Chapter 22

Chapter Twenty-Two

D awson took Caroline's pint of ice cream from her and set it on the conveyor belt at Wilde it didn't mean he didn't like and wouldn't help Ollie. In fact, he hung up and said, "My niece needs us at a friend's house to help with a small bleeding issue."

"My goodness," Caroline said as she picked up the pace. "All right, then. The end of this date just got exciting."

He chuckled, though he didn't like the idea that the beginning and middle of the date had been boring. He'd been trying to figure out how to tell her about his OCD and anxiety, and every time he tried, he couldn't do it .

He'd written it on a pink sticky note, so he could easily check it off any time, but he kept moving the note from one day to the next without actually doing it.

Ollie and Aurora only lived a few blocks from Wilde & Organic, and Dawson jogged up the front sidewalk to the porch while Caroline and the ice cream brought up the rear.

"Hey, hey, hey," he said as he entered. Chaos existed around him, and Dawson paused in the doorway. A little boy of probably two sat on the loveseat in a diaper, a partially eaten and totally soggy graham cracker in his hand. He looked at Dawson with wide moon eyes while another child cried from further within.

Jewel sat at the dining room table, singing to herself and coloring, like the happenings in the house this evening were completely normal.

To Dawson, they weren't. It wasn't like the house was dirty or falling down, but shoes lay by the front door in a heap, unpacked plastic grocery sacks sat on the kitchen counter, and both JJ and Shiloh stared at him from the other side of the long couch.

"Praise the heavens," Shiloh said. "Lara's in the kitchen, and she still won't let us help her."

"What happened?" Dawson asked as he moved forward.

"I don't really know," JJ said. "She was playing out in the back yard, and Shiloh came over with dinner. So I was getting the door. Next thing we know, she's screaming and blood's pouring from her mouth. Or nose." He glanced at Dawson as he hurried by. "Somewhere. She usually likes me, but she's freaking out."

So was he, and Dawson didn't blame him. The young man was probably only twenty years old. Maybe twenty-one at this point. He wasn't married and had no children. Of course, Dawson didn't either, but the Walkers were kind of like the Glovers in that they had a plethora of offspring.

JJ was one of the oldest, so he'd grown up with a lot of younger siblings and cousins. No wonder this household of a singing child, one about to smear soggy cracker on the couch, and one bleeding, wailing child wasn't all that abnormal for him. At Duke's and Zona's, this was about par for the course too.

For Dawson, his anxiety had just hit the roof and broken through. He took a breath as he rounded the island and found a little girl sitting on the floor, her back pressed to the cabinet behind her. Blood had been smeared on the floor, and it now fell in a dripping pattern as she held her head over her knees as she sobbed.

"Hey, there." Dawson got down on his knees too, deciding the blood didn't bother him. "Lara, baby, look at me, okay?"

To his great relief, the girl looked up. She had some sort of liquid coming from every hole in her face, but Dawson smiled at her. "Tell me how you got hurt. "

"Swallow," she said between her sobs. "Tripp-ed…and my shoe…toof went…boom." Tears ran down her face, and no wonder JJ needed help. Dawson wasn't even sure everything Lara had said was in English.

And he didn't know what to do. Then, like God providing manna from heaven for those wandering in the wilderness, light and ideas flowed into Dawson's mind.

"JJ, can you get Lara a popsicle?"

Thankfully, he didn't question Dawson. He just moved to the freezer drawer and opened it. Caroline put their ice cream in there and said, "Come on, you guys. Let's go get these other kids dressed and ready for dinner."

"Okay, yes," Shiloh said, and they left to do that.

JJ handed Dawson the red popsicle, and he started to unwrap it. "Hey, Lara, have you ever gotten a little cut on your finger?"

The girl looked at him with teary eyes but said nothing.

"See, cold things slow things down. Like ice in the river."

She babbled something about a river, and Dawson smiled at her. "Right," he said, though he had no clue what she meant. "I want you to suck on this, okay? Can you put it right against what hurts?"

He kept his grin in place as he tapped her nose with the popsicle. "Are you gonna put it right here?" She had blood on her nose, but as far as he could tell, it wasn't actively bleeding.

"No," she chirped out.

"Okay," he said. "I want you to put it on right where it hurts." He held out the red treat. "Can you show me where?"

She opened her mouth and said, "Toofs."

Her whole mouth seemed to be bleeding, and JJ handed him a washcloth. "Okay," Dawson said. "I'm just gonna wipe some of this away, and then you can have the popsicle. Remember." He started swiping as quickly as he could, without putting too much pressure on the girl's face. "You're going to put it right on the tooth that hurts."

