Roll call completed, Megs set her clipboard aside and pulled her glasses off her nose. “Okay. Glad to see all of you here. We’ve got a few pieces of business tonight, and then you can go waste time staring at your TVs or your phones or do whatever it is you do. The first item on the agenda is SnowFest.”
“It’s that time of year again,” said Chaska Belcourt, who was as good a climber as he was a mechanical engineer. The son of a Lakota Sun Dance chief, he’d come to Colorado to study engineering and had stayed for the climbing. His sister Winona, a vet who ran a rehab clinic for wildlife, had joined him.
Megs went on. “I don’t need to remind you—or maybe I do—that the Team gets about fifteen percent of its annual operating budget from SnowFest proceeds. We’ve been asked to volunteer again this year, and I expect each and every one of you to sign up. Hawke is the only person who gets a pass because he has to play fire chief all weekend.”
All eyes turned to Hawke, who nodded. “It makes up a chunk of the fire department’s budget, too.”
Megs held up a printout. “We’ve got the usual events—ice climbing, the polar bear plunge, a snowman competition for kids, the snow sculpture contest for adults. Knockers is sponsoring a new shotski event—”
“A … what?” asked Sasha Dillon.
Petite, blond and only twenty-three, Sasha was the country’s top-ranked female sports climber and lived off professional sponsorships.
Talk about a dream life.
Megs explained. “A shotski is where shot glasses are fixed to the back of old skis, and four people as a team drink a shot at once, trying not to spill a drop. The winning team gets some kind of prize.”
“A hangover,” said Harrison Conrad, the Team’s mad dog alpinist. As big as an ox, he had climbed Everest twice now and had his sights set on K2 next year.
Megs went on. “It seems you’re right, Conrad. The morning after the shotski, Knockers is hosting the ‘Hair of the Dog Breakfast.’”
Laughter.
“There will be bonfires at night, food vendors all day, bands playing at the main event tent, lots of drinking, and, of course, skijoring. The organizers are seeking volunteers to work each of these events. They would also like help at the first-aid tent. The official sign-up is online. It’s first come, first choice. Those of you who wait will have to take what’s left.”
After that, Megs gave them a quick budget update then asked for someone to fill in for her on the dispatch desk for two weeks in March when she and Mitch Ahearn, her partner and also a primary Team member, were heading to Alaska for serious skiing. And then the meeting was over.
Jesse got to his feet, feeling dizzy.
“Want to head out for a brew?” Herrera slapped him on the shoulder, then frowned. “Hey, you okay? You don’t look so good, man.”
“Today kicked my ass. I’m heading home.”
Twenty minutes later, he fell into bed, chilled to the bone.
*
Ellie bundled up Daniel and Daisy at six Monday morning, piled them and their car seats in her rental car, and drove them to her parents’ house, where her mother met her at the door, still wearing pajamas. Ellie set the kids and the diaper bag down on the sofa. She reached into the bag and pulled out two bottles of amoxicillin. “Here are their antibiotics. Daniel still fights me about it sometimes.”
Her mother took the medicine. “You won’t give Grandma a hard time, will you, Daniel?”
Daniel didn’t answer, but curled up on the sofa with his blanket, still sleepy.
Ellie gave her mother a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks, Mom.”
It would be so much harder to leave the kids if she’d had to put them into daycare. It wasn’t about saving money. It was about knowing that the children were in the safest, most loving hands while she was at work.
Her mom smiled. “Have a good day. Daisy, come help your old granny make coffee. Can you say ‘caffeine’?”
Ellie hurried back to her car and drove to Mountain Memorial, Scarlet’s little hospital, which sat a few blocks from the center of town. She was on call every other Monday, and today she’d been called in. Apart from days like today, she worked only three days a week. With the DIC payments she got from the VA and the small amount of Social Security she received for the kids, she didn’t need to work full-time. It was important to her as the twins’ only parent to spend most of her time with them.
She arrived to find that they’d put her on Labor & Delivery for the day. She had four years of surgical nursing experience, but she’d taken a position as a float nurse working Fridays and weekends. Floating required her to move from unit to unit depending on patient load. A lot of nurses hated floating, but Ellie wanted to avoid the unit politics that had made her last nursing job in Kentucky so stressful. Besides, no two days as a float nurse were alike, and working across so many specialties kept her nursing skills sharp.