Wildflower Bride in Dry Creek

“I hope the memorial service doesn’t give her a problem with the authorities. Now that I’m not dead or anything. Surely they’ll know it wasn’t intentional.”

He turned to Angelina for confirmation. Her eyes were so somber he wondered if his mother was in more trouble than he knew. Then Angelina reached over and put her hand on his arm. He didn’t flinch even though it was his bad arm and he wondered if he wasn’t feeling the burn all over again.

“They released your mother last Christmas,” Angelina said quietly. “She’s free for good. And she has other news, but I’ll let her tell you that.”

Tyler blinked suddenly. He reached over with his good arm to pat Angelina’s hand. He started the pickup again. And then he remembered.

“They really think I’m dead? My whole family?”

Angelina looked miserable, but she nodded.

“I’m so very sorry,” she stammered. “When Mrs. Stevenson—you remember her? My father’s secretary. Well when she finally told me about the death notice, I had to come here and tell someone you’d died. I didn’t know who I’d find, whether you had any family left here or not. But it didn’t seem right for you to die and no one even know about it.”

She spread her arms at that. “You grew up in this part of the country. It’s your home.

“Oh.” She stopped and brought her arms back to her sides. “I put an obituary in the Billings paper, too.”

He swallowed at that. But what was done was done. And he was going to see his family.

Giving him a memorial service wasn’t the worst thing a person had ever done to him. And she meant well. One thing he’d say for Angelina is that she had a heart of gold.

She still sat across from him with her head down so he reached over with his right hand and ruffled her hair like he used to. “It’s all right, Angel.”

“You remember?” She looked up at him in surprise.

“Of course, I remember.” Was there something he was missing? “It wasn’t much of a code name. Not like they have with the Secret Service. But it worked when we needed it to—”

Tyler thought she would be pleased that he had remembered something like that. But she looked aghast so he added, “I never told your father we had a secret code name or anything. It wasn’t like ‘dear’ or ‘sweetheart’ or anything anyway. It was strictly business. Just between us.”

“You never thought of me as your angel?” she asked, her face pinched.

“Well, no,” he stammered. “I knew I was your bodyguard and nothing more. I’d never presume to—that is, I’d never take advantage of our relationship. Not that we had a relationship. It was a business arrangement more than anything even though it did get me through that last year of high school.”

Tyler kept digging himself a deeper hole until finally he wondered if he hadn’t dug too far. “Not that I didn’t consider you a friend.” That didn’t seem enough, either, so he added, “A very kind friend.”

Angelina was just staring at him.

“I get it,” she finally said. “You would have taken a bullet for me, but only because it was your job.”

Tyler flinched. “I wouldn’t say only, but I was getting paid to protect you.”

She nodded and sighed. “I know. It’s just when you threw that knife at the van tire that day—well, it was magnificent, and I couldn’t even see all of it. You were like a superhero. All my friends said so. The ones who were standing there and watching it all. My friend, Kelly, still talks about it.”

She looked at him fully now and there was a softness in her eyes that made him want to protect her all the more. She didn’t need to know he would have taken a bullet for her even if no one had paid him a dime.

“If I’d been paying more attention, they never would have snatched you off the street like that,” he said instead. “I would have had time to call in the backup guards and it would have been handled without all the excitement.”

They were both silent for a moment, remembering those days.

“It was still very brave.” She sighed. “How’d you learn to throw a knife like that anyway?”

“Rattlesnakes,” he answered, thankful to move the conversation along. “You have to be quick and deadly if all you have is a knife and you’re facing a rattler. Growing up here, I always kept a small knife in my boot.”

“You still have the knife?” she asked.

He nodded and puffed his chest up just to amuse her. “Still have the boots, too. You see any rattlesnakes around, you let me know.”

Finally, he got a smile out of her.

Neither of them said anything as he drove the rest of the way to the dirt road that turned off the main gravel road and led up to his family’s old ranch.

He stopped just after the turn. Someone had been busy. The field to the right had been plowed and planted this year. Tall stalks of wheat went back deep in the acreage. He wondered how they were controlling the grasshoppers. On the left side of the driveway, the ground was freshly turned. He’d guess someone was going to plant something else there. And in the distance, behind the barn, he saw a herd of cattle, some of them with calves. The place had never looked so good.

His brothers weren’t just home, they were working the land. And then he saw a house. No, two houses in the far field. He wondered if his brothers had sold some of the ranch.

“They’ll be happy to see you,” Angelina whispered as she sat there with him.

He glanced down before she could see the dampness in his eyes. Even if some of the land was gone, he was glad to see his family on this ranch again.

