“So, this the mutt you wrestled for?”
“You watch your mouth!” Sierra said. “I don’t think there’s anything but golden in her! Do not offend her or she won’t like you. She has shown excellent taste so far!”
Connie clicked his teeth, dangled his hand at his side and Molly wagged her tail enthusiastically and went right to him, nudging his hand for a pet.
“She might have a little slut in her,” Sierra muttered.
“The best of us do,” Connie said, crouching to give the dog a serious scratch.
“Isn’t she beautiful?”
“I guess she’s kind of good-looking,” Connie said.
“She’s my first dog,” Sierra confessed.
“Seriously? You didn’t have dogs growing up?”
“There were dogs on the farm, but they were outside dogs, barn dogs, not dogs that slept on the bed. My grandma would have chased them out with a broom if they got in the house. My brother Dakota kind of claimed one of them and that dog followed him everywhere. It was all we could do to keep him off the school bus.”
As she recalled, those times they landed back at the farm when she was very young, they lived in the bus. Her grandparents had a small farmhouse and couldn’t really take on six extra people, so through spring, summer and fall, they continued to sleep in the bus, but would eat their meals and shower and use the facilities in the house. In winter they all crammed in the house together. When she was eight and Cal was sixteen, they took up permanent residence at the farm because Grandpa had passed. Space was found, though not much more than they’d had before.
Sierra went to get Molly’s leash off the hook in the back of the store. When Molly saw it, she got all excited, the only dog in the history of the world who was free most of the time and got excited by the leash. But she was smart and she knew it meant she was going somewhere. Beau ran to Sierra’s side immediately; he liked to go along, but Beau didn’t need a leash. “Would you like to join us?” she asked Connie.
“I’ll just hang out with Sully for a while,” he said. “You and your little friends have fun.”
“We certainly will,” she said, heading across the yard for one of the trails.
*
Connie went into the store and found Sully stocking shelves. “Need a hand?” he asked.
“I got it,” Sully said. “Grab a cup of coffee.”
“Holler when you’re ready for boxes from the storeroom. You know I like to show off my big muscles.”
“Just seen you show off the one between your ears, son,” he said. “Besides, there don’t seem to be any pretty young women around at the moment.”
“I’ll just practice, then.”
Connie positioned himself at the lunch counter where he could visit with Enid and be handy when Sully started toting big boxes of supplies out of the back storeroom.
Conrad Boyle was thirty-three and had grown up in and around Timberlake. For a while his family lived in Leadville when they’d found a good rental house there. Then they moved back to Timberlake when Connie was in first grade and his mom and dad had divorced. When his mom remarried, they’d stayed in that house and his stepfather moved in with them.
Connie wouldn’t call his growing up years hard, but they were at least inconvenient and at times very difficult. First off, his father and then his stepfather had both been brutish, angry men while his mother was a kind, hardworking, even-tempered woman. To this day, Connie didn’t understand why his mother couldn’t find better men to marry. And if she couldn’t, then why didn’t she just live as a single woman?
“You’ll understand someday, Connie,” his mother, Janie, said.
Right then and there he decided that if he didn’t find a good woman, one with whom he had mutual respect and happiness, he wasn’t going to do it. He did not ever come to understand, as his mother promised he would. His mother might not be gorgeous but she was certainly attractive, had a nice figure, a pretty smile and a sunny disposition. Both his father and stepfather were verbally abusive and while they did work steady, they did as little around the house as possible, yet their demands seemed constant. Conrad, you get that garage cleaned yet? Help your mother in the kitchen! I never saw anyone as lazy as you! That’s your yard, kid—every Saturday come hell or high water! Why the hell ain’t that driveway shoveled? You’re a fucking idiot. If I can put food on the table you can at least keep ahead of your chores!
To add to Connie’s misery growing up, he was small. Hard to believe, looking at him now. He was small and he had a girl’s name—everyone always called him Connie. Even if he corrected them and said, “It’s Conrad,” they’d still call him Connie. He felt like a boy named Sue; he had to defend himself a lot. There were guys in his class who had the shadow of a beard in sixth grade, but his growth didn’t kick in until he was fifteen. It was like that summer between ninth and tenth grade his feet grew from size seven to eleven. Testosterone descended on him and he shot up. Thank God.
His mother divorced his father when Connie was six and his stepfather when Connie was seventeen, not quite finished with high school. He had a half brother, Bernard, who they called Beaner, ten years younger than Connie, and with that second divorce, his mother got a job in Denver and took seven-year-old Beaner with her.
Connie stayed in Timberlake and moved in with his buddy Rafe’s family even though they had five kids. It was where he’d been hanging out whenever he could anyway. Rafe’s mother, Margarite Vadas, said she’d always kind of wanted six kids so it was perfect. And at the Vadas home, Connie found the kind of family life he admired and wished he could emulate. Carlos Vadas, a cook and outdoorsman, loved kids. It was a revelation to Connie that just the simple action of enjoying one’s family could make home life nearly perfect. It wasn’t flawless, it wasn’t without its tense or grumpy moments, it certainly wasn’t without arguments—just the fights over the bathroom alone could be staggering. But it just wasn’t challenging all the time. No one held a grudge and the single most important thing—no one seemed to walk on eggshells or brace themselves for the next blowup. He never once heard Carlos Vadas complain about the work of feeding his family or ridicule his children or call them names.