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Damn, she hoped it wasn’t the manager at Poplar Bend, the town’s one and only condominium complex, calling to complain that Marva was playing her CDs at top volume again, and refused to turn down the music.
In the six months since their mother had suddenly turned up in Blue River in a chauffeur-driven limo and taken up residence in a prime unit at Poplar Bend, Libby and her two younger sisters, Julie and Paige, had gotten all sorts of negative feedback about Marva’s behavior.
None of them knew precisely what to do about Marva.
Picking up the receiver, she almost blurted out what she was thinking—“It’s not my week to watch her. Call Julie or Paige”—and by the time she had a proper “Hello” ready, Tate had already spoken.
No one else’s voice affected her in the visceral way his did.
“I need those dogs,” he said, almost furtively. “Tonight.”
Libby blinked. “I beg your pardon.”
“I need the dogs,” Tate repeated. Then, after a long pause that probably cost him, he added, “Please?”
“Tate, what on earth—? Do you realize what time it is?” She squinted at the kitchen clock, but the room was dark and since she’d just been passing through with a basket of towels from the dryer, she hadn’t bothered to flip on a light switch.
“Eight?” Tate said.
“Oh,” Libby said, mildly embarrassed. The hours since she’d left the Perk Up had dragged so that she thought surely it must be at least eleven.
“You know I’ll give them a good home,” Tate went on. “The dogs, I mean.”
Libby suppressed a sigh. The pups were curled up together on the hooked rug in the living room, sound asleep. Faced with the prospect of actually giving them up, she knew she was going to miss them—a lot.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I know. You can pick them up anytime tomorrow. Just stop by the shop and I’ll—”
“It has to be tonight, and—well—if you could deliver them—”
“Deliver them?”
“Look, it’s a lot to ask, I know that,” Tate said, “and I can’t explain right now, and I can’t leave, either, even though Garrett and Esperanza are both here, because it’s the girls’ birthday and everything.”
“And you want to give them the dogs for a present after all?”
“Something like that. Lib, I know it’s an imposition, but I’d really appreciate it if you could bring them out here right about now.”
“But you haven’t even seen them—”
“Dogs are dogs,” Tate said. “They’re all great. And I figure you wouldn’t have suggested I adopt them if they weren’t good around kids.”
“It’s normally not the best idea to give pets as gifts, Tate. Too much fuss and excitement isn’t good for the animal or the child.” What was she saying?
She’d been the one to suggest the adoption in the first place, and with good reason—the poor creatures needed the kind of home Tate could give them. With him, they would have the best of everything, and, more important, Tate was a dog person. He’d proved that with Crockett and a lot of other animals, too.
“We’re not talking about dyed chicks and rabbits at Easter here, Lib,” Tate replied. He was nearly whispering.
“What about kibble—and, well—things they’ll need?”
“They can survive on ground sirloin until I can get to the store and pick up dog chow tomorrow,” Tate reasoned. “I’m in a fix, Libby. I need your help.”
The pups had risen from the hooked rug and stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway now, ears perked, tails wagging. Her heart sank a little at the sight.
“Okay,” Libby heard herself say. “We’ll be there as soon as I can load them into my car and make the drive.”
Tate let out a long breath. “Great,” he said. “I owe you, big-time.”
You can say that again, buster, Libby thought. How about fixing me up with a new heart, since you broke the one I’ve got?
The call ended.
“You’re going to be McKettrick dogs now,” Libby told the guys, with a sniffle in her voice. “Best of the best. You’ll probably have your own bedrooms and separate nannies.”
They wagged harder. It was impossible, of course, but Libby would have sworn they knew they were headed for a place where they could settle in and belong, for good.
“Heck,” she added, on a roll, “you’ll even get names.”
More wagging.
Libby found her purse and, after considerably more effort, her car keys. Since she lived across the alley from her café and walked everywhere but to the supermarket, she tended to misplace them.
If her aging, primer-splotched Impala would start, they were on their way.
