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“Well, whatcha waiting fo’? Get your sweet butt back there and wash those hands ‘til they shine. We’ll see how your first batch o’ oatmeal raisin cookies turns out.” She opened the hinged counter and waved Raven back to the kitchen, scooting her along with big hands and a bigger smile.
“Cheryl, you’re doing the Lord’s work, I know that to be true.” Maggie lowered her voice. “Our Raven, well... she ain’t had it easy.”
Cheryl nodded compassionately. “Hard work and good people will see her right,” Cheryl promised. “Stop by when that nest of squawking terrors has finished with you,” she said with little sarcasm, “and I’ll let her go for the day.” The old baker’s dislike of school children was fierce and total; they had been banned from her shop since the early 1990s, and avoided it as though Cheryl was an ogress who might simply broil them for lunch.
Maggie finished her coffee, but Cheryl waved away her dollar bill. “On the house, for finding me a good pair o’ hands. And don’t you be worrying ‘bout little Raven. She’ll be just right as rain.”
CHAPTERTHREE
Ridge Dawson feltthe steady build-up of discomfort in his forearm as he stirred the thick paint to the right consistency. He bit down the urge to grunt in frustration, re-focusing instead on the neat paint job, which was nearing a very satisfying completion. The front porch to his home would finally gleam as it had in the past, before its months of shabby disrepair and neglect, and it filled him with pride to be bringing this house back to a livable state. Entirely, he recalled with a self-congratulatory smile, on his own.
Pendale had been the Dawson home for as long as any of his relatives could remember. Though no one had ever found concrete proof, Ridge had always been told his family was among the first to settle in the area, right back in the 1870s when the healthful hot springs had begun to bring tourists on the new railway. This had been a boom time in Pendale, with thousands of people flocking to take the waters and to bathe in the hundred or so springs that welled up all along the river and around the town itself. Ridge’s grandfather had even claimed that a Dawson had managed the grand Pendale Hotel back at the turn of the century, but like everyone else had suffered terribly from the great flood of 1913. The springs had been filled with mud, the hotel and town overwhelmed; neither tourism nor the once-burgeoning town had ever recovered.
Leaving the paint to dry for the rest of the morning, Ridge turned back to the unforgiveable apocalypse that had been his mother’s garden. She would have wept, he knew, at its deplorable condition; weeds grew rampant, almost as if they owned the place, and the local buffelgrass — thick, spindly, and embarrassingly unkempt — had decided to compete. Ridge spent an hour of each day pulling up these unwelcome invaders and had cleared much of the acre since his strength had returned.
His days followed a quiet routine. Slowly building up his fitness regimen, Ridge now ran four miles each day in a long circuit around the town, and then worked on his upper body fitness. Weekly check-ups in San Antonio ensured he was on the right path, and the medics had praised his disciplined attitude, if not his occasional short-tempered dismissal of their insistence that heslow things down. His initial workout routines had been over-confident and excessive, leading to long bouts of exhausted coughing and the humiliation of once having to flag down a passing driver to bring him home after an ill-considered run. He had pulled muscles in his weight room, bringing a stern chastisement from his doctors, and would hear nothing of the ice baths on which they insisted.
That was six months ago. Now his routine truly fit his body’s needs: strength work for his legs and arms, steady, twelve-minute miles to give his damaged lungs the workout they needed, and a carefully controlled diet to ensure his digestion was not overly taxed. Only recently, but to Ridge’s immense relief, the doctors had signed off on the ‘modest and infrequent’ imbibing of alcohol; this advice he had taken seriously, adopting a ‘little and often’ attitude that made each cold beer wonderfully refreshing.
Ridge ate a small lunch of chicken salad and then returned to apply the second coat of paint. Working outdoors was a genuine pleasure after being cooped up for months in Walter Reed, surrounded by others who were struggling with their own injuries, the vast majority far, far worse than his own. Within minutes of the explosion all those months ago on a freezing Afghan hilltop, other SEALs had applied tourniquets. They’d called for a medic chopper and funneled Ridge into a system of medical care so well organized that, if they made it through the doors of the NATO Role 3 Hospital in Kandahar, the serviceman had a 98% chance of survival. Initial surgery had repaired the life-threatening damage to his lungs, and by the end of thesame day, he had been on a flight to Landstuhl, Germany, where his treatment had continued.
He was training himself not to think about it, but it was hard not to concede he had been incredibly lucky. Nick Vines’s mother had made an agonizing visit to Ridge at Walter Reed; the painful confluence of emotions had been so intolerable that for days afterwards, he’d wished he had not survived. The psychologists had warned him that there would be a period of wracking guilt as he processed his own answer to that eternal survivor’s question:Why me?
