“I’ve got a job,” Andrea said. “I can help out with expenses for a while.”
“You work for Melissa,” Matt piped up happily, smiling at Andrea.
Her smile faltered slightly, but it was friendly. She nodded, then turned back to her friend. “Byron—” she began.
But Byron silenced her with a shake of his head.
Just then, a chubby woman with frizzy brown hair came out of the back, greeting Steven and Matt with a cheerful hello and an I’ll-be-right-with-you before turning her attention to Byron and Andrea and the sheepdog.
“Well?” she asked hopefully. “Have we made a decision?”
Steven thought he detected a note of compassion in her tone.
Once again, Byron shook his head. “It just won’t work,” he said. “Not right now.”
The woman sighed. Her nametag read Becky, and she wore print scrubs in bright shades of pink and green and blue. “Your mom must be happy to have you back home,” she said gently.
By then, Matt was down on one knee, petting the sheepdog, and Byron watched with a sad smile.
“She doesn’t know I’m here yet,” Byron answered, his gaze bouncing off Andrea once before landing on Becky. “I got off the bus to hitchhike the rest of the way, but then Andrea came along and picked me up just this side of Flagstaff. I needed to be around a dog to get myself centered, so we came here first.”
Andrea winced slightly, as though Byron had inadvertently revealed some vital secret.
Byron looked at Steven briefly, then at Matt. “He’s a nice dog, isn’t he?” he asked, indicating the hopeful critter.
Matt nodded. “We’re here to get ourselves a dog,” he told Byron. “We have a ranch. Right now, we live in a bus, but we’re going to have a house and a yard pretty soon.”
Byron smiled, but there was still something forlorn about him. “Sounds like you’d be a good match for this fella, then.”
“Don’t you want him?” Matt asked. He might have been only five years old, but he was perceptive. He’d picked up on the reluctance in Byron’s decision not to adopt this particular dog.
“He needs a home,” Byron said. “Just now, I can’t give him one—not the right kind, anyway. So if you think he’s the dog for you, and your dad says it’s okay, you probably ought to take him home with you.”
Andrea started to cry, silently. She turned away when she realized Steven was looking at her.
Becky, on the other hand, was still on the other subject. “You’d better let your mom know you’re home, Byron,” she said in motherly tones. “Velda’s been looking forward to having you back in Stone Creek. She probably met the bus. And when there was no sign of you—”
Byron’s shoulders drooped slightly, and he sighed. Nodded. Turned to Andrea, who had stopped crying, though her eyes were red-rimmed and her lashes were spiky with moisture. “Give me a ride home?” he asked her.
“Sure,” she said.
“We can always use volunteers around here, Byron,” Becky added. “Folks to feed the animals, and play with them, and clean out kennels.”
Byron smiled at her. “That would be good,” he said. Then after pausing to pat the sheepdog on the head once, in regretful farewell, he followed Andrea out of the building without looking back.
“That poor kid,” Becky said, and her eyes welled up as she stared after Byron and Andrea. Then she seemed to give herself an inward shake. Turning her smile on Steven and Matt, she said, “May I help you?”
“We’re here to adopt a dog,” Steven answered, still vaguely unsettled by the sense of sorrow Byron and Andrea had left in their wake.
“Well,” Becky said, with enthusiasm, gesturing toward the sheepdog, “as you can see, we have a prime candidate right here.”
The dog’s name was Zeke, Steven and Matt soon learned, and he was about two years old, housebroken and, for the most part, well-behaved. His former owner, an older gentleman, had gone into a nursing home a few weeks ago, suffering from an advanced case of Alzheimer’s, and his daughter had brought Zeke to the shelter in hopes that he’d find a new home.
“Can we have him?” Matt asked, looking up at Steven. “Please?”
Steven was pretty taken with Zeke himself, but then, he’d never met a dog he didn’t like. He’d have adopted every critter in the shelter, if he had his way. “Wouldn’t you like to check out a few others before you decide?” he asked.
Matt wrapped both arms around Zeke’s neck and held on, shaking his head. “He’s the one,” he said, with certainty. “Zeke’s the one.”
Zeke obligingly licked the boy’s cheek.
Steven glanced at Becky, who was beaming with approval. Clearly, she agreed.
“Okay,” Steven said, smiling.
He filled out the forms, paid the fees and bought a big sack of the recommended brand of kibble. Zeke came with a leash and a collar, left over from his former life.
He rode back to the ranch in the bed of the truck, since there was no room inside, but he seemed at home there, in the way of country dogs.
Matt sat half-turned in his car seat the whole way, keeping an eye on Zeke, who’d stuck his head through the sliding window at the back of the cab.
“I bet Zeke misses his person,” the boy said.
Steven felt a pang at that, figuring there might be some transference going on. It was no trick to connect the dots: Matt missed his people, too.
“Might be,” Steven agreed carefully.
Matt had referred to him as “my new dad” that day, as he sometimes did. It was probably the only way he could think of to differentiate Steven from Zack. And the boy wanted desperately to remember his birth father.
He had slightly more difficulty recalling Jillie, since he’d been younger when his mother died.
“Do you miss anybody?” Matt asked. His voice was slight, like his frame, and a little breathless.
“Yeah,” Steven said. “I miss your mom and dad. I miss my own mom, and my granddad, too.”
“Do you miss Davis and Kim? And your cousins?”
Davis was Steven’s father, Kim his stepmother. They were alive and well, living on the Creed ranch in Colorado, though they’d turned the main house and much of the day-to-day responsibility over to Conner.
Brody, not being the responsible type, had left home years ago, and stayed gone.
“Yes,” Steven answered. They went through this litany of the missing whenever the boy needed to do it. “I miss them a lot.”
“But we can go visit Davis and Kim and Conner. And they can visit us,” Matt said, as the sheepdog panted happily and drooled all over the gearshift. “My mommy and daddy are dead.”
Steven reached across to squeeze Matt’s shoulder lightly. As much as he might have wanted to—the kid wasn’t even old enough to go to school yet, after all, let alone understand death—he never dodged the subject just because it was difficult. If Matt brought up the topic, they talked it over. It was an unwritten rule: tell the truth and things will work out. Steven believed that.
Matt lapsed into his own thoughts, idly patting Zeke’s head as they traveled along that curvy country road, toward the ranch. Toward the borrowed tour bus they’d be calling home for a while.
Steven