Page 15

2

CAL

It was snowing hard when Cal decided to check on Mama.

The thing about the snow is that it wasn’t the picturesque, decorative snow that tourists drove up from Missoula to photograph — with those fat flakes drifting down like something from a postcard, settling gently on pine boughs and mailbox tops. No. This was working snow. Montana snow. Dense and horizontal, driven by a wind that came down off the mountains with intent. It was the kind of snow that turned the road into a suggestion and the tree line into a ghost and reminded you, if you'd been foolish enough to forget, that this landscape had been killing people long before it started letting them live here.

Cal Meridian didn't mind. He liked it.

He stood on the porch of his large luxurious cabin home, on the land he loved, and let the cold settle against his face and his hands and the exposed triangle of skin at his throat where the sheepskin collar of his trench coat didn't quite close. He breathed slowly and deliberately, feeling the calm, quiet stillness surround him.

Behind, through the glass wall of the southern section, the living room glowed with the warm yellow light that Isabelle had insisted on.

Architecturally, the place shouldn't have worked — three stories of hand-hewn timber, floor-to-ceiling glass, and clean modern lines that had no business sitting on a ridge line in northwestern Montana, looking like something Architectural Digest would run on its cover. And it would if Isabelle had her way, which she would eventually because Isabelle always had her way and Michael, his best friend, was either going to marry that woman or Cal was going to lock them both in a room until they figured it out.

He'd helped build it with his own hands. Insisted really, much to Michael's wry amusement.

“It’s just weird, Bear. I mean…you're like paying them,” he had said while they drove back to town all those years ago.

Cal had just given a small half smile and nodded while Isabelle had snorted from the car and said, “men” while informing the construction company of an odd stipulation for the Meridian job.

For months he would join the crews working from morning to sundown, alongside them. At first they viewed him as an oddity despite his size. But then, while foremen, contractors, and Manhattan architects planned furiously for the estate rising out of the Montana wilderness, they came to see him as one of their own.

Cal smiled as he remembered it. He liked the work. It was meditative and calming.

It helped him forget the past. And the past was something that Cal really wanted to forget.

Fortunately the army of workers and equipment and zoning and planning required Isabelle's management, and Isabelle's management had required a budget that made Cal uncomfortable despite the fact that the cost was barely a blip to his net worth.

You can afford it, baby. Do something nice for yourself for once.

Mama's voice, standing in the diner kitchen with flour on her apron and that look she got when she was about to overrule him — steel-blue eyes sharp, mouth set. She had been telling him what to do since he was twelve years old with the immovable certainty of a woman who knew she was always right.

So he’d listened.

Ever since he returned to Blackthorn Ridge, he spoke less but tried to listen more. To be present. It was not because he couldn't say no — he'd said no to generals and agency directors and men who had the authority to make people disappear — but because Mary Sue Ellen, the woman he called Mama, had earned his obedience the old-fashioned way: by loving him when no one else would.

He looked back at the cabin and his mouth curved slightly as he thought of all the people in his life who laughed in disbelief when he referred to his home as just “a cabin”. He stared at the valley spreading before him, the post Thanksgiving snow, covering the black pines like a white blanket. The wind was picking up as the snow began to fall and Cal looked around the land he had come to love.

Thank You Lord…we both know I don’t deserve it.

He closed his eyes and once again willed the demons away.

Opening them he let himself see it, just for a moment, the way Mary Sue had seen it. The way the first time she'd driven up the private paved road when it was finally completed and stood in the large gravel drive and looked up at the huge structure with an expression he'd only seen on her face once before — the night he'd walked back into her diner after years of being thought dead.

Three stories. Timber and river stone. Multiple fireplaces. Windows that framed the mountains like Ansel Adams photos.. Every luxurious room designed to hold a man his size without making him feel like the world was too small — high ceilings, wide doorways, custom hand carved furniture built to hold weight that furniture wasn't usually asked to bear.

A kitchen Mama had cried in the first time she saw it. An old fashioned wraparound porch that was heated and looked out over six hundred acres of old-growth ponderosa and spruce that no developer would ever touch, because he'd made sure of that.

Home.

The word still felt borrowed sometimes even years later. Still felt like something he was holding for someone else, something that might get taken back if he held it too tightly. But he was learning.

Slowly. Learning to let go.

Brutus huffed from somewhere around the side of the cabin — a low, resonant sound that carried even through the snowfall, the noise meant the grizzly had found something more interesting than following Cal to the truck. Cal turned and saw him. Over fourteen hundred pounds of rehabilitated North American brown bear, sitting in the snow like an enormous, fur-covered Buddha, watching one of the barn cats pick its way along the fence rail with the rapt fascination of an animal that had never quite figured out what cats were for.

Cal shook his head. Cracked a small rare smile. "Stay out of trouble, buddy," he said.