Chapter 9 #2
But it was Trevor who spoke, and said, “I didn’t even know you had a dog.”
“Puppy,” Willow said. She leaned forward on the sofa. “Some kids threw it in the creek. Jeremiah went in after him.”
“I’m really just fostering him for Frankie, his rightful owner,” he said. “Sooner or later circumstances will change, and he can have his buddy back.”
“He’s so cute, Trev,” Willow said. “He has giant feet and a giant head and a gangly body. He’s about so high.” She held out her hand.
Jeremiah reached out to take her wrist and raised her hand a couple inches higher, and he let his fingers brush her skin as he took them away.
She looked at him, then widened her eyes. “He’s grown that much?”
“Vet says it’s normal.”
“Now I really want you to come.”
“You didn’t really want me to before?”
“I was just tryin’ to set some boundaries with my family.” She broke eye contact with him, and sent an innocent blink-blink their way.
For his part, Jeremiah had forgotten they were there.
She said, “Go pack up a few things for you and the pup and then come back.” Then in a stage-whisper, “They aren’t fixin’ to leave me alone until you do.”
He lowered his head. “Okay. Okay, sure. I’ll go right now.”
He turned to head out the door only to find his half-brother, Ethan, holding it open for him. “I’ll come along. Help you pack,” he said.
Willow woke to find Jeremiah sleeping beside the impossibly bigger dog in front of the fireplace on the dog bed on the floor, because she had fallen asleep on the sofa while he’d taken Beans for a midnight stroll.
Lily had hung around until Jeremiah and Ethan’s return, then she and Ethan had wished her well and headed home themselves around midnight.
She sat up slowly, one hand on her head like holding onto it would prevent it from spinning or throbbing. But neither of those things happened, so as she sat upright, she lowered the hand. Then she figured she’d try standing up.
Paws pounded and Beans jumped, hit her with his front paws, and set her right back down again.
“Hey, hey, down boy!” Jeremiah, probably roused by the floor vibrating beneath him when his pup galloped across it, grabbed the pup and set him down and told him no. The pup, she thought, had no idea what he was saying, but adored him all the same.
“How did he grow that much?”
“He’s an English mastiff. Vet says he could hit two hundred pounds in his first year. Then the second year, he’ll fill out.”
“Maybe he should live in the stable,” she said, “with his own kind.”
“I never would’ve known when I pulled him out of the creek.”
She smiled, reminded that he’d done that. “He’s doubled since then,” she said.
“So Lily’s coming over later to show me how to use the blood pressure thingie,” he said. “She left it. And the thermometer and a thing that clips on your fingertip to measure oxygen. Man, your family.”
“I know.” She tried standing upright again. The pup tensed, and Jeremiah said, “Wait,” and held his hand out flat palmed over the dog.
Beans settled, but in jittery, wiggly, I-can-hardly-stand-to-sit-still way.
Willow made her way to the kitchen. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”
“That’s good, because I’m cooking,” he said.
“Even better, because I need a shower.” She changed direction mid-step. He had the dog by his side, petting him to keep him calm.
“Do you think you can manage that alone?” he asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Dang.”
She rolled her eyes at him but blushed, too, as she left him.
She took the most careful morning shower ever.
It turned out, every turn or twist or change of head position could incite dizziness, so she moved slowly, washed away the hospital smells and scrubbed at multiple patches of gooey adhesive residue.
Her body was covered in bruises from where her poor horse had landed on her.
Purple patches decorated her shoulder, hip bone, rib cage, both arms and one thigh, and she had to wash those tender areas with care.
At least nothing was broken.
When she finished, she could smell coffee, so she dressed quickly and exited the bathroom.
Jeremiah said. “Yeah, that looks good,” he said when she came out in warm-up pants, a football jersey, and a damp ponytail.
She glanced down at herself, then up at him, raising one eyebrow. “It does?”
“I was pretty sure you’d come out in a uniform, determined to go in to work.”
She lowered her head, shaking it on the way. “I’m stubborn, but not suicidal. I intend to take it extremely easy today. I mean, Come on.”
“Exactly.” He took two plates out of the oven using pot holders and set them on the table, each with mounds of French toast and fried potatoes.
Then he went back for a bowl of fresh berries.
Finally, he topped it off by placing a steaming cup of coffee in front of her plate and pulling out her chair with a flourish. “Your breakfast, milady.”
She sat down. “It looks fantastic and…enough for four of me.”
