to drive the big truck from there to here, but she had plenty of daylight left.
Bailey was strong from her work with animals, and while she wasn’t fast, her endurance lasted.
She could keep going and going and going, which was what she did as she continued to walk up the ramp and get the next box or the next couch pillow or the next side table.
She could have left it all in the other half of the two-car garage attached to the house, but instead, she made the trek up the four steps to the garage entrance and into the house.
And in fact, she put each item in the room where it would eventually stay.
So finally, all she had left was her big furniture, and she was actually surprised that her momma hadn’t called yet, as she’d been tracking Bailey on a map app since she’d left Butte yesterday.
She’d promised to call when she got there, so she could have more people with bigger muscles than her to help her unpack.
For some reason, Bailey hadn’t done it, and she recognized the fiercely independent streak she possessed as it reared through her. She stood inside the twenty-foot moving truck and looked down at the king-size mattress she’d treated herself to a couple of years ago.
Maybe I can move it myself, she thought, which was absolutely ridiculous. Of course she could not move a king-size box spring and mattress by herself, and yet, she wanted to try. She also had a large dresser and a sectional couch that she might be able to move in by herself.
“Not the dresser,” she muttered to herself, but she could probably get the dining room chairs, and the legs too. They came off for ease in moving, but the tabletop had taken three of them to get in the truck, so Bailey wouldn’t be able to get it out of the truck by herself.
Sighing, she went to pick up the first piece of the couch.
She managed to muscle it into the garage, huffing and puffing and her back aching.
It had started to snow by the time she stepped back outside, and that only made Bailey more determined to carry on.
Driven by the thought that she was too old to sleep on the floor, she continued moving pieces of the sectional into the garage, and once she had them all, she had to face her own weakness.
Sighing, she pulled out her phone and tapped to call her mother.
“Hey, there you are,” her momma said in a bright voice. “I was just starting to wonder when we’d hear from you.”
“I’m here,” Bailey said. “Can you and Daddy come help me with the big things?”
“Yeah, of course,” she said. “Uncle Eli is here, and we were just waiting to hear from you.”
“Stockton is coming to help too,” Uncle Eli called.
Momma said, “Did you hear that? Stockton is coming too.”
“Yeah. Great,” Bailey said, as she took in the furniture pieces she’d managed to move. “I’ll get started, and I’ll see you guys in a little bit.”
“Oh, you don’t need to do much,” Momma said. “Daddy will call Uncle Beau and Uncle Andrew on the way down, and we’ll all meet you there.”
“Okay,” Bailey said, not quite sure how to tell her mother that she already had everything unloaded, save for a few final things.
“See you soon.” Momma ended the call, and Bailey shivered in her garage as a whip of wind pushed snow into the space and splattered it across her face. She groaned as she wiped it away.
“What am I doing?” she asked, though she’d moved from a terribly cold state to another one.
The reminder that she’d been living in Montana for the past fifteen years buoyed her up and got her back out into the storm to see what she could do next.
The snow had started falling fast, piling on top of what had already been there compacted into ice in the driveway.
She went up the ramp again, noting that most of it was now covered with heavy, wet, sticky snow.
She picked up the remaining couch cushion and a huge black lawn-and-leaf bag that she knew held her comforter. She could take these items in, and then just wait for her uncles to come help with the rest.
“Maybe I could do the table chairs,” she said to herself, her voice echoing off the metal walls of the truck. She also had a coffee table she might be able to bear-hug into the living room.
Bailey had a whole house of furniture that needed to go in, including a nightstand, which she could also lift by herself, and a bookcase, which she’d been planning to put in the master bedroom instead of her living room, the way she’d had it in Butte.
The house here was much bigger than what she’d had before, and Bailey had extra bedrooms in addition to the home office she would establish.
She’d left her desk in Butte in anticipation of buying a new one here.
The enormity of tasks in front of her overwhelmed her as she turned and started toward the end of the truck.
She didn’t have anything heavy in her arms, and she’d spent so much of her life in the snow that it didn’t even register to her that the ramp might be slippery.
But she took one step down it, and her foot completely went out from underneath her.
Her other leg had already been moving forward, and Bailey felt suspended in midair for one moment before she lost her balance completely.
She cried out and tried to maintain her grip on a stupid couch cushion and a bag that held a blanket instead of letting them drop to the ground. I don’t want them to get wet, ran through her mind just before her hip landed on the four-inch lip on the side of the ramp, and she toppled over it.
She landed hard on her back, her arms splayed wide and releasing the items they were carrying against her will.
Finally, she came to a stop, the air knocked out of her, and her thoughts completely silent.
She lay on her back with the beautiful snow drifting down on top of her as she blinked and tried to take stock of everything.
She felt so tired, and pain throbbed through her head, her hip, and her right ankle, which she realized was still elevated as it had caught on the lip of the ramp leading up to the truck.
Maybe I’ll just stay here for a minute, she thought, and she let her eyes drift closed, as the chill of the snow-covered ground, the metal truck, and the icy Wyoming wind surrounded her and pulled her deeper into unconsciousness.