One More Time (4 page)

“So they’re….” He made a face and shook his head. “You’re safe, though, aren’t you? We had that discussion when you were a kid. Maybe I should have done it yearly to get it to stick.”

I laughed and finished off the last of my coffee. I was finally feeling normal and awake. “Yeah, Dad. Everything’s good. Now, can we please do some work? I’d really like to do something else rather than keep talking about my sex life.” I tossed the coffee cup into the trash and my dad fished it out for me before tossing it into the recycling container not more than two feet behind me. He gave me another stern look, and I nodded, remembering we were supposed to be doing better as a department about that.

“Yes, anything else besides that. You go respond to the e-mails. I’ll go out on patrol. The guys should start coming in at nine.”

I waved to him as he gathered up his jacket and left. “See you.” We all came in on a staggered schedule so someone was always around. It was a good system, I thought. And if I’d wanted to be chief someday, I would have kept it that way. But I wasn’t next in line for the position, and I didn’t want to be either. I liked my lack of responsibility and being given orders from my dad instead of being the one to give them and make the hard decisions. Not that those came up often, maybe once every three years, but I didn’t want to be the one to fire one of my neighbors. I left that up to my dad instead. He was good at it, and at making sure the people didn’t leave angry. I liked my neighbors and couldn’t have imagined having to fire any of them.

I turned on my computer, grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge while it booted up, and then opened up the e-mails. It was a lot of the usual stuff I dealt with each day. The mountain paper wanted to know if we had any news we wanted to share. Their base was three towns over, so a lot of their news was about snow and the best places to ski during the winter. I let the guy who had e-mailed the department know that we didn’t have anything to share at this time.

A mom wanted to know if we could show up at her son’s birthday party since he wanted to be a cop. The kid was six and his mom worked at the grocery store. I smiled thinking about how some of the older guys, those with grandkids that age, would get a kick out of doing that.

I took out my phone and texted Tony, the oldest member of our little force besides my dad. They were both in their sixties, but neither of them looked it and on my bad days they could still outshoot me.

Six year old boy wants a cop at his birthday party. Want the assignment?
I texted him.

Who’s his mom?
Tony texted back.

I rolled my eyes. I didn’t know Tony had a thing for single moms, which I knew Amy Anderson was, but I figured if it made Tony want to do it and spend time with the kid, then whatever. I brought random guys home when I didn’t even know their first names, so I figured I didn’t have any room to talk about love lives and relationships.

Amy Anderson. Works at the grocery store. Son is Tim.
I texted back.

I’m in. I’ll get the details from you when I get into work. Let her know I’ll be there.

Thanks.
I figured I knew why he said yes, and it didn’t bother me in the least. Amy was pretty, I guessed. She always smiled at me and asked about my dad when I was in the grocery store. I sent the e-mail and continued on with them.

Ben, who lived two doors down from my dad, was complaining about a barking dog in the neighborhood that someone from the precinct apparently needed to deal with immediately. I shook my head at his tone, but also because I didn’t remember there being any noisy dogs in the area. I was pretty sure my dad would have mentioned one to me if there had been. And besides, Ben knew who my dad was. Everyone in Thornwood did. He could have taken five minutes to walk down the street to go talk to my dad instead of spending that much time writing a pretty long and ranting e-mail about some dog barking.

I decided to call my dad and let him know.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Hey. Your neighbor Ben is complaining about a barking dog,” I told him.

I heard a message come over a loudspeaker wherever he was and figured he was probably at the grocery store. “Can you get me a bag of chips while you’re there? I didn’t eat breakfast.”

“Boy, chips aren’t breakfast. I’ll bring you a banana and some chocolate milk. Now, what’s wrong with Ben?”

I could have argued about how I wasn’t five and didn’t drink chocolate milk anymore, but that was a lie. I loved everything that had chocolate in it, and my dad always got the good kind of chocolate milk for me, the one made with actual milk and not the one that had filtered water as the first ingredient. “He’s complaining about a dog barking. I didn’t think people had many dogs near your house. There’s the golden retriever on the corner, but who else?”

