They lay quietly for a while as their bodies relaxed, then Joe pulled away a little. Mackenzie rolled over so they were facing each other, their knees slightly bent, their mouths in perfect kissing range. But Joe frowned slightly, then turned his head away. “Hey, pup,” he softly called. “C’mere.” It was only a moment before the bed dipped as Griffin jumped up, and then he immediately curled up just below their knees, his body warm as it pressed against them.
“Does Red sleep on your bed?” Mackenzie asked.
“Red is a filthy beast,” Joe muttered. He kissed Mackenzie then. “He’s lucky he’s allowed in the house.”
“That’s not really answering my question.”
Joe grinned. “On Christmas Eve,” he admitted. “Just once a year. He protects me from Santa.”
“Santa’s dangerous?”
“Hell, yeah.” Another kiss made Mackenzie not care about the nonsense Joe was coming up with. “Breaks in, eats your food… steals shit….”
Okay, no kiss was sweet enough to make that acceptable. “Santa doesn’t steal shit!”
“Maybe not from you,” Joe said with a shrug. “But all those toys he gives to the good kids? He steals them from bad kids.”
“He makes them in his workshop,” Mackenzie corrected. He really wasn’t sure Joe should be trusted to raise a four-year-old.
“That’s what they want you to believe.” Another kiss, and then Joe pulled away and looked serious. “I want to buy you a Christmas present,” he said quietly.
“What? Right now?”
“It would just be a present if I bought it for you now. I want it to be a Christmas present.” He looked down at the sleeping dog, then back at Mackenzie. “I want you to still be around at Christmastime.”
Mackenzie smiled at him. “I want that too,” he said. Then it was his turn to grin. “But I don’t want Santa to steal my shit, so we’d better be really good until then, okay?”
“I’ll try,” Joe agreed. And then they faded off to sleep together, Griffin snoring happily at their feet.
Chapter 18
“MAYBE HE doesn’t realize Griffin’s a dog,” Will suggested from his spot on the porch. “Red’s always been really good with the cats.”
“He doesn’t think Griffin’s a cat!” Mackenzie protested.
“It’s because Griffin was immediately submissive,” Ally said wisely. She was sitting beside Joe, sipping on a cup of cocoa, watching the dogs trot happily through the autumn leaves, Red in front, Griffin close behind. “He didn’t challenge Red, so Red doesn’t have to beat him up.”
“That’s how Mack works too,” Joe said from his spot on the porch steps. He knew he was pushing his luck, but it was kind of fun to get Mackenzie almost mad. “He just immediately saw my superiority and dominance and never challenged me at all. Just rolled over and showed his belly… peed on himself a little….”
The clod of wet leaves came from behind Joe, someone’s hand rubbing them into his face so hard some little bits of half-decayed vegetation went in his mouth and up his nose. “Hey!” he protested once he’d pulled away. Mackenzie was still in front of him, and the hand had been strong, but not that strong… “Sarah,” he said in disgust. “You two are ganging up on me.” It was true. Just the night before, Joe had said something Sarah didn’t care for, and Mackenzie had splashed him with dishwater in retaliation.
“I think of it as more of a universe-wide effort to keep you in line,” Sarah said smugly. She sat down on the steps next to him and snuggled in, brushing a little leaf detritus off his cheek. “You’re kind of obnoxious when you’re happy,” she said, softly enough that only he could hear. “But in a good way.”
Austin trotted over with an orange leaf in his outstretched hand. It was apparently his autumn version of giving flowers to people; it certainly saved the family some money. He looked thoughtful, then edged past Sarah and made his way onto the porch to give the leaf to Will. “Bye-bye,” he said sadly.
Will’s guilty expression gave Joe a quick stab of satisfaction before he rearranged his emotions to something more appropriate. “You know it’s not a big bye-bye, right, buddy? Will’s going to sleep somewhere else more often than he does now. That’s all. He’ll still be here lots. He’ll still see you all the time.”
“And if he doesn’t watch his step, he’ll be back before Christmas,” Sarah muttered into Joe’s shoulder. The family’s concerns about Lindsey seemed to have crystallized lately, mostly centering around the idea that she wasn’t friendly enough to the family and didn’t appreciate Will’s good qualities. It was nice for everyone to be picking on someone else for a change, but Joe generally kept his opinions on the matter to himself. If things did go badly, Will would need someone neutral to talk to. Even if Joe had to chase his brother down and force the conversation.
