Reluctantly he picked up the smoothie and sipped at it. It must not have been as bad as he’d anticipated, because he took a few more sips, then sighed and set it down. “Thanks,” he said, and though the word was grudging at least he said it.
“You’re welcome. I need to take her for a walk—” At the word “walk,” Tricks grabbed her tennis ball and went to the door where she stood fairly vibrating with anticipation. “—and I’ll be gone about twenty minutes, maybe a little longer. Do you want the TV on?”
“No, I just want to lie down and rest for a while.”
“Okay, then. Drink the rest of that smoothie.”
She started to leave the door unlocked, but realized that when she left, he would likely go back to sleep, which was the equivalent of leaving the house unprotected. Without saying anything, she got her keys and pistol as usual and grabbed a heavier coat on her way out the door, flipping the hood up to cover her head. The wind was now downright icy, and the low dark clouds pressing down on the hills looked as if they might start dropping snow any minute.
She locked the door and started off across the yard. Tricks dropped the ball at her feet and, as usual, took off running, certain Bo would throw the ball in the direction she’d chosen.
They had a route they walked, a path that had been tramped down over the many walks she’d taken since getting Tricks. The path wound around the edge of some woods, and Bo stayed well away from the small hidden lake where she sometimes let Tricks swim in the summer. Going to the lake was a treat, not a routine. Beyond the woods was a meadow, and beyond that more woods where the trail climbed a decent hill. When she’d first started walking Tricks, Bo would be out of breath by the time they reached the hill, much less climbed it, but now she crested it without any problem. She threw the ball for Tricks the whole way, with Tricks racing back and forth.
This was the best part of every day, out walking with her dog, her boots making rustling noises in the fallen leaves, watching Tricks’s joy as she dashed back and forth.
She would have liked to stay out longer than usual in case the weather turned especially nasty during the night, and she wouldn’t be able to walk Tricks tomorrow as often as normal, but her other work waited for her at home and she couldn’t prolong the walk forever. She said, “Let’s go home, girl,” and, with a happy wag of her tail, Tricks reversed her course.
They were about halfway back when a hush fell around them. The wind died and fat, silent snowflakes began drifting down on them, the flakes decorating Tricks’s pale golden fur like confetti. Bo took out her cell phone and snapped a few pictures of the dog with snowflakes on her head because she looked so pretty with the swiftly melting decorations. Tricks was a camera hog who stopped and posed, dark eyes bright and smiling, every time she saw a camera, as if she knew what a picture she made. “Good girl,” Bo crooned, bending down to nuzzle the top of her head. The dog cuddled against her for a minute, always happy for a snuggle, then they continued on the trail. The flurry stopped before they reached the house again, but given how cold it had gotten, Bo expected there would be more snow coming.
When she unlocked the door and went in, she saw that her “guest” was stretched out on the sofa, sound asleep. Tricks trotted over to him and began a head-to-toe sniffing exploration. Bo watched to see if he was disturbed, but he didn’t stir, and after a minute Tricks abandoned him for one of the stuffed animals still piled in front of the sofa, shaking it, then trotting with it to her own bed where she beat it against the floor a time or two before dropping it and selecting another.
Bo checked the smoothie. He’d drunk about half of it, which she guessed was about as good as she could expect this first time. She poured the rest of it down the sink.
She had some time before feeding Tricks and herself, so she went to the small office area she’d set up under the slant of the stairs and opened the file on her computer. Her current project wasn’t all that interesting, converting technical language on how to operate a camcorder into language the average person could follow, but it was something she was good at. It helped to have the actual product in her hands, but if that wasn’t possible, she could make do with diagrams. As long as she could visualize the action, she could describe it.
One of the deals she’d made with the town was that it provide Wi-Fi to her house, meaning she could now send and receive all the data she needed to work without having to drive into town to use the library’s Wi-Fi. Just that convenience had made a big difference in her productivity. She always had proposals out, and she worked hard at delivering her projects by deadline or ahead of time, so over the years her business and income had grown—but not grown enough to keep her afloat after getting saddled with the barn and all the personal debt she’d stupidly piled up getting that project done. With that one blow her fledgling business in house flipping had died a gruesome death, and she’d returned to the tech writing to keep herself in food.
Sometimes Bo could only marvel at how her life had turned on that one bad deal. At the time she’d been panic-stricken, but if the client hadn’t left her holding the bag—or, in this case, the barn—she’d have moved on to another town, another house, and she wouldn’t have the roots she’d eventually put down here. “Roots” had been an alien concept to her; she’d moved around, not getting attached to any place or any person, then life had happened and here she was. She had a place that had become home, she had friends—good ones—and she had Tricks. All in all, she thought she’d gotten the best part of the deal. Sure, sometimes she wished she could take in a concert or wander through a museum, eat at a restaurant with a decent wine list—and someday she might take a vacation and do just that—but she was oddly content where she was. No one could have been more surprised than she was at herself.