Sam felt the badge on his shirt and then rubbed the star on his thumbnail and felt like he’d won the lottery.
“I already won the prize when God gave me you and Evie, but thank you.”
“The guys at the station are gonna be jealous, aren’t they?” Evie said.
Sam grinned. “Oh yeah…big time.”
Then the doorbell rang. Sam loped through the house and opened the door.
“Morning, Roxie.”
“Morning, Sam,” she said, then came in and shut the door behind her.
“How did you fare through the storm?” he asked.
“I slept through it,” Roxie said.
He arched an eyebrow. “Lucky you. We did not.”
She grinned and then walked into the kitchen.
“Miss Roxie! Miss Roxie! Daddy made us Happy Meals for breakfast,” Evie said.
“And we have prizes but we can’t play with them until we clean our plates,” Beth added.
“Good move, Daddy. Have a good day,” Roxie said.
“Yes, ma’am.” He gave each girl a kiss on the top of her head, then gave them a starry thumbs-up, and left the house.
He couldn’t help but glance across the street as he was walking to his cruiser, and then glanced down at the sticker on his thumb and got in and drove away.
***
Katie woke abruptly, glanced at the clock, and then relaxed. Still plenty of time before she went to Delilah Cash’s house to take the Yorkie for a walk. It felt good to have a purpose until her classes began, and the luxury of not living by an alarm did not go unappreciated.
After a leisurely breakfast of fruit and cereal, she put on her oldest pair of jeans and a tank top, and decided to dig out the little backpack she used to wear to go hiking. She dropped in her house keys and wallet, added a couple of bottles of water, a small plastic dish, and some wet wipes, then grabbed her sunglasses as she left the house.
She paused a moment, eyeing the puddles left over from last night’s rain and feeling the unexpected heaviness of humidity in the air, then slipped her arms through the straps of the backpack and took off down the street.
She’d been walking for almost an hour when she finally headed toward Delilah’s. There were shade trees along almost every residential street in town, but after last night’s rain, the heat of the day was turning Borden’s Gap into a sauna. The humidity of rural Tennessee was a one-eighty from the dry heat of New Mexico. Sweat was running down the middle of her back and between her breasts as she walked up the steps at Delilah’s house and rang the doorbell.
When she heard an abrupt burst of yapping, she grinned.
Rhett was announcing her arrival.
Delilah came to the door, smiling. “He’s ready!” she said. “Are you ready for Rhett?”
Katie laughed. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. She poked the poop bag Delilah gave her into her hip pocket and took the leash attached to the Yorkie’s collar. And like yesterday, the little dog had the leash in his mouth.
Katie reached down and gave him a quick pat.
“Are you ready, buddy?”
Rhett Butler bounced down the steps like a little rabbit, leading himself and Katie off on their walk.
Katie waved at Delilah, and they were gone.
And like before, their parade did not go unnoticed.
Today, Beau Newton had parked his landscape truck and trailer along the curb of the grand blue house at the end of the block where Delilah lived. It belonged to George and Flo Welby, the owners of Welby’s Grocery.
Beau was down on his knees pulling weeds out of Flo’s flower bed when he saw the pair coming up the street. He knew who the woman was. He’d seen her around town, and he knew whose dog she was walking. Rhett Butler’s reputation for prowess had long since preceded him. Rhett was the only dog in town who chose to participate in controlling his own leash.
Intrigued, Beau wanted an excuse to talk to her, so he jumped up and hurried toward his truck, grabbed a little hand-size hoe out of the toolbox, and then casually turned around just as the duo approached.
“Morning, ma’am. I’m Beau Newton. I own Newton Landscaping.” He pointed at his truck as if to prove the validity of his statement. “I see you and Rhett are having yourselves a fine walk.”
“Nice to meet you, Beau. I’m Katie McGrath.”
“You’re the new teacher, right?”
Katie nodded, but Rhett was already tugging on the leash.
“As you can see, Rhett’s not through with his walk, and it’s getting hot, so we need to be on our way. Nice to meet you,” she said, and resumed her walk.
Feeling empowered that she’d stopped to talk, Beau jumped in with both feet.
“Uh, say…Miss Katie, I would love to take you out for coffee some morning.”
“That’s real sweet of you,” Katie said. “But dating is not on my agenda right now.”
Beau was disappointed, but he didn’t let it show. “Yes, ma’am. Anyway, it was nice to meet you. See you around town.”
Katie breathed a sigh of relief and kept walking. After sniffing multiple trees and flowering bushes and hedges along the ensuing two blocks, the little Yorkie found a satisfactory place to poop, then waited patiently while Katie recovered it.
As she was tying up the bag, she laughed at the expression on his face.
“You think you really did something, right?”
He yapped.
She was still grinning as she dropped the bag in a public garbage bin on the street. A few yards down, Katie stopped and sat down on a public bench, pulled Rhett up in her lap, and poured some water in a little plastic bowl. She set the bowl down beside her, and watched in quiet delight as Rhett Butler abandoned her lap for a drink.
“Are you through?” she asked, when he finally looked up at her, water dripping from the little chin whiskers around his mouth.
Rhett yapped.
“Excellent,” Katie said. She emptied what was left in the bowl and put it back in her backpack, then put Rhett back down.
But instead of picking up his leash, Rhett looked up at her and yapped again.
Katie slipped the backpack on and scooped him up in her arms.
“So that’s the end of the walk, is it? Now you’re just along for the ride.”
Rhett licked her chin.
She kissed the top of his little head, then wrapped the leash around her arm, settled him against her breasts, and headed to Delilah’s.
The older woman was sitting outside on the verandah when Katie came up the steps.