And Austin didn’t really seem all that worried about any of it. The family watched him as he jogged down the stairs and leaped off the second-from-the-bottom tread, his new feat of daring. He glanced around to be sure everyone had seen and admired it, then headed for the leaf pile.
“Not there, little man,” Mackenzie said as he grabbed Austin’s shoulders and steered him around the more glistening leaves. “The doggies peed there. It’s a bit dirty.”
Austin allowed himself to be diverted, and Mackenzie picked up his rake again. The family had told him not to bother; they might run the lawn tractor over the leaves to mulch them up before winter, but that was about as far as they ever went. Raking and piling and burning leaves? Who had time for that?
But Mackenzie had it in his head that this was an authentic country activity and hadn’t allowed himself to be dissuaded. He’d at least agreed to compost the leaves instead of burning them; Joe was pretty sure there would be another struggle when he had to convince Mackenzie that loading them into the bucket of the tractor and dumping them on the manure pile counted as composting.
Austin had found himself another leaf, and this time he brought it to Mackenzie. “Coals to Newcastle,” Sarah muttered, but Mackenzie accepted the leaf as if it were a rare treasure.
“It’s beautiful!” he gushed. “I really like the colors—green and orange, and there’s a bit of yellow right there! And some pink up around the top!”
“Let’s see if he can keep that up after the twentieth leaf,” Ally said with wry affection.
“It’s for ‘hello,’” Austin said to Mackenzie, then frowned as if dissatisfied with his word choice. “Not ‘hello.’ For… for sleeping here now.”
“Welcome?” Joe suggested. “When somebody comes and you’re happy they’re there, you say they’re ‘welcome.’”
Austin squinted at him suspiciously. “You’re welcome?” he said. “That’s for after ‘thank you.’” They hadn’t been playing the Joe-suggests-ridiculous-things game lately, but apparently Austin still wasn’t sure he could completely trust his uncle on these issues.
“Same word,” Joe agreed. “Kinda the same idea, but a little different. You can leave the ‘you’re’ off and it just means you’re happy somebody came.”
Austin still looked a little unsure, but he turned to Mackenzie and nodded in strangely formal way, like a tiny ambassador. “Welcome,” he said.
“Thank you,” Mackenzie replied with feeling.
“You’re welcome?” Austin said with a dubious look in Joe’s direction. He obviously wasn’t a fan of the repetition.
“Yeah, that’s it, buddy! Not my fault it’s kind of weird.”
Austin returned to his leaf-hunting and Mackenzie to his own, larger scale version of the activity, and the rest of the family sat on the porch and watched them both. It was mid-October, and things had finally slowed down a little on the farm. There were certainly things Joe could be doing, but he’d shipped a good number of cattle off to market over the past couple weeks, the hay was in, the machinery that needed repairs wasn’t going to be used until the next spring…. He could afford to take a Friday afternoon off to enjoy his family. Will was
supposed to be packing and moving into his new house, but he wasn’t taking anything but his clothes with him, so he had some time too. Ally and Austin had just gotten home from school, and Sarah had dropped by with some paperwork on the ranch sale and decided to stay a while. It would have been better, in theory, if Nick had been there, just to make the family complete, but he would have just been bragging about the new business, letting everyone know how important and successful he was going to be… it was easier to miss him than it was to deal with him.
And Mackenzie was there. Sure, it was mostly because he was trying to distract himself from the next day’s wedding… the clients were doing the decorating and had made it clear they didn’t need any help, so Mackenzie was on call in case anything went wrong with the building but otherwise superfluous. He wasn’t handling it well, and Joe caught him taking another worried look at the sky.
“It’s not going to rain,” Joe reassured him. “And if it does, that’s their problem. The joy of not holding the reception is that you don’t have to worry about that crap. The church doesn’t leak, so rain won’t affect your part of things.”
“The whole wedding is my part of things!” Mackenzie protested. “If this event gets messed up, no one’s ever going to want to get married in that building again!”
“No, the rest of the world isn’t insane like you are,” Sarah said kindly. “They won’t blame you for some bad weather.”
Mackenzie didn’t look convinced, but he went back to his raking anyway. He had the front of the property almost cleared when a car stopped at the end of the driveway and let two people out, then sped away down the road.
