Chapter 3 #3
He watched her in quiet joy and amazement and felt his own heart swell just a little.
It was lovely to see her appreciation for something so very simple, and yet, in a way, it wasn’t simple at all.
He really appreciated the fact that he’d guessed right about her and that she would enjoy this.
This place was very close to his heart, and finding somebody out there who had a heart like his, well, it was nice.
When she turned to him, she started laughing. “I need to go home and change into dry clothes after this.”
“So will I,” he agreed, laughing too. “It’s always been the same, but it never stops me from coming back.”
“No, of course not,” she said, looking around. “This is fabulous, and I still can’t believe I didn’t know about it.”
He smiled. “And maybe that’s a good thing,” he pointed out, “because I got to be the first one to show it to you.”
She looked down at Sarge and Dagger, running amok. “What do you think about letting them off their leashes?”
“How do you feel about wet dogs?”
She winced and then glanced at him, a twinkle in her eye. “They’re staying with you, aren’t they?”
He started laughing again as she unclipped both leashes, and the dogs immediately jumped into the pool of water, having the time of their life, barking, playing with each other, getting back out onto the bank, shaking off gallons of water with their antics, and then diving right back in again.
He smiled. “Just to even see them like this is a joy,” he said.
She nodded. “And it’s not something I necessarily thought I needed,” she acknowledged, “but, boy, did I need it today.”
He smiled at her. “And it should make you realize that you were doing the right thing in terms of Dagger here.”
“And yet I can’t keep taking on dogs,” she admitted, “especially if that doesn’t necessarily get them happy homes with people who have time for them.
I mean, it’s one thing for me to find time now for the dogs that I keep, but, for so many of them, with my working all day, it wouldn’t be nearly enough. ”
“I agree with that,” he replied, “and an awful lot of things are hard to see in your line of work.”
She nodded. “I do have to put animals down, but if it’s an otherwise healthy animal”—she shook her head—“I refuse to do it, even though a lot of people ask it of me. They don’t want somebody else to take it, or they say they’ve exhausted all avenues and want me to put a healthy animal to sleep. I just won’t do it.”
“So, what do you do in that case?”
“I end up keeping them, then try to find good homes for them, which, so far, I’ve managed to be fairly lucky with,” she told him, “but one day it’ll be an even bigger problem, and I’m just not going there right now.”
“What about your family? Do they have animals?”
“Oh, heavens no,” she muttered, with a smirk.
“That’s partly what pushed me into this because we were never allowed to have any pets growing up.
Not even a goldfish. They were either dirty”—she rolled her eyes—“or would bite us or would be dangerous, bringing in diseases or something. That was all per my mother. She would rattle on and on about it, every time I asked. There just wasn’t any give in her for anything, other than people, and then only people in her church.
If you weren’t part of the church, you weren’t worth her time … period.”
“Ouch,” Wilden muttered. “Whatever happened to the part in the Bible about helping those who are less fortunate?”
“Yeah, well, you only qualified as being the worthy less fortunate if you did the things you were told to do, and my mother was very good at telling people what to do,” she explained, with a wince.
“Not necessarily a great way to grow up because very few people could stomach her rather blunt know-it-all attitude about what to do. I mean, she was there when people needed help, at least the first time, but, if you didn’t do what she told you to do in order to get out of whatever trouble you were in, you were deemed a lost cause and didn’t deserve any more of her charity,” she shared.
Vivian shook her head. “So, I grew up with a very strange view of what charity meant, and her version certainly didn’t include anything involving animals, and I really struggled with that.”
“And your sister, is she the same?”
“Yes, a carbon copy in many ways. My father isn’t quite as bad, and I think he at least understands why I do what I do, but he won’t go against my mom.
She runs that household,” she declared, with a glance in his direction, “and he knows that, to keep the peace, he’s got to toe the line and keep that same belief system in place. ”
“That’s too bad,” Wilden muttered. “I’m sure all of us have some kind of challenge in our family life, which we think we could get over. Yet still sometimes it’s just not that easy.”