"All hurt," she whimpered, and Dawson took one last swipe at her chin.

"Okay, then," he said. "I want you to put the whole thing in your mouth, yeah?" He gave her the popsicle, and to Lara's credit, she did just that. The whole thing went in her mouth, and he expected her to rip it right back out and start crying about the cold.

She didn't, and he picked up the little girl and set her on the edge of the counter next to the sink. JJ had another washcloth ready, and he cooed at her, "I'm gonna wash your hands, sweetie. Just keep the popsicle in your mouth."

Together, he and Dawson got Lara mostly cleaned up, and JJ turned to tackle the floor. Dawson lifted the girl into his arms and said, "Okay, take it out for a minute. I want you to spit everything in your mouth into the sink."

She did and it was just all red. Dawson wiped her face again and gave her a quick glass of water. "I want you to swish it like you're brushing your teeth," he said. "Like your momma taught you, okay?"

"She teach-ed me to brush swish-swish-swish." The girl mimed brushing her teeth and then Dawson held the glass for her while she took a drink of water…and swallowed it.

"Spit this one out, baby," he said. "I want to see if you're still red inside."

She did what he said, and he saw only a trace of red. He rinsed the popsicle and handed it back to her. "Popsicle back in."

Lara sucked on that as Shiloh returned. "Oh, she's cleaned up." She hooked her thumb over her shoulder. "We have Jewel and Mason ready for bed. Jay-J, should I get dinner out?" She looked over to him, and Dawson took a moment to study his niece.

Jay-J? Like, rhymes with Gage?

JJ wasn't in high school anymore, Dawson knew that. And Shiloh had just gotten her driver's license.

"Yeah, if you could get it out, that would be great." JJ straightened to toss away the antibacterial wipes he was using to clean the floor. He pulled out a few more and added, "Jewel, Mason, time for dinner."

"I eat," Lara said. "I hungry."

"Just a minute, sweetie," JJ said. "I want you to finish your popsicle first." He met Dawson's eyes, who nodded.

"How long since you graduated?" he asked, shooting a look over to Caroline, who'd come to help Shiloh get out dinner.

"A year or so," JJ said.

"It's almost two years now," Shiloh said. JJ shot her a glare, but she simply kept working. "What? It's true. You'll have been graduated for two years in just a few months."

"But it's not two years yet," he growled.

No matter what, that put him at least four or five years older than Shiloh. And she wasn't even the one Dawson worried about. "What are you doing?" he asked. "College? Trade school? Working your ranch?"

"Just working the ranch right now, sir," he muttered.

"And babysitting for your cousin," Dawson said.

"Yeah," JJ said. "I'm the manny so Ollie and Rory can go out once a week. They pay good, and I'm trying to earn enough to go to the Dominican Republic on that mission tour this summer."

"Oh, sure," Dawson said, as he'd heard the pastor talk about that. He also knew the Walkers had plenty of money. Like billions of dollars plenty. JJ would never need to work another day in his life, and he'd be fine. "What about after that?" he asked as Lara finished up her popsicle .

"I don't know." JJ took the red-stained stick and tossed it in the trash with the last of the wipes. "Did you know exactly what to do with your life, Dawson?"

He looked at the young man, and JJ reminded Dawson so much of himself. "I mean, I always knew I wanted to work the ranch. So I suppose."

He handed Lara to JJ and said, "Baby, tell us what happened."

"I be running so fast," she said, and now that she wasn't all nasally from the crying and her mouth wasn't filled with blood, Dawson could understand her. "Like, zoom! Zoom! Zoom! And I fell-led, my shoe just pop-ped off, and I go flying down. Bang and boom!"

JJ grinned at her. "Bang and boom aren't good."

She looked at him with wide, earnest eyes. "I lost-ed my toof, JJ. See? It gone." She lifted up her lip, and at least her gums had stopped bleeding. Dawson couldn't see any other damage either. "I ha- a toof ‘ere t'day." She dropped her lip. "Now, no toof."

Her eyes filled with tears. "I swallow it. Now I sad." The saddest tears in the world slid down her face, but Dawson had to turn away to hide his smile. He caught Caroline watching him, and she had the warmest smile on her face too.

"Why are you sad?" JJ asked. "It's just a tooth. They'll all come out, sweetie."

"But I get no prize from Toof Fairy."

Ah. All the things came together, and Dawson turned his grin on JJ. The young man looked stumped, though, and Dawson couldn't believe he hadn't lived through little children believing in fantastical creatures.