“Want to come along for the ride?” she asked Hildie, resting on a rug of her own, in front of the couch.
Hildie yawned, stretched and went back to sleep.
“Guess that’s a ‘no,’” Libby said.
The pups were always ready to go when they heard the car keys jingle, and she almost tripped over them twice crossing the kitchen to the back door.
After loading the adoptees into the back seat of the rust-mobile, parked in her tilting one-car garage on the alley, she slid behind the wheel, closed her eyes to offer a silent prayer that the engine would start, stuck the key into the ignition and turned it.
The Impala’s motor caught with a huffy roar, the exhaust belching smoke.
Libby backed up slowly and drove with her headlights off until she’d passed Chief of Police Brent Brogan’s house at the end of the block. The chief had already warned her once about emissions standards—she was clearly in violation of said standards—and she’d made an appointment at the auto shop to get the problem fixed, twice. The trouble was, she’d had to cancel both times, once because Marva was acting up and neither Julie nor Paige was anywhere to be found, and once because a water pipe at the shop had burst and she’d been forced to call in a plumber, thereby blowing the budget.
All she needed now was a ticket.
She caught a glimpse of the chief through his living-room window as she pulled onto the street. His back was to her, and it looked as though he were playing cards or a board game with his children.
Still, Libby didn’t flip on her headlights until she reached the main street. Only when she’d passed the city limits did she give the Impala a shot of gas, and she kept glancing at the rearview mirror. Brent took his job seriously.
He was also one of Tate McKettrick’s best friends. If by some chance he’d seen her sneaking out of the alley in a cloud of illegal exhaust fumes, she would simply explain that she was delivering these two dogs to the Silver Spur because Tate wanted them tonight.
She bit her lower lip. Tate had said he owed her big-time. Well, then, he could just get her out of trouble with Brent, if she got into any.
But Libby made it all the way out to the Silver Spur without incident, and Tate must have been watching for her, because he was standing in the big circular driveway, with its hotel-size fountain, when she pulled in.
The dogs went wild in the back seat, scrabbling at the doors and rear windows, yipping to be set free.
Tate’s grin lit up the night.
He came to the car, opened the back door on the driver’s side and greeted the pair with ear-rufflings and the promise of sirloin for breakfast.
The dogs leaped to the paving stones and carried on like a pair of groupies finding themselves backstage at a rock concert.
Frankly, Libby had expected a little more pathos when it came time to part, since she’d been caring for these rascals for over two months, but evidently, the reluctance was all on her side.
“Hey, Lib,” Tate said, just when she’d figured he was planning to ignore her completely. “You saved my life. Want to come inside for some birthday cake?”
Lib. It wasn’t the first time he’d called her by the old nickname, even recently. He’d used it over the phone earlier, conning her into bringing the dogs out to his ranch that very night. Hearing it now, though, in person instead of over a wire, caused a deep emotional ache in her, a sort of yearning, as though she’d missed the last train or bus or airplane of a lifetime, and would now live out her days wandering forsaken in some wilderness.
“I shouldn’t,” Libby said.
Tate crouched to give the dogs the attention they continued to clamor for, but his face was turned upward, toward Libby, who was still sitting in her wreck of a car. Lights from the enormous portico over the front doors played in his hair. “Why not?” he asked.
“It’s late and Hildie’s home alone.”
“Hildie?”
“My dog,” she said.
“Is she sick?”
Libby shook her head.
“Old?”
Again, a shake.
That deadly grin of his—it should have been registered somewhere, like an assault weapon—crooked up the corner of his mouth. “Will she eat the curtains in your absence? Order pizza and smoke cigars? Log onto the Internet and cruise X-rated Web sites?”
Libby laughed. “No,” she said. Once, they’d been so close, she and Tate. She’d known his dog, Crockett, well enough to grieve almost as much over not seeing him anymore as she had over losing his master. It seemed odd, and somehow wrong, that Tate had never made Hildie’s acquaintance. “She’s a good dog. She’ll behave.”