“The Hendersons just rescued a few Maltese so that’s probably who he’s talking about. I’ll stop by the hardware store to see Ben after I bring you back your breakfast. Don’t skip meals. It’s bad for your blood sugar or something.”

I snorted. I didn’t care about my blood sugar. I’d wanted to sleep in and coffee didn’t do much to tide me over until lunch. We had some granola bars in a cabinet next to the computer paper, but they were nearly a year old and pretty hard at this point. “Thanks. See you in a bit.”

“Bye.”

I hung up and continued on with my morning of going through the e-mails.

Caleb

I MANAGED
to get my TV set up, luckily without needing to call the cable people to help me figure out how to plug the damn wires in correctly, but after a four-hour marathon of my favorite cop show, I had Trent on my brain and needed to turn it off. He really was pretty cute. I’d never had a thing for cops, but he might have been able to convince me to change that if I was actually looking to have a relationship. Unfortunately Paul had soured me on that front. It was close to noon, I was starving, and I’d had jerky for breakfast, so I was starting to feel a bit sick to my stomach. Fortunately for me I didn’t have to drive far to get to the nearest grocery store.

I grabbed a basket, figuring I’d be loading up for a while, and walked toward the frozen food section. Most of my meals came from there normally, but I did want to check out Rosie’s menu completely too. Financially I was in a good place, with clients waiting for me to start working again, which I promised them would happen that week. Without a mortgage or rent payments hanging over me, I didn’t see any reason not to spend a bit more on my food than I usually would have.

Six frozen pizzas went into my cart, along with a couple of local Colorado craft beers. I’d never been much for craft beer, or really trying new beers in general, but I figured I might as well give them a chance. Maybe I’d end up liking one at some point.

I grabbed some packs of cookies too. One peanut butter, a chocolate chip, and a sugar cookie were all added to my growing pile of food that wasn’t going to be good for me at all. I added some double chocolate with mint chips too. I hadn’t tried them, but they didn’t sound disgusting, and they were cookies, so I wanted them. Without Paul there to make crappy remarks about what I ate, I wanted all the junk food I’d been limiting, or completely denying myself altogether, for the past three years.

By the time I was done, my cart looked like a frat boy’s preparty haul, and I didn’t feel guilty about it at all. In fact, it felt pretty good.

“Hey,” the woman at the register said as I pulled into her lane. Her name tag said Amy, and there was a rose pin below it on her shirt.

“Hi.” I started loading my groceries onto the belt.

“You’re the new guy in town, huh?” she asked.

I nodded. “Is it that obvious?”

Amy shrugged and gave me a big smile. “We don’t get a lot of new people here. I drive past your place most mornings to drop my son off at school, and I saw that your pastures are empty. When will your horses be coming in?”

I wasn’t sure what the obsession was with my pastures, but I didn’t think it was that weird that I didn’t have any plans for them. I knew why they were all assuming I did, but my empty pastures couldn’t have been the most interesting thing to happen in Thornwood that month. “I don’t have any.”

She looked a bit disappointed. “Oh. Well, that’s okay too.” She’d finished ringing up my groceries, and I paid for them. “Do you need help out?”

I shook my head. “Thanks anyway.”

“Have a good day.”

“You too.”

After loading up my junk food haul, I headed back home, but I decided on a different route that would take me past the precinct. I thought it would have been pretty easy to find, but I was wrong about that. The only thing telling me I was near the police station was a tiny sign on the front of an office building. I would have missed it entirely except it was the only place that had two police cars parked in front. I shook my head and let the new reality of my small-town life actually start to sink in. Honestly, I kind of really liked it. It was small and adorable, which was a huge change from LA, but that was a good thing. There were no highways, no heavy traffic jams, no sirens blaring at three in the morning, no people shoving on the sidewalks. It was nice in a way I hadn’t remembered LA ever being.