Just then he heard a thump from behind and he turned around to see the dog leap to the ground.

“Prince!” Angelina rolled down her window and called out, but it was too late.

The mutt was off and running, with so much joy evident in his whole body that Tyler had to smile. “He looks like he’s home.”

“But he can’t live here,” Angelina protested. “I rescued him.”

“He won’t be happy going back to Boston,” Tyler said. “Not if he’s used to running around in the country here.”

“I’m still here for another month.”

“Well, you’re going to break his heart when you leave. That’s all I have to say.”

Tyler didn’t dare think about his own heart.

* * *

Angelina sat in the pickup. “Do you think I’m being selfish? Wanting to keep Prince with me?”

“You’ll need to ask Prince. Maybe he’d like to see the ocean.”

“Everybody should have a dog.”

By then, Prince had run all the way up to the house and another dog came out from behind the barn, barking. Prince didn’t seem to mind the other dog and he started chasing what looked like a Rhode Island Red hen that was now running toward the barn. Angelina smiled as the chicken slipped inside the slightly open door at the side of the building.

Prince nosed at the door, but couldn’t get it to move so he turned his attention to the three pickups parked next to the house.

“I don’t want to startle everyone,” Tyler said then, looking over at her. “Maybe you should go inside first and tell them to all sit down, at least.”

“That’s what I told them to do when I told them you were dead.” Angelina wished she could take that conversation back. “I don’t want to make them think something else is wrong.”

Tyler stopped his pickup next to the other vehicles. “I’m surprised no one’s come outside yet. Maybe they’re not here.”

Angelina shook her head. “They are probably just upstairs in your room getting your boyhood treasures for display. We were going to show them tonight at your service.”

“My marbles.” Tyler looked at her. “That’s all I ever had. Who would want to see my marbles?”

“Well, people do that at funerals. We wanted to give everyone the sense of who you were growing up here. At first I thought of a slide show, but your brothers didn’t have pictures of your childhood.”

“Of course not. Didn’t you hear about the Stone boys? We were fortunate to survive childhood. We didn’t have any picture-worthy moments.”

“Well, yes, I know, but we wanted to celebrate your life tonight. We had to have some good times to talk about. There must be something.”

“Mrs. Hargrove gave me a plate of chocolate chip cookies once when I snuck into her Sunday school class. I think she meant them for the whole class, but she just scooped them all into a bag and gave them to me. I was supposed to be hunting rattlers down in the coulee, but I rode our horse into town and went into the church basement just before she started talking. I’ll never forget the look on her face. She was really surprised.”

“Well, see, that’s a good memory.”

“Later, she offered Jake a whole pie if he would go. I almost figured I’d come in second best on that one.”

“Life isn’t about measuring how much you have against how much someone else might be given.” She might sound a little pompous, but she had to say it. She was turning her life around and that was an important part of it.

Tyler grunted. “Easy for you to say when you can have all the pie in the world just waiting for you.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s not easy for me to say,” Angelina protested. “And maybe I don’t always have all the pie.”

She’d known for a long time that money didn’t buy happiness. But she was just coming to understand that the loneliness she felt when she looked at loving families was the same kind of ache that other girls had in high school when they looked in her closet and thought she had every pair of designer jeans in the universe. It wasn’t just the missing of the other thing—whether it was clothes or money or loving parents—it was when the lack of that one thing tricked a person into feeling like they were not important to God. That’s when people were in trouble.

Just then Prince found another chicken and started to bark again.

“Maybe you should be going,” Tyler said to her as he looked toward the dog. “I don’t think my brothers will put up with much more barking before one of them comes to see what’s going on. The cattle could have gotten out.”

Angelina nodded. “Follow close behind me. It’ll only take me a minute to tell them.”

She opened the door and stepped down to the ground. Without the shade of the cab, the sun beat strong on her. She started walking to the house and, just before she arrived at the side porch, she turned to look back at Tyler. She remembered how difficult it had been to come to the Stone ranch when she first arrived in Dry Creek. If only she had waited to tell everyone that Tyler had been declared dead, she wouldn’t have put his family through the grief of it all.

She squared her shoulders as she knocked at the door.

Lord, help me do this right this time, she prayed as she stood there waiting for someone to answer.

Mrs. Hargrove had assured her she could pray to God about any of the struggles in her day. Prayer was new to Angelina, but she had started asking God to guide her even when she didn’t know how to pray.

Angelina heard footsteps and took a second to motion for Tyler to come. She was sure his family would want to see him the very minute that she announced he was alive.

