When they got to the creek, some fifteen minutes later, Walker got off Mack, walked over to Smokey and adjusted the stirrups to suit Shane.
“I guess I’m sort of out of practice,” Shane said, keeping his voice low so Brylee and Clare, who were having a fine old time girling it up, wouldn’t overhear.
“That’ll be easy to fix,” Walker assured him. “It’s been a while since you and your sister came for a visit, after all, and my guess is, you haven’t had many opportunities to ride horses in the meantime.”
Shane studied him solemnly, swallowed once. “I wouldn’t mind being here more often,” he said, choosing his words with such obvious care that Walker’s heart hurt a little. “If you wanted me—us—Clare and me, I mean, hanging around and stuff.”
Careful, Walker counseled himself, because his most powerful instinct was to gather the boy in his arms, tell him how much he wanted Shane and Clare to play bigger parts in his life. How very much he wanted to tell them they were his, try his damnedest to make up for lost time, hear the world call them by their rightful surname, which was Parrish, not Elder.
“You can hang around as much as your mom will allow,” Walker finally replied. “How’s that?”
“She’ll say you’re busy and we’ll be underfoot,” Shane answered with bleak certainty.
Walker’s throat hurt. He cleared it, in order to speak. “I reckon that part of it is my call,” he said cautiously. Then, after a long pause, he added, “Suppose I have a talk with her?”
Shane brightened, but his delight faded as quickly as it had appeared. “You can try,” he said. “Mom’s pretty hardheaded, though. Everybody says so.”
Walker chuckled, a rusty sound, saw-toothed enough to draw blood, the way it felt coming out. “That’s true,” he allowed gently, “but I reckon she’s had to be a bit on the hardheaded side to raise you and your sister into the people you are, and build a world-class career at the same time.”
Shane appeared to consider this, but in the end, Walker suspected, the finer points went over his head. He was only thirteen, after all, in that in-between place, neither boy nor man, an ever-changing sketch of the person he would become as he grew to manhood. “I guess,” he said, sounding unsure.
“Are we going to ride or stand around and yammer?” Brylee interceded, the smile on her face seeping into her voice. She hadn’t dismounted, and neither had Clare.
Walker laughed, shook his head and swung back up into the saddle, the reins resting loosely across his right palm. “You ready?” he asked Shane in a quiet aside.
Shane nodded, proud and determined. “Ready,” he confirmed.
They rode for another hour, until the dogs started lagging behind, tongues lolling, signaling that, as Walker’s dad used to say, they’d had about all the fun they could stand for one afternoon.
Back at the barn, Brylee and Clare continued to chatter while they unsaddled their horses and put them away in their stalls. They talked while they brushed the animals, too, and the whole time they were feeding them.
“How come women talk so much?” Shane asked innocently. He and Walker had been performing the same tasks as Brylee and Clare right along, but only a few words had passed between them. It wasn’t that there wasn’t anything to say—working together, side by side, was its own kind of communication, rendering speech unnecessary.
“I have no idea,” Walker answered in all honesty. “I guess females are just wired that way.”
“Maybe,” Shane agreed. “Mike—that’s my mom’s lead guitarist—says girls think if things get too quiet, somebody’s mad at them.”
Walker weighed the pros and cons of that theory. “That’s a little on the simplistic side, I think,” he said. “My guess is, strong women—like your mom and Brylee and Clare—don’t worry too much about whether or not anybody’s mad at them. They’re too busy doing the things they figure they ought to get done.”
Shane nodded thoughtfully, and Walker would have given a lot to know what was going on in the boy’s mind just then. What had it been like for him, on the road with Casey and the band for most of his young life? Had he ever felt scared, facing new places and new people at every turn? Did he ever wish he could just light somewhere, attend regular school, make friends and play on the softball or soccer team?
He didn’t really know Shane, or Clare, for that matter, and that realization, oft-visited though it was, shook him, made him feel wistful and pissed off and a whole passel of other things, too. He clamped his jaw down tight so he wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t blurt out the facts. While it was probably right, the claim that the truth set people free, it was equally true that it could scorch the earth, destroying everything in its path, leaving nothing but rubble in its wake. It could break hearts.
Maybe, he reflected glumly, it was already too late to rectify the situation without doing more harm than good.
He was fairly sure Casey believed exactly that—and she might be right.
“Spaghetti for supper?” Brylee asked when the horses were taken care of. Two ranch hands were already busy feeding the rest of the livestock and attending to other end-of-the-day chores.
The kids approved of the suggestion loudly and with vigor, but Walker remained pensive, thinking of all the time they’d wasted, he and Casey and the kids. And while he figured he could love the woman if he was ever fool enough to trust her that much, right about then, if she’d been handy, he’d have read her the riot act from start to finish, and then started all over again just in case she’d missed anything.
Whatever happened between him and Casey, Walker thought, he was through playing games, through watching from the sidelines while his children grew up, through with the lies and the pretending and all the other bullshit.
If the four of them—he and Casey, Clare and Shane—couldn’t be a family, well, so be it. It wasn’t an uncommon problem, in the modern world—folks dealt with it, did the best they could.
All Walker could have said for sure as he fed and watered all four dogs on the side porch, the sounds of laughter and cooking and table-setting rolling out through the screen door between there and the kitchen, was that he was done doing this Casey’s way.
Yes, there would be consequences. He’d just have to find a way to work through them, the way a man worked through a hard winter or a long-term heartache.
* * *
MITCH FOUND HER, eventually, probably drawn by the faint strains of her guitar and a song that wouldn’t quite come together.
Companionably, Casey’s manager sat down on the bottom step, rested his elbows on his knees and his chin in one palm.
“You and the cowboy,” he began. “Is it serious?”
Casey stopped playing, placed her guitar gently back in its case, lowered the lid and snapped it closed. “By ‘the cowboy,’” she replied, “I assume you mean Walker?”
“Don’t try to throw me off, Case,” Mitch said with a note of sadness in his voice. “We’ve known each other too long for that.”
Casey looked away. “Walker is a—friend,” she said, because the first person she told about her relationship with Walker was not going to be Mitch Wilcox, no matter how much she respected him and appreciated all he’d done for her over the years. No, Clare and Shane had to hear what she had to say before anyone else and, after them, Brylee. This was, after all, a family matter.
“If you say so,” Mitch agreed, still seated on the stairs. Out of the corner of her eye, Casey saw him spread his hands in a gesture of helpless acceptance. “I’m not here to talk about Walker Parrish.”
“You could have fooled