He shrugged it off for the ten thousandth time as his careful, painstaking work came to an end for the day. The sun was an hour from setting when he put aside his paintbrush and climbed into the shower. Twenty minutes away was the bar, some dinner, and his old high-school friends, the only two guys left in the area from his graduating class. Looking around as he drove through town to Route 87, it wasn’t hard to see why; the flood was a century past, but Pendale had yet to find a way of attracting investment or business, or creating significant work. Even the old hotel, derelict for decades, had been razed; some ruins outside of town were the only signs that prosperity had ever visited Pendale, however briefly. It truly had been a long time ago, and Ridge let it go.
Mitch and Flynn were sitting at the bar, beers in hand and shirts still marked with the day’s sweat. “All hail the conquering hero!” was their traditional welcome, however many times Ridge ordered it to cease.
Ridge slapped his friends on the back and took his usual seat at the bar. In many ways they couldn’t have appeared more different; Ridge’s neat, short, black hair contrasted with the habitually unkempt Flynn and his ponytail, and Mitch’s explosion of nut-brown curls. Flynn needed a shave, too. Ridge made a mental note to give them both a hard time. “Hey, guys,” he said, taking his bar stool.
“Evening there, Ridge,” said CJ, the bartender. “Slinging paint again today?”
Ridge kept his friends informed, though each nugget of news would only bring more ball-busting and jokes at his expense. “Finished the porch,” was his description of ten hours’ meticulous labor. “The garden’s still a mess, but I’ll beat those damn weeds.”
They loved the notion of ‘Farmer Ridge’ and ribbed him mercilessly about his newfound green thumb. “He’s gonna show up here one night with a nice big basket o’ squash and carrots,” predicted Flynn.
“Then it’ll be selling his fruit jam door to door like a Girl Scout,” offered Mitch. Ridge slapped his oldest friend robustly around the shoulder.
“A trained killer, a decorated veteran,” marveled Flynn, “reduced to planting potatoes and dolling up his stoop.”
“Fuck, give it a rest, you assholes,” Ridge growled in almost entirely mock anger. Only these two men were permitted this kind of needling; anyone else making fun of Ridge’s Afghanistan experience would have found themselves on the wrong end of an iron fist. “What have you knuckleheads achieved today?”
Guffaws hid their embarrassment. Neither Mitch nor Flynn could be considered a high achiever. They had graduated from high school ‘the way an egg graduates from a hen,’ as Ridge’s mother had put it. Flynn ran a small and unspectacular second-hand car dealership, while Mitch called himself a ‘landscape architect,’ although everyone knew he dug drainage ditches and similarly unedifying features for a local construction company. College had been a fairytale notion, and neither had been attracted to joining the armed forces, even when their friend Ridge made a beeline for the recruiting office immediately after 9/11. Neither was married. Flynn had an on-off relationship with a mail lady, which made him a figure of fun just as much as Ridge was for his patient gardening.
“Sold me a Buick to a guy from Floresville,” reported Flynn, without further elaboration.
“Dug me a fuckin’ big hole near Pendale,” added Mitch, without anyneedfor further elaboration.
“Stellar, gentlemen, just stellar.” Ridge knew how easy it was to hit too close to the bone, and reined in his admonishment of his two school friends, lest they blame themselves for their economic woes. “Pendale provides, yet again, boundless opportunities for those prepared to work hard.”
All three men got a laugh out of that one. Ridge ordered beers and took a look around. Thursday nights weren’t exactly the peak of the week, and this place was seldom crowded, even on a weekend. There was a girl shooting pool with her guy, a noisy drunk with bad cue control; two old-timers played checkers in their usual booth, and a dude in a cowboy hat was eating a steak at the end of the bar.
“There ain’t no jobs in town,” Mitch admitted. “You could always rejoin the service. The money was OK, wasn’t it?”
“Sure,” Ridge conceded. “They’re nothing but generous to the people they accidentally blow up.” His friends treated the actual incident itself with more circumspection; Ridge wasn’t over it, they could see. “Or at least, I think they blew me up.”
“Still can’t remember nothing, huh?” asked Flynn gently.
Ridge shook his head. “Don’t even remember coming back down from patrol, but I’m told we did.” Ridge took a moderate sip of his beer, nursing the brew he knew could be his only one tonight; the local cops had no sense of humor about drunk driving, and besides, his doctors had been explicitly clear on the importance of taking it easy.
