Page 116 of Boston
Cash chuckled with him. “Well, I’m up now. Might as well say what’s on your mind.”
“I was just wondering if you were still up in Wyoming.”
“Sure am,” Cash said, his defenses already flying into place. A lot of rodeo happened here, and in Montana too. Jet currently ran the circuit, and he and his brother competed in team roping events when they weren’t managing a dairy operation out of theTexas Hill Country. He’d been living in Texas for fifteen years, though he hailed from Teton County.
“Where are you staying?” Jet asked.
“I’ve got a vacation rental right now,” Cash said. “But I’m gonna have to be moving on here soon. I’m not real sure what I’ll do.” He could go anywhere and stay anywhere. He had multiple six-figures of savings in the bank, and he’d learned that he was a simple man and didn’t need much to keep himself happy—a nice bed and a good steak every now and then, and his favorite root beer, and Cash felt like he’d roped the world.
“Well, if you’re planning on staying in town a little longer,” he said. “My parents have a place in Dog Valley that’s going to be vacant for a few months.”
Cash sat up and opened his eyes, all awake now. “Vacant?”
“Oh, that got your attention, didn’t it?”
“It sure did,” Cash said. “Keep talking.”
Jet could talk and talk and talk andtalk, and for once, Cash wasn’t unhappy about it. “They’re doing a six-month service mission in Costa Rica,” he said. “Something with the clean water wells there. It’s through my dad’s job at Springside Energy.”
“Yes,” Cash said slowly, leading him along.
“My youngest sister is finally out of the house. I guess she has been for a couple of years, maybe longer. I don’t know….” He trailed off, and then yelled, “Wade! How old is Lark?”
“This is not relevant,” Cash said, and Jet laughed right out loud, and that only prolonged the conversation.
“You are so grumpy.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s before eight a.m.,” Cash shot back.
Jet laughed again, and Cash took a moment to pull down from the top of his screen. Yes, it was only seven-fifty-two. He hadn’t seen this hour of the day in a long time, and he didn’t want to see it again for a long time.
“Anyway,” Jet finally said. “Lark’s off doing her thing. And my mama was going to hire someone to come check on the house every couple of days. You know, just to make sure it goes okay through the winter, that the pipes don’t freeze, that the wind hasn’t thrown a branch through the window, anything like that.”
“Yep,” Cash said.
“And I told ‘er that I thought I had a friend in the area, and that maybe you’d like to stay in the house.”
“Iwouldlike to stay in the house,” Cash said.
“It would be free,” Jet said. “They’re leaving on August twenty-first, but my daddy’s already there. My mom’s just finishing up the gardening and everything, and then she’s going to join him.”
“All right,” Cash said.
“I don’t know if you’ll have to mow the lawn again or not,” he said. “Actually, I think my mama pays a neighborhood boy to come do it.”
“I can do it too,” Cash said. Heck, if he could stay in someone’s house for free, he could mow a lawn. He’d certainly done plenty of that growing up here in Coral Canyon.
“Anyway, they’re not going to be back until the end of March,” he said. “It’s the whole winter. But if you wanted to, you could stay there.”
Cash immediately thought of Boston and Beth, though Beth would be returning to Maryland in only a couple of weeks. He thought about the place he and Boston were going to see in just a couple of days. But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t drive over to Jet’s parents’ house and check on it.
Heck, they might not even be able to buy that property, and maybe they wouldn’t want it until spring anyway, so they could buy it, but not live there.
The possibilities ran wild through Cash’s mind, and he said, “I’m definitely interested and want to do it. I managed to extendmy vacation rental here until the end of August, but they’ve got it rented for a Labor Day party, and then they’re coming back to do some work on the trees, and they don’t want me here. They said I could come back in October, though.”
No matter what, he had to deal with September with nowhere to live. He hadn’t looked too hard for anything else yet, but it definitely sat on his to-do list.
“Well, this sounds about perfect then,” Jet said. “You can head up there anytime after August twenty-first. Obviously, it’s furnished. You can use anything in their kitchen, and it’s got six bedrooms.”
