He laughed and withdrew his arm. “That’s right. Good thing you reminded me.” He smiled at his mother. “I saw the Caddy, and I wanted to say ’bye before I leave for Colorado.”

“Is everything… taken care of, with Billy… at the ranch?”

He answered in similar code to avoid scaring the little girl in the backseat. “All taken care of. Taken away. No trouble at all.”

“That’s good.” She looked into his big, kind, unhandsome face. “Hugh-Jay?”

Teasingly, because of her suddenly serious tone, he said, “Mom?”

“Speaking of Colorado, I may have done a bad thing,” she confessed.

“Impossible,” he said with a grin.

“Well, wait until I tell you before you judge. I offered a little vacation to Laurie, for the two of you, but it seems to have turned into a spa trip for just her.” Wishing to lessen the blow, she gilded Laurie’s excuse, to make it sound more tactful. “Laurie felt you might not want to leave the ranch, with so much work to do.”

She saw a frown appear between his eyes before he erased it.

“She’s probably right. That’s fine. It’ll be good for her.”

“It would be good for you, too.”

“Do I look like a spa kind of guy?”

She smiled. “Hugh-Jay?”

Again he teased her, though not quite as lightheartedly. “Yes, Mom?”

“Don’t ever let anybody tell you that happiness has to be earned.”

His expression turned quizzical and more genuinely amused. She was infamous among her offspring for offering bits of impromptu wisdom to them.

“Okay,” he said agreeably. “I won’t.”

He chuckled, but for some reason, she couldn’t work up another answering smile. She felt her eyes start to fill, and blinked it back. “What I mean to say,” she said, “is that if happiness had to be earned, then out of all of my children, you would be the happiest.” She paused, then plunged in, and said softly so that little ears couldn’t overhear, “But you’re not, are you?”

“Mom,” he said, his voice gentle.

Because he was right there in her window, she placed her left palm against his right cheek, feeling the stubble of the whiskers of her most-grown son. They were so blond they were nearly invisible. She looked at him as if memorizing him. After her first weeks of being a novice at mothering, he had been such an easy child. So simple to manage. Easy to please. As he grew up, a piece of chocolate cake made him happy, any sitcom could make him laugh, Christmas absolutely delighted him. He was never grouchy in the mornings, and now he had his own baby daughter and he thought the sun rose and never set in her.

Annabelle leaned forward and kissed his broad sweaty forehead.

“Mom!” He laughed a protest. “I’m filthy.”

“Smelly, too.”

“You look dirty, Daddy!”

He grinned into the backseat. “I am, pumpkin. Daddy needs a bath.”

Annabelle thought about her daughter-in-law taking a long, leisurely bath and thought about telling him to hurry home. Instead, afraid of interfering again, she just smiled, though her eyes were threatening to fill again. “Well, I never claim that you’re my perfect son, just that you’re my good one.”

He leaned into her palm a little, then straightened his head again.

“Not all that good. But I’m fine, Mom.”

“Really?”

“Really. Don’t worry about us.”

“Your mother loves you,” she said, her tone lighter than her feelings.

He squeezed her hand, gently released it, and stood up. He smiled one last time into the backseat, blew his daughter a kiss, and walked back to his truck with a wave. Later, Annabelle would feel those moments were the greatest gift God ever gave her: a last chance to see her firstborn up close, to hold his face in the palm of her hand, to kiss him, to tell him she loved him one last time.

He drove his truck around her car, turned right at the corner, in the direction opposite his home, and was gone.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME Annabelle pulled the Caddy into the barn, with Jody slumped over asleep in her car seat, Hugh Senior led his lame horse back into the vet’s stable, where a goat, a llama, and another horse were already in residence. As he led the limping mare into a stall, the goat baaed. The treatment of the horse was overseen by the doctor who had diagnosed an infection requiring some surgical cleaning.

“She’s got a fever, Hugh. We’ll operate tomorrow.”

“How serious?”

“Not very, at least not yet, but if you’d waited a few days-”

“I should learn to trust my son’s instincts about animals more than my own. Hugh-Jay knew to bring her in now. I hope he has better instincts about people than I do, too, and not just about horses.” His initial confidence about the rightness of his actions in regard to Billy Crosby had ebbed on the drive from the ranch. Uncharacteristically, he was second-guessing his decisions and feeling worried about whether he had done the right things all the way along the line with the young man he’d sent off to jail.

The vet’s face took on a knowing expression. “I heard about Billy Crosby.”

“Already?”

“Heck, Hugh, he got arrested a couple of hours ago, right? That’s a lifetime, in terms of it getting around the local grapevine. I’ll be surprised if it isn’t already news in five counties.”

His patient’s owner laughed. “What exactly did you hear, Doc?”

“That he did some bad things. Sliced the throats of a dozen head of cattle, mutilated a couple of them-”

Hugh grimaced. “It was one pregnant cow and no mutilation.”

“My my,” the vet said wryly, “I’m surprised to hear the news got exaggerated. Who ever heard of that happening around here?”

Hugh Senior stroked one side of the horse’s silky neck and smiled.

“I wouldn’t worry about your instincts about people,” the younger man told the older rancher. “All the boys that you and Annabelle have helped over the years? Not a one of them has turned out like Billy. He’s the exception that proves the rule of your generosity in helping these kids.”

“I never have understood what that means, ‘proves the rule.’”

“Me, either.” The vet laughed. “Maybe it’s not even true.”

“One thing’s true. Billy takes exception to the rules.”

The vet remembered Hugh-Jay Linder’s story about the carload of rough-looking strangers who had moronically tossed out a burning cigarette. The idea of a wildfire unnerved him even more than most people, because of all the helplessly caged animals in his care. Whenever there was a story in the news about a burning stable, he broke out in a cold sweat of dread and pity. When it was arson, he could barely contain his rage. He was about to mention the cigarette incident to Hugh Senior as another example of idiots who didn’t follow rules, but before he could, he got distracted by the appearance of a swelling on the shank of the horse’s injured leg. He walked back into the stall to take another look, and the story faded from his memory.

The rancher traded places with him, walking out of the stall as the doctor walked in. As they passed one another, he clasped the vet’s shoulder. “You’re a good man, Doc. Thanks for taking care of us.” When he walked outside, he was startled to see how much closer the storm had drawn to Rose. The clouds looked like a billowing curtain hung from heaven to earth and extending north and south for miles. Lightning flashed spectacularly throughout them. There was nothing more breathtakingly beautiful in the world, in his opinion, than a thunderstorm approaching Rose from across the wide, flat, empty fields. He wouldn’t have traded sights like this for all the nightclubs in New York or trolleys in San Francisco.

The breeze ahead of the gigantic clouds had turned into gusts, and the temperature had dropped already.

Hugh hurried to his truck, holding onto his hat and hoping to get a couple more errands done before he headed back west through the blowing curtain of clouds to Annabelle and home.