CHAPTER 1
morgan
The three old geezers made their way out of the feed and grain store, leaving Morgan alone with his five brown paper bags full of groceries on the sales counter. He had no idea what was in those bags because the geezers had taken over his shopping expedition, asserting that they knew what he needed for the coming blizzard and were only too glad to help him out.
In addition, a litter of wood scraps marked the trail of Ambrose’s efforts to make sure Morgan would stay warm for the duration of the blizzard. And now Morgan had a headache.
It was the usual one, from the pain in his knee and the slightly off-balance way he walked these days, with his tight grip on the purple HurryCane, plus the effort it took to be polite to the people who were trying to help him.
Once his knee got better, he wouldn’t need so much help and wouldn’t feel so irritated by every damn thing. Back in Denver, he’d been taking PT and had been nearing the end of it when he’d gotten the call saying his Aunt Oralee had died. Since he was her only living relative, her lawyer was counting on him to come up to Hysham, Montana, to deal with her last will and effects.
This he had dutifully done, taking extended leave from his job as a building safety inspector at an unremarkable firm in downtown Denver. He’d flown up a week ago, though the time was a blur: the trip, the funeral, and his first two meetings with Aunt Oralee’s lawyer, the impossibly young Ethan Barlow, who’d handled the paperwork with calm ease.
It wasn’t until two days ago, when Morgan took the keys to his aunt’s store, Hysham’s only feed and grain, and moved from the small, slightly dated family-run motel on the edge of town into the little apartment above the vast cavern of the store, that everything began to sink in.
He’d stepped into the store that day, looked around, and nearly called Bradley so they could make fun of everything together. Barely in time, he’d remembered that Bradley had broken up with him and moved on with his life.
Apparently, Morgan’s auto accident and subsequent knee surgery and health issues had been too much for Bradley to deal with.
Morgan’s need to go to Montana had been the last straw, for Bradley had packed his things and abandoned Morgan in their shared apartment. This had left Morgan with a mountain of decisions to make, and in the end, he’d given up the lease, put his stuff in storage, and made the journey alone, traveling with only two suitcases.
Those were open on the floor in his bedroom above the store, and that’s about as far as he’d gotten with settling in. He didn’t know how long he’d be staying, but Bradley had left him, so his old life was gone. The plan was to get the feed and grain sold and then start afresh. Somehow.
When he’d mentioned selling the feed and grain, the old geezers, Ambrose, Maurice, and Neville, had responded with plaintive looks and expressions of dismay. Their general advice had been that he should maintain one of the town’scornerstones, which had been in place almost from Hysham’s inception. And that he’d learn to love living there.
Then they’d gone on about local charms: the coffee shop; the small market; the attentiveness of Young Tommy, the sheriff (who was not young); and the aptitude of Deputy Hartland, who the geezers thought was amazing, as well as, in their words, a sweet gal. Morgan had done his best to block their chatter out.
Gus Odell, a well-to-do local rancher with the air of a tired cowboy who’d nonetheless maintained the spring in his step, had come by the day before. He’d put in an order for hay and discussed the reorder of some pallets, an item that Morgan had no idea the use of.
Gus had mentioned something about the Grange that had burned down and, again, described the feed and grain as a cornerstone. He had told Morgan to wait a while before making any big decisions.
“Son, it’ll sell better in the spring,” he’d said. “Not to mention, you’d do the town an awful lot of good if you stuck around and kept the doors open.”
The collective opinion that he should stay in Hysham and build his new life there was already overwhelming.
The warnings he’d received of an impending blizzard from the sheriff and deputy, plus the three geezers and even Mabel Milbourne, a talkative older woman whom he’d had the misfortune to bump into at Hysham’s only market, and the excitement on the faces of everyone he’d seen, didn’t help his mood or headache, either.
It was going to snow. So what? It snowed everywhere, so why was this such a big deal? In his old life, in Denver, it snowed, they plowed the streets, and you got on with things.
Ambrose, the most active and vocal of the geezers, had been nice enough to take a bundle of wood, one of four that they’d forced him to purchase at the grocery store, into the small officeand build a fire in the pot-bellied stove. The welcoming heat had pulsed out from it right away.
Morgan had stood back, leaning on his cane with both hands, and watched to see how Ambrose arranged the wood to burn most effectively. He made appreciative noises and counted the seconds until Neville and Ambrose and Maurice left.
Before they did, they pestered him with questions about how soon Morgan was going to revive his aunt’s tradition of making fresh coffee and bringing in donuts most mornings so they could sit and gab in the corner of the store that had been set up for that purpose.
It was only when they’d departed that he could go back into the office, settle into the dusty wooden desk chair, stare at the flickers of orange and gold through the open door of the stove, and simply breathe. Wait for his headache to subside, wait for the pain meds he’d just taken to kick in, and count the minutes until his next dose.
He was down to three types of medication: a painkiller, a blood thinner, and a muscle relaxant, and he was doing his best to stretch out the time between doses of the painkiller. To reduce the doses, too.
The oxycodone was potent stuff, and he didn’t like how it dried out his mouth and unsettled his stomach. Sure, it helped with his knee and his head, but the effects everywhere else made it just about not worth it. Hence, the weaning.
He looked at the sheets of paper covering the desk. From an earlier, half-hearted attempt at organization, he knew that the top layer of messiness consisted of documentation for a large sale of hay, a handwritten receipt for a special order of leather-cutting tools, and a typewritten letter about a shipment of watering cans that had just arrived in anticipation of spring.
Beneath that, in multicolored substrata, were standing orders of dog food, birdseed, cat litter, plastic milk crates, papersacks full of a corn-and-grain mixture, and so on. People had been coming into the feed and grain up to the day his Aunt Oralee had gone into the hospital, it seemed, and all of those orders needed to be dealt with.
He was leaning back, prepared to bask in the warmth of the cozy flames, when he heard a sound from the main part of the store.
The store was a long open room with a collection of aisles in the middle and along the sides that contained stuff he’d never have imagined anyone would need, but evidently they did. He disliked going into that cold, echoing emptiness to look at the mess and disorganization. To feel the cold coming in through the thin, single-paned windows.