“Well, to be fair, I can pack away enough for three of you, so…” He took his seat across from her.
“Where did all this food come from? I mean, I know you made it, but the ingredients? Fresh berries?”
“Your mom brought them last night. I was still awake when she came sneaking in and scared the daylights outta me. It was too late for the stores to be open, so I’m guessing she raided her own supplies.”
She sipped the coffee, then spooned berries and poured maple syrup over her French toast. Then she tried her first bite and closed her eyes in pleasure. “Oh, man, that’s good.” She had a second bite. “Where did you learn to cook like this?”
“Remember I told you we had a great chef for a while?”
She nodded, but was too busy eating to speak.
“He was an ex-con and a genius who was wasted on me. But my old man had to have the best of everything. I used to go down to the kitchen, bored as hell in that big empty house, to watch him cook. Then I started helping, when nobody else was around to see.”
She lifted her head, watched his face. “Why couldn’t anyone else see?”
“My father had very clear ideas about what he wanted his firstborn son to learn. Cooking wasn’t part of the plan.”
She lowered her eyes. “Criming was.”
He nodded.
“Did the chef get in trouble for teaching you?”
“No. We kept it secret.” A shadow passed over his eyes.
“Tell me,” she said. “I’m not fixin’ to judge.”
He studied her face for a moment, then said, “My senior year of high school, I cajoled the chauffeur, Cal, into letting me take one of the cars. I had a date. Now my old man was all right with me driving the cars, but he wanted to know in advance when, and where I’d be going, and with whom, and he’d send one of his enforcers out to keep an eye on me, supposedly from a distance, but always obvious.
Taking a car without advance consent was a big violation. ”
“And what happened?”
He sighed, shrugged. “I took the car, had a great time. The next day there was a new chauffeur. I never knew what happened to Cal, but I never saw him again.”
“Holy… Do you think he’s all right?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know. The more I find out about my old man, the more I think he might not be. Here, let me top that off.” He got up to fetch the coffee pot, then refilled her still nearly full mug.
Jeremiah cleaned up the cottage while Willow napped on the sofa after breakfast. She hadn’t intended to nap, and that she’d drifted off told him how much the accident must’ve taken out of her.
That tightened the knot of worry that had been living in the pit of his stomach since he’d seen her lying on the pavement.
He even made her bed and picked up her discarded clothes and damp towels from the bathroom.
By the time he finished, she was rousing, stretching, and then frowning. “I fell asleep. Jeez.”
“Well, you’re supposed to be resting, so that’s probably a good thing.”
“I want to go outside, check on Sundance.”
“I kind of thought you’d laze around the house all day—”
“Not sure it’s in me. Come on, we can discuss terms on the way.”
“Terms.”
“You should be getting something for this. A paycheck, some samolians, you know. Cold, hard cash.” She went to the door and stepped into her tall brown boots.
She took her hat from a peg by the door, plopped it on her head, then winced and took it right off again.
When she replaced it, she did so more carefully.
Willow in a cowboy hat had an effect on him such as few things ever had. His heart skipped, he lost his words, and his train of thought jumped plumb off the track. Happened every time he saw her in one.
“You comin’?” she asked, opening the door.
“Can Beans come?”
She tilted her head, then pressed a hand to it, but didn’t acknowledge anything wrong. “It’s probably good to expose him to all sorts of other animals as a pup. Just bring a leash, I don’t want him spookin’ the horses.”
“C’mon, boy.” He put on his boots, and took his hat off the peg. Beans’ leash was hanging underneath it.
“That’s a big collar for a pup,” she said. “Then again, he’s a big pup.”
“Vet says he’ll need a calf collar when he’s grown.”
“A calf collar!”
He slid the collar over the pup’s head. It hung a little loosely. “It’s kind of fun watching him grow. Seems he’s bigger every morning than he was the night before."
“I still think he’s gonna need a saddle one day.”
They walked away from Willow’s little cottage and down the walkway to the drive.
It forked right toward the road and her parents’ house, and left toward the stable.
They went left. Beans was practically dancing, stopping to sniff every few steps.
Eventually, the stable came into sight, where they trained and boarded horses and raised thoroughbreds.
Stretching out from either side and rolling behind the stable were meadows where the animals grazed. As they drew closer, the pup noticed the horses, and the horses noticed the pup.
Sundance came toward them limping a little, his foreleg wrapped. “Hello Sundance. Are you okay, boy?”