The two little girls, their eyes dark and solemn, looked at each other, and the smaller girl tugged on the older girl’s hand. They weren’t old enough to be teenagers and they weren’t so little, either. He didn’t know much about kids so it wasn’t easy for him to guess their ages, just the same.
“Melanie says we’re going to the store to get Daddy some soup,” said the younger girl. “Maybe some throat candy.”
The older girl, Melanie, shook the little girl’s hand, scowling, blinking against the large snowflakes batting her face.
“Which store?” asked Dale. “I can carry you there, if you like.”
“The grocery store,” said Melanie, the older girl. “In Wheatland.”
“That would be Wheatland General store,” he said, knowing it was almost two miles away. Easy enough to do in a truck and while not impossible for two determined little girls, with the weather coming down hard the way it was, still not an easy feat. “Can I take you there? Where do you live?”
The girls looked at each other, hands still clasped, almost as if they were silently communicating about the rule where they should never talk to strangers and would it be okay to break it just this once.
“Is your daddy real sick?” he asked, trying a different tack. What adult would be haphazard in his child care to send two little girls to get him some soup and cough drops in this weather? It sounded irresponsible, to begin with, and maybe even downright cruel.
“Rebecca got scared because Daddy won’t wake up,” said Melanie.
“He’s been on the couch all day,” added Rebecca, moving closer to her older sister.
That sounded to Dale like the girls’ dad had a bad cold or maybe even the flu, which would explain why the two little girls were out in such weather, unprepared, shivering, and soaked to the bone.
He debated in his mind whether it would be worth it to carry the girls to the store and then take them home or whether he should take them home first so he could assess what was the matter with their dad. And then either head to the store for cold medicine or call an ambulance.
Deciding on heading wherever their dad was first, he moved close and then crouched down so he wouldn’t be looming over them. Holding out his hand, propped on his knee, he could now look them level in the eyes.
“Where do you live, little ones?” he asked, keeping his voicesoft, not wanting to betray his growing sense of urgency as the snow began slapping on the back of his neck.
Taking a deep breath, Melanie looked at Dale with dark eyes and he could see in them that she’d decided to trust him. That she’d run out of options and was desperate.
“We live under a tree in a trailer,” said Rebecca, chiming in.
“It’s the old Meyer’s place,” said Melanie. “We don’t have a home anymore so Daddy brought us here, where his grandma an’ grandpa used to live. It used to be a farm, with chickens and cows, but it’s just a trailer under a tree now.”
Dale rubbed his jaw, and then his nose, which was dripping with freezing rain. In fact, all of him was pretty damn cold, and if he was cold, the little girls, Melanie and Rebecca, must be chilled all the way to the bone.
“Look,” he said. “I’ll take you two home and check on your dad. See if he just needs medicine or maybe something more. Okay? I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. Let’s just get in the truck where it’s warm and dry.”
Melanie sighed as she nodded, and then she let Dale put her and Rebecca in the passenger seat of his truck. The step up was too high, and there was a wind whistling under the truck, pulling dampness with it, so he lifted them in, and buckled them in together. Then, when they were carefully secured, he closed the passenger-side door and hustled around to the other side. When he got in, he cranked the heat up to high.
“Which way is home, Melanie?” he asked.
Both little girls pointed down the road, past Lafitte Church, and left in the direction of the flat of land that was mostly used for ranching and farming. But where was the trailer under the tree? It couldn’t have been far, after all, Melanie and Rebecca had just come from there.
“The old Meyer’s place?” he asked, an odd memory fleeting across the back of his eyes. He pushed on the accelerator very gently, and guided the truck down Palmer Canyon Road.
CHAPTER 3 - DALE
It wasn’t even half a mile later when Melanie pointed to the left, to the dark group of old pine trees that someone had planted long ago as a windbreak. On the other side of the trees, if you looked hard, was an old pale blue single-wide trailer, listless among the scrubby weeds, an old tire, a little white freezer on its side, the lid hanging from one hinge.
Dale pulled into the driveway, which was only two side by side depressions in the thick mat of snow that had formed in the last five minutes as if the coming blizzard had determined to mark its territory early.
“We didn’t bring back any soup,” said Melanie, a forlorn waver in her voice. “Or throat candy.”
“I have groceries in the truck bed,” said Dale. In fact, he had overdone it at the store, since they’d had a sale on sweet glazed ham, which he loved. “Let’s go see what’s up with your dad.”
He parked the truck close to the door of the trailer, expecting that someone would come to the door to check who had just arrived in the yard. But no one came and the yard was eerily silent except for the sound of snow blowing across the frozen grasses.
He helped the little girls out of the truck, and then followed them up the rickety metal steps. Melanie opened the door and Rebecca scampered under her arm to go inside. Then Dale followed Melanie, shaking the snow off him as he stood on the worn avocado-colored carpet and looked around the dimly lit single-wide.