It would be like Lazarus bursting forth from his tomb, she assured herself, recalling the story she’d just read with Mrs. Hargrove in the Gospel of John. Then she heard someone start to turn the knob on the door. They were all happy to see Lazarus, weren’t they, Lord? Help me to do this the right way.

She was certainly happy Tyler was alive.

Chapter Three

Tyler wondered what people would have remembered about him if he had died in that bomb blast. He had no land to claim him. No wife to mourn him. He didn’t even have a dog like Prince to howl at the moon in his absence.

He frowned, realizing he could have done more to keep in touch with his brothers and his mother. Some people thought hard times brought people together, but his father’s rages had destroyed his family. Birthday cards and Christmas greetings had seemed too impersonal after all they had gone through together. Tyler had been in a group foster home for juveniles with his brother, Jake, for several years so he’d seen him for that time. Then, once he was out of there, Tyler had sent money to his mother from time to time, but his messages had been short and full of forced cheer. He’d gotten his job with Brighton Security with a referral from the foster home, but he didn’t want to talk to his mother about that. He never knew what to say to someone who was in prison.

When Tyler saw someone open the door for Angelina, he decided it was time to get moving. It wouldn’t take her long to explain that the news of his death had been premature. He took a moment to adjust his shirt collar so it would hide more of his burn scar. He didn’t want his mother to worry.

Prince came over to run around him as Tyler started walking up to the house. He liked to listen to the crunch of his boots on the hard dirt. He’d gotten used to not hearing footsteps in the sand of Afghanistan, but it made him feel disoriented. He was a Montana man and glad to hear some sound again, especially on his family’s ranch.

Tyler kept looking around and noticed someone had been busy with the buildings. Growing up, he always remembered this old house as being in need of paint. It had been built by his father’s great-grandparents. Every winter, more white paint would flake off and more of the gray in the boards underneath would shine through. His mother had suggested once that they paint the house, but his father said he didn’t have time for all that scraping. He wanted to wait until the winter weather took all of the paint away and then, he said, he’d be happy to slap some new paint on.

Tyler wondered if the flaking had happened like his father had predicted. If it had, someone had put on a light peach color in its stead. It looked good with the white trim on the windows and porch. Looking down, he saw a border of rocks framing a raised flower bed that grew a few purple plants. And, if he wasn’t mistaken, his mother’s old Christmas rose was still alive at the far corner of the house.

His mother loved flowers and her lilac bushes were green and healthy. Most of the blooms were usually gone by this time in the summer, and he couldn’t find their scent so there had been no recent flowers. He was happy that his mother had been released in time to enjoy her lilacs this spring.

Tyler stepped onto the porch, walked through the screened-in area and faced the back door of the house. Someone had taken a paintbrush to this door, too, and it was white. Whoever it was had put a lot of effort into making it look nice and that made him feel good. It honored the whole place.

Tyler realized he was just standing in front of the door, stalling. He didn’t know if he should knock or just wait a minute and slip into the kitchen. He could hear people talking, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He didn’t want to startle anyone by appearing before Angelina had time to tell them what had happened.

Finally, he decided to open the door just a little so he could hear where she was in her explanation.

“It’s too nice to keep out in the barn,” a man’s voice said.

Tyler wasn’t sure which of his brothers was talking, but it sounded like a few people might be gathered in the kitchen.

“Well, of course, we can’t keep it there,” another man’s voice responded. “I’m just saying we don’t want to put it in the cemetery on top of Dad’s grave. People will think its Tyler resting underneath it.”

“You’re right. We can’t do that to our baby brother,” the other voice agreed.

“Before you do anything,” Angelina said, and Tyler could hear the stress in her voice, “I have an announcement—”

“Could you pass me that pitcher of water first?” his mother asked. She sounded hoarse. “I’m a little dry.”

Tyler smiled. He recognized her voice; it had always had a lilting quality to it.

“Of course,” Angelina said. “Let me pour it for you.”

“I’m going to miss him, you know,” one of his brothers said, sounding mournful.

“I know what you mean,” the other brother answered. “We haven’t seen him for a while, but the world was a better place with him in it.”

Now that’s what a man likes to hear when he’s dead, Tyler thought to himself in satisfaction. He wouldn’t want to cause his family any prolonged grief, but it was nice to know he would be missed. He wasn’t so sure about the baby brother comment, but the overall tone was nice.

“Actually, there’s no need to miss him,” Angelina said, her voice brighter now.

“Well—” One of his brothers started to protest.

“He’s here,” Angelina finished quickly.

There was a pause.

“You mean because of the gravestone?” the other brother asked. “It’s nice and everything, but I’ve never believed a man’s spirit comes back and hangs around any place.”