"Well, I happen to know that the Tooth Fairy doesn't need the tooth," Caroline said, surprising both him and JJ. They turned toward her with eyebrows raised, and she plucked Lara from JJ's arms. "My brother lost a tooth at school once, and his teacher put it in one of those plastic containers that snaps closed. He wore it on a string around his neck all through the day. But when he got home, he realized it had popped open while he was playing, and the tooth was gone."

She set Lara in the booster seat at the table, and she held everyone's attention now, Dawson's included.

"And you know what?" She put a bowl of macaroni and cheese in front of Lara. No chicken nuggets like the other kids had. "The next morning, he had a dollar bill under his pillow. The Tooth Fairy knew ."

"I got a five-dollar bill for my last tooth," Jewel said.

"Yes, mm hm," Caroline said without missing a beat. "The Tooth Fairy has to account for inflation, I guess."

Dawson burst out laughing then, because it was just too funny to think of the Tooth Fairy having to deal with inflation. Caroline grinned back at him, and he swore he felt the house shift a little. Or maybe that was just his position in time and space, and that he'd fallen slightly.

Fallen in love with the stunning woman now serving a two-year-old she didn't know another dinosaur-shaped chicken nugget.

"Shiloh," Dawson said as he breathed in, trying to distract himself. "What were you doin' here?" He cut a look at JJ, who'd just dished himself some food too.

"I'd just finished up work," she said nonchalantly. "Clara Jean asked me to bring JJ the food for the kids." She took a bite of dinner too, which told Dawson something—like she'd planned to come here and eat dinner with JJ and the kids maybe.

"Did you call your momma?"

Her face paled and she coughed. "Shoot, no." She pulled her phone out of her back pocket, and she was wearing her work polo for Wilde & Organic. Clara Jean was JJ's sister. Shiloh and Clara Jean were good friends.

Her story sounded plausible, but JJ was still four years older than her.

"No." Shiloh moaned. "She's already called twice."

"Then go call her," Dawson said, and Shiloh retreated from the house to do that. The moment the front door snicked closed, he turned to JJ. "So, you're what? Twenty-one?"

"Will be this summer, yep," he said.

"You know she's sixteen, right?" Dawson asked, his meaning ultra clear. So clear, JJ's hand froze with his fork halfway to his mouth. He stared at Dawson, pure shock pouring from him .

"All right," Shiloh said, bustling back into the house. "She knows I'm not dead."

Dawson looked at her and said, "All right. Great. Do you two need us here still?" He reached for Caroline. "If not, I'd like to finish my date." He nodded to JJ. "Do I need to call Ollie and let him know what's gone on here?"

"No," JJ said, becoming mobile again. "I'll tell them."

Caroline ran her hand along JJ's broad shoulders. "And son, she'll need some painkiller for her teeth."

"Oh, shoot. Sure." JJ practically toppled the table he got up so fast, and he moved over to a cabinet that held various bottles of medicines. "Let's see…."

"Go help him, darlin'," Dawson said. "I want to say something to Shiloh."

"Be nice," she whispered before she went to help JJ find the children's painkiller.

"Shiloh," Dawson said, because he didn't have much time. "You tell me straight. You seein' this boy who's going to be twenty-one soon? Do I need to worry about this or not?"

Shiloh blinked, her daddy's dark eyelashes fluttering a mile a second. "What? No, Uncle Dawson, I swear." But her face took on the color of a pink sunset. "Clara Jean said he was babysitting tonight, and he'd ordered food for the kids. But something got messed up with the flower delivery for tomorrow, so she couldn't leave the store when she was supposed to. So she asked me to bring it by on my way home."

He nodded to the bowl of macaroni and cheese she'd eaten from. "And you thought you'd stay and hang out with him."

She looked at the bowl too, clearly horrified. "No," she said flatly. "No, I didn't—" She cut off and pressed her lips together. "I wasn't going to stay at all. I swear, Uncle Dawson."

"So I don't need to tell your momma and daddy anything," he said as Caroline went, "Oh, whoops!" and a clattering of pill containers hit the counter.

"No," Shiloh muttered. "Nothing going on here. Momma's already watching April like a hawk because she flirts with Rusty like he's the only boy alive." She rolled her eyes. "I don't like JJ."

"All right," Dawson said as the young man came over to the table with the right medicine for his niece.

"We gotta have this, sweetie," he said, giving Lara the medicine. She took it just fine too, and JJ's gaze caught on Dawson's. "Thank you for coming, sir."

"I'm barely older than you," Dawson said. "You don't need to call me sir."

"You went to college, right?" he asked.

