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“Yes, ma’am. What’s the trouble?”
“Uh, we’re not sure, but we found Mr. Davis on the floor. He’s breathing, but I don’t think he’s conscious.”
“Okay, an ambulance is on the way.”
Maisie’s hand was shaking as she tried to place the phone back on the receiver. “What do we do while we wait?”
“I wish I could say I’ve taken first aid classes, but I haven’t,” Drew admitted. “You?”
“CPR,” Maisie said. “But he’s breathing and has a pulse, so that won’t do much good. Did he fall and hit his head?”
Drew scouted the area, finally offering one of her trademark shrugs. “I have no idea. But he’s about sixty-six or sixty-seven. Almost the same as Cord.”
Maisie took a deep breath, knowing how hard that comparison must be for Drew, especially as her dad was still recovering from his own health scare. “Maybe you should go listen for the ambulance. I can stay with Bob.”
Looking grateful for the excuse to slip away, Drew stood up and let Maisie take her place.
“It’s going to be okay, Drew.”
“You don’t know that for sure, though.” She removed her hat, swiping her sleeve across her forehead. “How long has it been since you called?”
“A minute, maybe two.” Not nearly long enough for the ambulance to get there, but Maisie didn’t really need to point that out. She sat down next to Bob, taking his hand, which was rough and cool to the touch. “Hey there, Bob. Help is on the way. You hold on there, buddy.”
Bob didn’t move, but Maisie didn’t know what else to do, and she remembered a nurse assuring her when she was at her father’s bedside toward the end that comatose people can hear. She shut her eyes to stop herself from seeing her father in Bob’s face. “I’m Maisie, by the way. Sorry we’re meeting like this.”
She grabbed a blanket from the bed, pulling it over his prone form to keep him warm. One of Bob’s eyelids fluttered while the other remained still. Maisie studied the man’s face, noting a certain slackness to his left side. “Drew? I think he can hear me. I also think he may have had a stroke.”
Maisie continued to sit with Bob while Drew went outside to await the paramedics. It seemed to take forever, but the ambulance finally arrived, leaving Drew and Maisie to move out of the way and look on, feeling helpless. Maisie put an arm around Drew’s waist and felt the woman lean into her, perhaps too shaken to keep up her usual aloofness, which Maisie was beginning to believe was more than half pretense.
“I’ll give Cord a call,” Drew said when the ambulance had pulled away with the neighbor inside. Her voice was tired and vulnerable, prompting Maisie to hold her even tighter. “It’s too dark to ride home, and he and Dad are going to want to know about Bob.”
* * *
Cord metthem outside at Whetstone Ranch about twenty minutes after the ambulance departed, arriving in an ancient pickup truck with the horse trailer on the back. “What happened?”
“We think Bob had a stroke,” Drew explained. Fear and pain filled the edges of her eyes. Drew was appearing to hold it all together but was quietly breaking inside. Not bothering to care what Cord would make of it, Maisie scooted closer, resting a hand on Drew’s arm. “They’ve taken him to the hospital.”
“He was by himself?” Cord’s face was pinched as Drew confirmed this, and if he’d noticed how possessively Maisie was holding onto Drew, he didn’t say anything about it. Not that he would under the circumstances. Actually, Maisie wondered if there was anything that would get him to speak out of turn. She didn’t imagine Cord was the gossiping type, and Drew was just like him.
They loaded the horses into the trailer quickly, no one saying a word. To Maisie, it felt like the cabin and the time she and Drew had shared there, the intimacy between them, had happened in another world long ago, not an hour or so before.
It truly was like Vegas after all, what happened there, stayed there. This was both good and bad. It threw Maisie off emotionally to go from such extremes, but it did bode well that they might find their way there again at some point. Not that Maisie was focusing on sex with the emergency at hand. But it was starting to sink in how quickly things could change in this type of life, how every up seemed to be balanced by a steep down. It explained a lot about Drew and her outlook on life.
Drew sighed as she helped Maisie into the truck, climbing in beside her as Cord took the driver’s seat. “This is going to be hard on Dad.”
“Bob’s a staple here, only a year older than me.” Cord let out a huff of air as he started the truck. “This will change things.”
Maisie wondered what he meant by this but didn’t have the courage to ask.
“Can you help Cord with the horses?” Drew asked when they arrived back at the Lazy C. “I need to find my dad.”
Maisie didn’t argue, even though she had no idea what to do with horses or what was involved in putting them away. Cord barely needed help, anyway, and she knew the point was to give Drew some space to break the bad news to Andy.
Sure enough, she found Drew and her dad at the kitchen table a while later, talking quietly.
“Would anyone like a cup of coffee?” Maisie didn’t wait for an answer, filling the coffee machine and pulling down some mugs.
Their hushed voices were difficult to process, and Maisie had pretty much zoned out while completing her task, until the conversation grew heated.
