Page 91 of York

“Um. I don’t know. I guess we could stay here tonight. Gary said he would be ready for me anytime. I can hopefully get my mind together by tomorrow.”

“Or the next day. We’re not in a big rush. Though, I would feel better if I had a weapon around here.”

“For the animals?”

“For anything.”

“I have a gun in my room.”

“You have a gun in your adolescent bedroom?”

“Yeah. There’s a massive gun safe hidden behind a cabinet, too. You can have your choice.”

“Well, then, I see no reason for us not to settle in for a few days. Let you get your head on right. Feel whatever you have to feel. Make the decisions you need to. Then we can go from there.”

“Mommy? Daddy?”

Denny’s voice had that slight worried edge, making both of us jump up and move toward the door.

“Let’s save this for later,” I said, meaning the bedroom.

We kind of drifted through the rest of the day, checking out the house, the grounds, eating leftovers from the diner for dinner, then showing Denny her special bedroom.

I answered about a million questions about the grandfather she never got to meet, about why she hadn’t met him, about what it was like to grow up on the ranch.

Eventually, she exhausted herself playing with her new toys and had us put her to bed in her new bedroom, but we had to agree to sleep in my old bedroom across the hall.

After she was asleep, I took York to the gun safe and watched his jaw go slack as he turned to face me.

“Was your grandfather some secret drug dealer? The fuck he need this many guns for?”

“I know. It’s crazy. But it was his favorite thing to treat himself to.”

He chose a gun and a waist holster to wear under his shirt around the house.

Then, after locking down the house for the night, we finally dropped onto the couch with cups of steaming instant coffee.

“The gun safe was impressive. The food storage was fucking insane.”

He wasn’t wrong about that.

My grandfather wasn’t paranoid, per se. But he liked being prepared. Which meant there was a whole temperature-controlled room full of freeze dried and vacuum-sealed food stores that would basically be good for the next thirty years. That was where we’d managed to find some instant coffee, sugar, and freeze-dried milk. I’d also taken out a tin of buttermilk pancake mix, maple syrup, and freeze-dried strawberries to make a somewhat serviceable breakfast in the morning.

“Yeah, we got shipments a few times a year to add to it. There are whole freeze dried meals, meats, veg, fruit, you name it. We could survive the apocalypse here. Though, the end times without fresh coffee doesn’t feel worth it,” I said, wrinkling my nose at my instant coffee.

“Denali is gonna get a kick out of the freeze-dried candy.”

“Yeah. She’s been so good about all this.”

“A plane full of toys, chicken tenders and fries for lunch and dinner, bison, cattle, and a new room full of goodies? She’s having a blast.”

That was true.

This was heavy for me.

For her, she had a lot of fun new experiences.

“Want to talk about it?” he asked.