“No, it isn’t easy at all,” she declared, “but we’re all going our own directions and doing what we feel we need to do.”
He could appreciate that.
When the dogs finally slowed down with their water antics, Wilden called them over, and both came and rested at his feet, just panting, their fur completely soaked with water. He smiled down at them, both looking totally spent. “I don’t think I’ve seen any two happier dogs in a very long time.”
“Not only that,” she added, “I’m delighted to know that Dagger is following Sarge’s lead, so it appears to be an influence that will be very helpful in getting him to obey.”
“I can work on his training,” Wilden said. “I don’t have a problem with that. Certainly while I’m here, I will need something to do.”
She eyed him sharply. “Are you planning on staying?”
Surprised at the question, he studied her intently.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I was in a spot where I was figuring out what to do with my life, after I got injured in the military,” he explained.
“I got a medical discharge, and, after the healing and rehab, you go through a ‘what now’ phase. It’s not exactly something you’re really prepared for. ”
“You don’t look as if you are hurt that badly.”
“I’m missing a leg. Plus, I’ve had my fair share of surgeries and associated rehabs.
As a part of all that, I was working with some friends, Kat and Badger, helping them out.
They have an organization that helps a lot of veterans get back on their feet, both by working for them and also by benefiting from their work.
They build housing for veterans, especially those with disabilities. ”
Wilden continued. “The housing is also built by veterans, even those with disabilities. So, in the process, the building guys tune up their construction skills and their social skills as well. It all serves to help assimilate us back into society and that kind of thing. That’s when I heard the news about my father passing and the problem with this guy here,” he shared, bending down to Sarge and giving him a big belly rub, the water still coming off with his movements.
“So, I came to confirm he was okay and to check up on my grandma.”
He chuckled. “I guess, since I was able to arrange for the cremation of my father today, it was good timing,” he noted.
“My grandmother will need a bit of time to recover, and I don’t know yet that she’s okay.
My father was spending her pension money on himself and, from the looks of things, barely feeding her. ”
“That’s awful,” she said, “but I’m not surprised. He did seem to be that kind of a guy.”
He looked over at her and nodded. “Yeah, he was absolutely that kind of a guy, and now my grandmother will need a little bit of extra care and attention for a while. I’m still trying to get a bead on her financial situation, but regardless, her house needs work.
So either we install a chair lift to get her up and down the stairs or we convert the downstairs bathroom so she can shower or bathe downstairs.
She’s perked up since I got home, but I’m not yet sure that she’s capable and ready to live on her own at this stage,” he shared.
“She seems to think she doesn’t have enough money to go to a retirement home if she had to, and again I don’t know if that’s true or not because I’ve only just gotten home.
So I don’t really know what her personal situation looks like,” he admitted, a sad smile on his face.
“Apparently my father had no problem taking absolutely everything she had. So, I’m hoping, at the end of the day, we’ll come up with a good solution for her. ”
Vivian nodded. “Then maybe the solution is for you to stay in town,” Vivian suggested, staring at him. “I mean, if you don’t have any other place to go at the moment, maybe this is a good place for you to be.”
He smiled. “Prior to coming here, I would have said, Absolutely not, but something is so special about being back here,” he conceded, as he turned to look at the waterfall.
“And my grandmother doesn’t have too many more years left.
So now a part of me very much wants to bring our relationship back to the forefront.
There’s some pain over how it ended, before I walked out, that we needed some time to fix.
However, after seeing all the damage my father did, it doesn’t need any time at all.
It just needs more attention,” he declared.
“I can’t hold anything against her at all because she was only trying to survive.
My father would not have made that easy on her, and now I feel as if I should have come home a long time ago and booted his ass out.
That would have been difficult to do from a legal perspective if she wouldn’t stand up to him, but at least I could have tried. ”
“I’m sure it would have been difficult,” she agreed, followed by a dry laugh, her face all scrunched up. “John wasn’t the kind to give up easily.”
He grimaced. “Yeah, as you know firsthand, he was all about causing trouble, not so much about solving anything or even making things better for his own mother.”
She nodded.