“Who’s that?” Will asked, squinting. Nobody answered, but they all turned to watch.
The visitors were halfway down the driveway when Ally squeaked, “It’s Lacey! And Savannah!” She dropped her mug and skipped off the porch, then ran to greet her friends.
“What the hell are they doing here?” Will asked quietly. Again, he got no answer.
Mackenzie set down his rake and came over to stand by the family, and together they cautiously took a few steps toward the new arrivals.
“Hey, guys,” Sarah said cautiously. “It’s good to see you, but… what’s going on? How’d you get here?”
“We took a bus to town and then caught a ride with Donny Travis’s brother,” Lacey said matter-of-factly.
“That’s the second question answered,” Joe said. He smiled and tried to sound nonthreatening. Mostly, he tried not to think about the sister who was missing, the little girl who was living in a care facility she might never get out of. “But what about the first question? What’s going on?”
Lacey straightened her shoulders and looked dead at him. “You said we should come here if things got bad at home. You said if people were drinking too much or if we didn’t feel safe, we should come here. You said it didn’t matter what time—we should just come.”
Joe stared at her. Yes, he’d said that. Of course at the time they’d been living a five-minute walk away, not a five-hour drive. But he’d said it, and he’d meant it. And he still did. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Yeah. Okay.” He’d need details, eventually, but for the time being, he supposed this was enough. He looked at Will, who just looked back at him, then at Mackenzie, who smiled as if he was sure Joe had a plan for just this situation. “Are you guys hungry? Ally, why don’t you take them inside and get them something to eat?”
Ally raised her eyebrow as if she knew she was being removed from the adult conversation, but she did as Joe had suggested. When the girls were out of earshot, Joe said, “We need to call Andy. He felt bad about not getting them out of that house before the fire. He’ll help us now.”
“Help us do what, though?” Sarah was frowning at him. “What are we supposed to do with them?”
Joe didn’t know the details, but he definitely had a good idea about the general principle. “He’ll help us keep them safe,” he said. “He’ll help us help them.”
Mackenzie stepped closer and took Joe’s hand, looking at him with a concerned expression.
“I can’t let them down again,” Joe said quietly.
“You didn’t let them down last time,” Mackenzie corrected. “But we can try to help them. Absolutely.”
It wasn’t fair to him. Mackenzie hadn’t signed on for this. But he was smiling at Joe now, his agitation about the church completely gone. “We’ll help them,” he repeated. “We’ll make it work.”
Joe made himself nod. This wasn’t Mackenzie’s problem, and Joe wouldn’t let him take responsibility for something so unrelated to him, but at least he wasn’t trying to keep Joe from helping out. “Thank you,” Joe said with feeling.
“You really don’t make things easy on yourself, do you?” Will smiled ruefully at his brother. “I can’t decide whether I should offer to stay and help out or hurry up and get out so you’ll have more room.”
“Hurry up and get out,” Joe said with a smile. “We’ll be fine.” He looked down at Austin, who was standing at his feet with a brightly colored leaf in each hand. “Who are those for, buddy?” he asked, even though he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.
Sure enough, Austin waved toward the house. “Lacey and ’Vanna,” he said. “To say ‘welcome.’”
Joe sighed. Somehow the arboreal tribute made it seem a bit too real. “Okay,” he finally said, stepping aside so Austin could get by. “Go for it.”
The little boy scampered up the stairs, and Sarah and Will trailed after him, going inside to give their own greetings to the girls.
Joe kept a tight grip on Mackenzie’s hand. “This is more than you signed up for,” he said carefully.
But Mackenzie just grinned at him. “You always give me more than I expect,” he said, and he leaned in to kiss Joe, his nose cold but his lips warm. “We’ll make it work,” he said again.
And Joe believed him.
About the Author
KATE SHERWOOD started writing at about the same time she got back on a horse after a twenty-year break. She’d like to think she’s far too young for it to be a mid-life crisis, but apparently she was ready for a few changes!
Kate’s writing focuses on characters and relationships, people trying to find out how much of themselves they need to keep, and how much they can afford to give away. She tries to find a careful balance between drama and humor—she wants readers to have an intense experience and feel drawn into the book, but she also wants them to enjoy the time they spend reading.
Visit Kate at www.katesherwoodbooks.com or e-mail her at [email protected].
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The Fall Page 23