liked her life, liked who she’d become, knew for sure and at long last that she’d be happy from now on, with or without Hutch Carmody, because she’d decided to be.
It was time to leave her fears and doubts behind and go forward, expecting good things to happen, knowing she could cope with the bad ones.
After half an hour or so, Casey and Walker joined her in the yard.
Casey was beaming. “It’s perfect,” she told Kendra, bending to stroke Daisy’s gleaming golden head when the dog approached, wagging her tail. “Where do I sign?”
Kendra glanced at Walker, then looked at Casey again. “Don’t you want to think about it for a while?” she asked. As many houses as she’d sold over the course of her career, she’d never had an instant offer like this one.
“Heck, no,” Casey replied exuberantly. “It’s just what I want. Why wait?”
That was it.
There was no haggling, no having the place inspected, no anything.
Casey signed a contract when they got back to the office, wrote an enormous deposit check to show good faith and announced that the sooner the deal closed, the better, because she wanted to get her children settled in Parable before school started.
Kendra promised to speed things along in every way she could.
After Walker and Casey were gone, she jumped up and down in the middle of the office and whooped for joy, causing Daisy to slink under a desk and peer out at her with wary eyes.
That made her laugh, and she spoke soothingly to the dog until she came out of her hiding place.
Presently, Kendra gave up on the whole idea of working—there wasn’t much to do, anyway—and, after locking Casey’s mongo check away in a desk drawer, she summoned Daisy, locked up and returned to her car.
The zinnias she’d picked at the mansion rested on the passenger seat, a damp paper towel wrapped around their stems, reminding Kendra of the fireworks on Saturday night, colorful flowers blooming in the sky and melting away in dancing sparks.
She drove to the Pioneer Cemetery, parked, picked up the zinnias and, leaving Daisy in the car with a window rolled down so she’d have plenty of air, walked along the rows of graves until she came to her grandmother’s final resting place.
Eudora Shepherd, the simple stone read, and the dates of her birth and death were inscribed beneath it. No husband was buried nearby, no family members at all.
Her grandmother had been alone in the world, for all intents and purposes.
Kendra crouched and laid the zinnias gently at the base of the dusty headstone.
“You did the best you could,” she said very softly, as the breeze played in her hair. “It must have been hard, taking in a child at your age, with money always running short and trouble coming at you from every direction, but you let me stay with you when Mom left, and that was what was important. You fed and clothed me and kept a roof over my head, and I’m grateful for that, Grandma. I’m really, truly grateful.”
Kendra stood up straight again, her eyes dry, her heart quiet.
At long last, she’d truly let go, stopped wishing the past could be different. All that really mattered, she realized, was now, what she did, what she thought, what she felt now.
She said goodbye to her grandmother, to all the things that had been and shouldn’t have, and all the things that should have been, but weren’t. She said goodbye to Jeffrey, and goodbye to the reckless boy Hutch had been when she first fell in love with him.
And “hello” to the man he had become.
She was in no rush, though. Things would unfold as they were supposed to, and she was open to that.
* * *
HUTCH SADDLED REMINGTON and rode up to the mountainside alone that morning after assigning the ranch crew to various tasks for the day.
He dismounted, left the horse to graze and walked toward the rock pile, pausing briefly in the place where he and Kendra had made love the previous Saturday afternoon.
He smiled. It had been good—their lovemaking—because it had been right. Not to mention, long overdue, from his viewpoint, anyway.
He went on to the stone monument he’d built in fury, in pain, in frustration, lifted up one of the heavier stones, and set it on the ground.
“It’s over, old man,” he told his dead father, though only the birds and the breeze and his favorite horse were around to hear. “I’m through hating you for not