“Then come in and have some birthday cake.”
Libby looked up at the front of that great house, and she remembered stolen afternoons in Tate’s bed, the summer after high school especially. Traveling further back in time, she recalled the night his parents came home early from a weekend trip and caught them swimming naked in the pool.
Mrs. McKettrick had calmly produced a bath sheet for Libby, bundled her into a pink terrycloth bathrobe, and driven her home with Libby, shivering, though the weather was hot and humid at the time.
Mr. McKettrick had ordered Tate to the study as she was leaving with Tate’s mom. “We’re going to have ourselves a talk, boy,” the rancher had said.
So much had changed since then.
Tate’s mom and dad were gone.
Her own father had long since died of cancer, after a lingering and painful decline.
Tate had married Cheryl, and they’d had twins together.
On the one hand, Libby really wanted to go inside and join the party.
On the other, she knew there would be too many other memories waiting to ambush her—mostly simple, ordinary ones, as it happened, like her and Tate doing their homework together, playing pool in the family room, watching movies and sharing bowls of popcorn. But it was the ordinary memories, she’d learned after losing her dad, that had the most power, the most poignancy.
With all her other problems, Libby figured she couldn’t handle so much poignancy just then.
“Not this time,” she said quietly, and shifted the Impala into Reverse.
“You need to get that exhaust fixed,” Tate told her. The smile was gone; his expression was serious. Moments before, she’d been convinced he’d only invited her inside to be polite, wanted to repay her in some small way for bringing the dogs to him on such short notice. Now she wondered if it actually mattered to him, that she accept his invitation. Was it possible that he was disappointed by her refusal?
She nodded. “It’s on the agenda. Good night, Tate.”
He looked down at the dogs, still frolicking around him as eagerly as if he’d stuffed raw T-bone steaks into each of his jeans pockets. “What are their names?”
“They don’t have any,” Libby said. “I call them ‘the dogs.’”
Tate chuckled. “That’s creative,” he replied. His body was half turned, as though the house and the people inside it were drawing him back, and she supposed they were. Garrett and Austin were both wild, in their different ways, but Tate had been born to be a family man, like his father. “You’re sure you won’t come in?”
“I’m sure.”
One of the big main doors opened, and the twins bounded out, dressed in identical pink cotton pajamas.
Libby’s heart lurched at the sight of them, and she put the Impala back in Park.
“Puppies!” they cried in unison, rushing forward.
Libby sat watching as the pups and the little girls immediately bonded, knowing all the while that she had to go.
“Happy birthday,” Tate told his daughters, with a tenderness Libby had never heard in his voice before. He glanced back at her, mouthed the word, “Thanks.”
Libby’s vision was blurred. She blinked rapidly and was about to suck it up, back out of that spectacular driveway and head on home, where she belonged, when suddenly one of the children, the one with glasses, ran to the side of her car and peered inside.
“Hi,” she said. “We have a castle. Would you like to see it?”
Libby looked up at the front of the house. “Not tonight, sweetheart, but thank you.”
“My name is Ava. You’re Libby Remington, aren’t you? You own the Perk Up Coffee Shop.”
Although Libby couldn’t recall actually meeting the girls, Blue River wasn’t a big place, and practically everybody knew everybody else. “Yes, I’m Libby. I hope you’re having a happy birthday.”
“We are,” the child said. “Uncle Garrett bought us our very own castle from Neiman-Marcus, and Uncle Austin sent us ponies. But Dad gave us what we really wanted—puppies!”
“Take these rascals inside and give them some water,” Tate told his daughters. He lingered, while the “rascals” followed the twins into the house without so much as a backward glance at Libby.
Libby’s throat tightened, partly because this was goodbye for her and the dogs, partly because of the little girls’ obvious joy and partly for reasons she could not have identified to save her life.
“I actually bought them a croquet set,” Tate confessed.