I drove home after that, and it didn’t take me too long to bring my junk food into the house. With my groceries unloaded, I put my laptop on the island, grabbed a soda and a box of the cookies—since I didn’t feel like waiting for a pizza to get done for my lunch—and got to work. I’d finished all my projects before moving, which meant a fresh start on everything. I was excited and ready to get going as I turned on my music, a nice change from the silence of the house, and got to work making a new logo for a reptile store in Arizona. They wanted a whole new setup in addition to the logo, with a new banner, new letterhead, new website—the works. It was good money for me, and I got to practice drawing a snake for their logo, which wasn’t all that hard to do since it had no legs or anything really complicated about it. I thought it turned out pretty well, though, and an hour later, I had a few drafts of it sent off to them.

I checked my phone when it beeped, welcoming the distraction and at the same time praying it wasn’t Paul. It was my sister, Marie, which made me really happy.
Call me if you’re not busy
, her text said.

I dialed her number and waited for her to pick up, hoping it wasn’t one of those times where she meant to call her at some point if I wasn’t busy and not to drop everything right then and there.

“Wow, that was fast,” she said as she answered.

“I had a minute between projects. How’s things there?” I got off the stool, rubbed my lower back, and went to the couch to stretch out and hopefully keep my back from hurting. I was supposed to take breaks every fifteen to thirty minutes while my back recovered. It hadn’t even been a bad accident, but my doctor said I’d been hit at just the right angle to really throw things out of alignment. “Good. The boys are out working with Dan and some of his new horses. They’re learning fast.”

I heard the pride in my sister’s voice, and it made me smile. She was a good mom, always had been. I liked kids well enough too, but I knew I wouldn’t have been nearly as comfortable with them as she was. “Good. Hey, once I get things moved in here and I pick out some real furniture, why don’t you all come for a visit?”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

I heard the uncertainty in her voice and wondered what caused it. “Nope. Not at all. I haven’t seen the boys in years. It would be good for us all to catch up.” I tried to keep my voice light, since I had no idea what was going on with her and why she sounded so weird at my invitation. I hoped it wasn’t anything really serious.

“Great. I’ll talk it over with Dan. I think it could be fun, but I need to see what his schedule is like.”

I took a second before saying anything to her just in case I said something I didn’t want to. I’d meant every word of it, but my sister didn’t need me nagging on her. “Or, hey, here’s an idea. Why don’t you and the boys come visit? Dan could get a break from them for a while.” Good, I sounded perfectly light and fluffy as if my ulterior motive wasn’t getting my sister and her kids away from her husband for a few weeks. I’d asked her to come to LA, but she’d always claimed the city wasn’t a good place for young kids, and they couldn’t afford a hotel room for a few weeks since I didn’t have any place for them to stay while they were there with me. She didn’t have that excuse now, though, since I doubted she could get much safer than in a tiny town like Thornwood, and I had plenty of space for them. I didn’t want them moving in with me, but a few weeks would be fine.

“We’ll see,” Marie said. I figured that was the best I was going to get from her right then. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Dan; it was more that something weird had happened when she and Dan got serious. I knew she’d talk to me less. I figured on that. But she went for months without returning my calls sometimes and that had never been like her before Dan came into her life. Now I guessed her excuse was that she was busy with the kids, but a text wasn’t hard to reply to, and I sent her plenty.

“So, anything fun happening there?” she asked.

I turned my head to look out at the pine trees. I had a big deck out there that I hadn’t spent much time on yet. The view from my couch was plenty good for me so far. “Not really. I got groceries, so I guess that’s something. Last night I thought I had an intruder.”

“You okay? What happened?”

She sounded so worried, and I smiled. “Nothing much. Just some raccoons, I guess. That’s what the cop I called said. Their precinct is in a little office building. I can’t believe I found such a tiny town to move to.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t move back to Kentucky when you moved out of California,” she countered.

“I considered it for a little while. But I wanted to try someplace new. I’ve visited here, had a time-share in Colorado that I used a few times years ago, and I always thought it was pretty. No old memories, old relationships, familiar places—none of it. Colorado seemed like as good a place as any to go to.”