Someone pushed their chair back and Tyler could hear the squeak it made on the linoleum.

“Your great-grandfather would have believed,” his mother said. “But then he was pure Cherokee. And the Bible doesn’t give us any reason to think the dead stay on the earth as spirits. As nice as the sentiment is, though.”

“I don’t mean his spirit.” Angelina’s voice grew more desperate as she went on. “Tyler is here. Alive. With us.”

Now, there was absolute silence. It never was easy to tell the Stone family anything, Tyler thought with a grin. Once they had their minds made up to grieve, they would stay the course no matter what anyone said.

“It does seem that way, doesn’t it?” his mother finally said, her voice polite.

“I almost thought I heard his footsteps a minute ago,” one of his brothers added cautiously. “He used to love those boots of his. I wish we had them. We could bury them under that gravestone and it would be almost like he was here.”

Well, Tyler told himself, there was never a better moment to enter a conversation. He opened the door and stepped inside the kitchen. Angelina had done as she said and had everyone sitting around the table that stood in the middle of the kitchen. Unfortunately, she was the one facing him and the others were looking down, probably not wanting to talk anymore about how he was or wasn’t there.

“Nobody’s going to bury my boots,” Tyler said.

His mother gasped so hard it sounded like a squeal. Jake spilled the glass of water he had in his hand. Wade half stood from his chair, looking startled and fierce.

Tyler glanced around quickly. The kitchen had been his favorite room in the house because that’s where his mother usually was. It had been painted light green since he’d been here last and it smelled like cinnamon. The appliances were all white and looked new. Someone had painted a red bird on the wall by the refrigerator.

“I paid good money for my boots,” Tyler finally said, standing there grinning. “They’re not going into the ground.”

“Well, praise the Lord!” his mother whispered. Tears were starting down her cheeks.

Tyler nodded and took a step closer to her. She stood then and turned to embrace him.

“It’s okay,” he said as he felt her tremble in his arms. She seemed more fragile than he remembered. He hoped she couldn’t feel the weakness in his left side. She had enough to worry about without adding him to her list.

As soon as he stepped back to give his mother room to breathe, Jake was there, hugging him. Then Wade stood beside them, slapping them both on their shoulders. Fortunately, he’d chosen Tyler’s right shoulder so he didn’t hit the burn area.

“Easy,” Angelina said as she stood up then. She took a step closer to them. “His shoulder is hurt.”

Jake and Wade both stepped back.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Wade said, looking stricken. “I never thought.”

His brothers looked at him as if he was going to fade away.

“I’m okay,” he hastened to say. “Just a little—accident.”

Everyone just kept looking at him.

“I heard it was a bomb,” Jake finally said. Then he turned to Angelina. “In fact, she told me it was a bomb.”

Tyler could see where this was going. “Angelina only passed on what the military sent to her father’s firm.”

His mother was starting to frown as he talked.

“But that’s what I never understood,” she said. “Isn’t the military supposed to notify your next of kin?”

“I didn’t want to bother you,” Tyler explained. “So I listed Brighton Security as my next of kin.”

“Not bother me—” his mother said, her voice rising. “I’m your mother. I’m supposed to be bothered if you’re dead.”

“And just who is this Brighton Security?” Wade demanded. “If you didn’t want to put Mom down as your next of kin, you should have listed me.”

“I didn’t have anyone’s address,” Tyler said in his defense. Maybe he’d taken his independence too far, but he never thought the military would need to contact someone anyway. “And Brighton Security is where I work.”

“But that’s—” His mother still sounded confused. “Isn’t that Angie’s last name?”

“Angie?” Tyler didn’t understand. “You mean Angelina?”

Even in high school, Angelina had never allowed anyone to shorten her name. Not that many tried. He turned to look at her now.

“I didn’t want to be different,” she said. “Everybody here is Amy or Susie or Mary or something short. Even your mom is Gracie Stone.”

All he could do was shake his head. Here Angelina was, a bona fide rich society woman, and she wanted to sound like she’d grown up in Dry Creek. Kids here spent their summers dreaming about going to the big city. He could suddenly sympathize with her father. Mr. Brighton had worked for decades to give his daughter every advantage possible, and all she wanted was to blend into a small Western town like Dry Creek.

“I think I need to sit down,” Tyler said as he walked over to the chair Wade had been sitting in. He looked at his brother. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Anything for you,” Wade said.

Tyler closed his eyes, feeling tired. The doctors had warned him he’d have some bad days for a while, even before he began his physical therapy. He doubted they’d counted on this kind of a day, though.

“I should make you some tea,” his mother said.

Tyler nodded, not bothering to open his eyes.

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