A Baby for Dry Creek and A Dry Creek Christmas. Janet Tronstad

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СКАЧАТЬ on the Redfern Ranch could never compete with the excitement of a big city. Ranch life was plain, good living, and that was all Reno wanted, but he knew there was no theater, no fine dining, no museums, no upscale shopping.

      A Vegas cocktail waitress like Chrissy would never stay in a place like Dry Creek any more than his mother had. Oh, Chrissy might think it was quaint and amusing enough for a week or so, but in the long term she’d leave. Dry Creek would never be enough for her.

      Yes, throwing away that piece of paper his sister had left on the counter was the only sensible thing to do. Reno said those words to himself, but for some strange reason he didn’t listen. Instead, he folded the piece of paper into a small square and put it in his shirt pocket.

      He told himself he’d throw it away tomorrow. When tomorrow came, he told himself it wouldn’t hurt to wait until the next day.

      That was two weeks ago Monday, and he no longer even bothered to lie to himself. Every day when he changed his shirt, he moved that piece of paper to the new pocket.

      Reno shook his head. This past Saturday he’d actually looked at a map to see which freeways he’d need to take if he drove down to Los Angeles. He’d gone so far as to remind himself he’d never seen the Pacific Ocean and had a good reason to drive down to Los Angeles, quite apart from seeing Chrissy. A man ought to see the ocean some time in his life.

      Reno scraped his feet on the porch of the hardware store. At least no one in Dry Creek knew about that slip of paper in his pocket or the foolish thoughts going around in his head. He wouldn’t have had any peace if they did. Sometimes it felt as if he had a dozen grandparents, each one of them anxious for him to date someone so they could plan a wedding and then begin the more serious business of knitting baby booties.

      Reno didn’t know why the seniors in Dry Creek were so set on babies. But all he heard these days were wistful remarks that, given all the marriages in Dry Creek lately, it sure was a shame there weren’t any babies.

      No, he didn’t want the people of Dry Creek to know he was even thinking of visiting Chrissy. They’d start putting their hopes on him, and he’d only let them down.

      Chapter Two

      Reno opened the door. The hardware store was silent, and for a brief second the light was such that Reno thought no one was inside. Then he saw all his neighbors, and they saw him. It was a toss-up as to who was more startled.

      “It’s that clay mud,” Reno finally said as he stepped inside. They were looking at him as if he were covered with tar or something toxic. “I guess I look a little odd.”

      “You look just fine,” Mrs. Hargrove declared stoutly as she smoothed down the skirt of her checked gingham dress. Mrs. Hargrove had to be eighty years old, and she’d worn the same set of gingham dresses since the late 1950s. She had one in every color of the rainbow. A good dress, she told folks, never wore out as long as you took care of it. Over the dress she wore a black wool sweater that had been stretched out by too many washes. She had rubber boots on her feet and a paperback mystery stuffed into the pocket of her sweater.

      Reno stopped and stood still. If Mrs. Hargrove had to defend him that strongly, he must look worse than he thought. She’d been his Sunday-school teacher years ago, and she was loyal to her students. He’d been in the first grade when he’d realized that she fussed with her hair or her dress on the few occasions she was nervous. She’d done it when Randy McCall asked where Eve got her babies from, and she was doing it now.

      Mrs. Hargrove reached up and patted her gray hair to make sure her bun was secure. She could have saved herself the effort. Mrs. Hargrove’s hair wouldn’t dare misbehave, any more than the first-grade boys would have years ago.

      “If someone will just hand me my mail, I’ll step back to the porch,” Reno offered as he looked down. He must have left giant tracks on the clean floor or something, but the floor was already muddy, and not with his footprints. “I’ll have to remember this one for April Fools’ Day. I don’t think Lester got this much of a reaction when he dressed up like Elvis and went to the café for breakfast. Who would have thought he was that much of a clown?”

      Lester stood up from where he was kneeling beside the bottom bin of the nail rack. He was a short, wiry man who seldom spoke, and he cleared his throat before he started to talk. “I may be a clown sometimes, but at least I would financially support a baby if I had fathered one.”

      “Huh?” Reno wondered if he had missed something. Lester was Reno’s closest neighbor, and he looked as if he’d screwed up all his courage to speak. “Since when do you have a baby?”

      “Sometimes a man can have a baby and not even know it.”

      At least six people in the room sucked in their breath.

      “Hush, now,” Mrs. Hargrove finally managed to say. “It’s none of our business. Just because we’re all used to seeing everyone’s mail as it comes in, it’s no reason to meddle.”

      Reno wondered what she was talking about. Everyone in Dry Creek meddled. It was one of their most endearing traits. It meant they cared.

      “That letter was addressed to us,” Jacob said indignantly. “We weren’t reading anything but what was meant for us. We’re the ones who take turns passing out the mail in Dry Creek. We’re the postmaster.”

      “Still,” Elmer muttered as he walked back to his chair by the stove, “it’s not our business. Of course, in my day a young man was raised to do the honorable thing and marry a woman he got with child.”

      “Lester got someone pregnant?” Reno finally asked. The last he knew, Lester had been courting Nicki. That was before she married Garrett, of course, but still Reno didn’t like to think of Lester playing his sister false. “I thought you were planning on marrying Nicki.”

      If Reno’s voice rose a little, he figured no one could blame him. A man was supposed to defend his sister’s honor, even if she was off being a trucker along with her new husband.

      Lester took a step forward. “Not me, you fool. You’re the one with the baby.”

      Lester could as well have said that Reno had a castle in Spain or a boot growing out of his head. “What?”

      “Now, remember the letter didn’t say that Reno was the one,” Mrs. Hargrove cautioned. “For all we know, he didn’t even have those kinds of thoughts about Chrissy Hamilton. The Reno I know is a good boy.”

      Reno choked. He wished he had a little more mud covering his face so no one could see his guilty flush. How did you tell your old Sunday-school teacher that you’d stopped being a boy a dozen years ago? He sure didn’t want to start telling Mrs. Hargrove about the jumble of thoughts he had about Chrissy Hamilton.

      Even though he knew Chrissy wasn’t the one for him, he still found her attractive. Well, maybe more than attractive, if he was strictly honest about it. Something about Chrissy reminded him of the time as a boy he had been fascinated by a picture of cobras in some catalog that had come to the ranch.

      Not that Reno was worried. He had been smart enough not to order a cobra from that catalog when he was nine years old and he was smart enough now to avoid Chrissy. Just because he was drawn to both of them in some mysterious, crazy way didn’t mean he had to do anything about it.

      Besides, Mrs. Hargrove was СКАЧАТЬ