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“Love ya, Firecracker,” he tells me, crossing to grab what he was looking for to begin with. “Somehow they slipped my mind.”
“Rinse your face off before you get near my parents,” I tell him; having smelled myself on his face when he kissed me, I figure it’s better he hear it from me before he pisses my dad off.
I burrow back into the comforter and hope to get a few hours of sleep before the next interruption. I was on guard duty for part of last night and will pull that shift the rest of the week, but if the activity level around here is anything like today, I may ask about us moving over to Grandma’s house before the spring.
*
Next time I wake up, I realize that getting to sleep in won’t be a problem as the sun has started setting. My stomach is grumbling when I finally emerge from our room, and I make my way to the main house to scavenge for food and shower before checking in to see if there’s anything left for me to do today. Instead, I find myself walking into a meeting.
“He needs help, Dad,” my mom says, sounding exasperated as she looks around to Jace, Grandma, and Gramps sitting around the kitchen table.
“Well, he can come and ask for it,” Gramps responds in a tone of voice that we all know well. He’s being stubborn about something, and he won’t budge.
“He would no sooner ask you for help, than you would ask him for anything,” my grandma responds, crossing her arms across her chest and from the look on her face, warming up a zinger. “What would Martha say?”
Wow. Grandma must be digging in her heels if she’s bringing my other grandmother into an argument.
My mom and dad grew up on neighboring homesteads, here in southeastern Washington, and my grandparents on both sides were best friends. My dad’s father died suddenly, shortly before I was born and my mom’s mother died; succumbing to cancer when I was still a toddler.
Some part of me always wondered if my living grandparents would get together, but Mom assured me they were strictly in the friend zone.
“What’s going on?” I ask the four adults sitting around the table, belatedly noticing Dylan waving me over to the living room, dramatically swiping his hand across his neck.
“I sent your dad and Dylan up to check in on Lee earlier today. It turns out he’s in rough shape so they spent the day getting him situated, but he wouldn’t come back with them,” Mom explains to me, and I put my pile of towels and clothes down on a side table while I wait for the rest of the story to come out.
“I’ll go up and check on him tomorrow. If Russ can be spared, he can do any heavy lifting that’s needed while I get an idea of what medical attention he might need,” my grandma says, looking just as resolute as Gramps.
“Then it’s all settled, and no one needs my input on this anyway,” he says, throwing his hands up and looking over to me. “You must be starving, kiddo. Let’s see what we can dig up, huh?”
I am, so I nod; wanting to get the scoop on why he doesn’t like the third neighbor who lives just a little further up the mountain.
Unfortunately, he’s tight-lipped about that and besides organizing sandwich fixings for me, he seems more interested in talking about the guard duty I took the night before.
“It’s cold now, so I don’t expect strangers to be walking around at night. We have that going for us, it’s right before dawn that…”
“…that an attack might happen, I remember what you said. Which is, I’m guessing, why the next shift starts around three. I’ll be in bed by then and whoever takes over will be at the beginning of their shift, so not as tired,” I repeat my thoughts from the previous night, trying to reassure him. “Russ and Aiden were talking yesterday and think that some of Dylan’s ideas for an alarm system might actually be worth trying. But it doesn’t sound like we’ll have time to get anything in place before the first snowfall.”
“Yes, Dylan does have good ideas for perimeter security and Aiden said he’d help him fine tune them. I don’t mind the occasional pit being dug, without stakes in it, mind you, or air horn rigged to a tripwire, but I think we’re jumping the gun rigging any trap that can kill or maim a person. God forbid Rachel gets turned around out in the woods and trips one.”
“Good point. Where is she, by the way?” I ask, hoping she isn’t using up the water I’m allotted for my shower.
“She’s bathing Sara. It’s been so long since there were babies here,” he says, nudging my shoulder with his. “Now, there will be two!”
“Yeah, and I never thought any new sibling I’d have would be from Mom!” I exclaim in between bites of my sandwich, instantly feeling guilty at the tone of voice I took and cast a glance over my shoulder to make sure that my parents didn’t hear me.
“You’re not alone in that, Julia. Don’t underestimate how worried your momma is about this. She doesn’t want any of us to see it, but at least with you and Dylan, there was a solid medical system in place. Well, you know all this,” he says, cutting himself off. “Makes an old man feel pretty useless when he can’t do more to help his daughter.”
“Okay, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard you say,” I tell him, suddenly furious that he doesn’t understand that while we all rolled our eyes at the way he chose to live all these years, the plans he created and the home he built will now, literally, save our lives. “I’m calling the police on your pity party! We will make it through the winter because of you. In the spring, we’ll plant more crops and learn about holistic remedies from Grandma Martha’s journals and the hands-on knowledge that Grandma Elsbeth has. Everyone here has it easy compared to so many other places.”
“Amen,” Eddie says from behind me, his large hands clamping down on my shoulders as he leans over me. “My little girl wouldn’t have survived much longer without you and your family. What you all sacrificed to build here is a safe harbor I never could have imagined. And with a little more luck, that nurse that your friends mentioned will help Shelby and that’ll be one less worry.”
“What nurse?” I ask, suddenly regretting that I slept the day away and seemingly missed so much.
With that, the two of them fill me in on the woman they learned of this morning.
Except they didn’t learn enough, and I’m soon frustrated trying to picture a stranger who may be the answer to all of our prayers. I also wonder what Russ needed the whiteboard for earlier today, because if this woman decides to stay with us, that might come in handy.
“Mike, I need to interrupt because I don’t want to leave Russ doing all the work out there,” Eddie says, breaking up our chat. “The area we’re working on, well the auger’s hitting a rock slab pretty quick now. We think we’re better off if we use the trees, it’ll jut the fence out some, but the posts won’t be dug far enough to do much good.”