Dawson nodded. "Yeah. I got a degree in ranch management, but you know, lots of ranchers and farmers don't do that. They just stay and work their family land. There's no shame in that." He studied JJ as his head dipped. "Or you can go to the trade programs or one of those vocational things. They do things with finance or machine repair all the time. It's useful to have those skills, and they don't take long. You can work the ranch while you do them."

"Yeah," he muttered. "I know."

"Have you talked to your daddy about taking over the ranch for him?" Dawson didn't want to pry, but JJ had asked. He seemed open to talking to Dawson about this. "He's gotta be what? Close to sixty, because Duke's in his early fifties."

"Sixty-one now, sir," JJ said.

Dawson nodded. "When my brother came back to Three Rivers, we suddenly had a whole slew of conversations to have. See, my daddy had changed his will, thinking Duke would never come home. So he'd named me as the sole successor of the ranch."

Caroline watched him, keen interest in her eyes. He shifted, a tiny current of discomfort running through him, what with Shiloh listening too. "So we started having a lot of conversations," he said. "I hated them, because I don't want to talk everything to death."

"Talking is real hard for me," JJ said.

"The best part of communication," Caroline said. "Is that it can be learned—with practice." She moved to stand in front of JJ too. "So you just have to practice doing it, and you'll find you'll get better and better at it every time you need to do it."

"I don't even know what to say," JJ said.

Dawson exchanged a look with Caroline, and she clearly wanted him to give the advice. He didn't know how to counsel twenty-year-olds any better than four-year-olds. But God gave him the words as he opened his mouth and said, "Do you check in with your parents when you get home late at night?"

"Yes, sir," JJ said.

"So you will tonight?"

"Yes."

"Is your momma the only one awake, or is your daddy up too?"

"They're both up," JJ said.

Dawson nodded, expecting no less from Jeremiah Walker. "So tonight, when you get home, you walk into their bedroom and you say, ‘I have to talk to you about something.' And you sit down on the end of the bed, and in the dark—it's so much easier to talk in the dark when you're first starting out—you tell them, ‘I want to take over the ranch, and I need help knowing what to do next.'"

" If you want to take over the ranch," Caroline said.

"Right," Dawson agreed. "Or you say, ‘I want to go to that vet technician class I told you about a few weeks ago,' or ‘Hey, I heard of this vet technician class I want to do, and I need your help in knowing how to enroll.' Or ‘I want to run away to the circus, and I'm packing tonight. Don't worry. I don't need your help with it.' "

He grinned at JJ, who finally smiled back. "Okay," he said. "I get it."

"They'll turn on the light," Dawson said. "And then it gets harder. But son, if I know one thing about your momma and daddy, it's that they just want to help you. They want you to be happy. They probably have a dozen ideas for what's best for you, and they're just waiting for you to open the door with the one you think you want to hear about."

"Right," he said. "Okay."

"You only have to be brave for as long as it takes to get the first sentence out," Caroline said. "Trust me on that. Once that first sentence is out, the rest will follow." She nodded, her expression kind but also filled with intensity. Dawson wanted to hear more about how she'd practiced her hard conversations, because she was so good at saying just what she wanted.

"Thanks again," JJ said, and he quickly hugged them both. "Thanks for dropping the food by, Shiloh."

"What? Oh, sure." She took her bowl over to the sink and rinsed it out. "I have to get going. My momma needs me at home."

Dawson doubted that very much, but he didn't argue. JJ didn't either, and the three of them left, still calling good-byes as the door closed.

They'd left the street and the neighborhood and started back toward Caroline's where they'd been planning to climb up on the roof and eat ice cream, whispering and laughing into the night until they were too tired to continue, when Dawson remembered the ice cream.

"Doesn't matter," Caroline said, her fingers in his tightening. "I've got Biscoff."

"I'm gonna need the story of the Biscoff," he told her.

"Yeah, well, get in line, Mister. You have a million stories to tell me still."

He chuckled. "Fair enough." He pulled into her driveway but didn't immediately get out. "Would you go out with me on Valentine's Day?"

She turned to face him, surprise etched in every line of her face. "You're asking me out? It's not implied?"

"Are we to implied dates?"

"I mean…I guess—I don't know."

"I'm asking you to be my Valentine," he said with a smile. "Yes or no?"

"Dawson, of course." She leaned toward him, cradled his face in her hand, and kissed him.

He suddenly didn't need ice cream—he had something sweet in Caroline. "Okay," he whispered against her lips. "And now we're on implied dates for everything. Birthdays, weekends, lunches, Fridays, Tuesdays, your mom's birthday, anniversaries, breakfasts, all of it." He smiled against her curved lips, and kissed her, once again feeling the earth move just a little…tiny…bit.