Montana Creeds: Tyler

“Take Davie home with you,” Doreen said, stiff now, and flushed with shame and fury and frustration and God only knew what else. “You’ll want to give him back soon enough.”

“Maybe,” Tyler agreed. But he was remembering all those times when Cassie had stood toe-to-toe with Jake Creed and refused to let him drag his youngest son home by the hair. What would have happened to him if it hadn’t been for Cassie and, to a lesser degree, for Logan and Dylan?

Payback time.

There was a kid in trouble, and he couldn’t ignore that.

Doreen looked at her watch. A little of her favorite tattoo showed on her upper arm—a phoenix, rising majestically from the ashes. “Do what you want,” she said. “Play hero. You’ll be sorry, Tyler. You will be sorry. And that’s the last warning you’re going to get from me.”

Tyler reached for a napkin, gestured for Doreen to hand over the pen she used for taking down food and drink orders. Scrawled his cell number on it.

“Call if you need help,” he said.

Doreen eyed the number with contempt, but she took it in the end. Stuffed it into her apron pocket in a wad.

Tyler watched her go. Settled up for the coffee. Made his way through the casino to the employees’ lounge. He’d gone to high school with the security guard posted in the hallway, and hung out with Jim Huntinghorse when he was still managing the place, so nobody got in his way.

Davie sat hunkered down in a chair in the corner, alone in the room, clutching the library book in both hands.

“Time to ride,” Tyler said.

“What if he’s out there?” Davie asked. “What if Roy’s out there?”

“I couldn’t get that lucky,” Tyler told him, with a grin.

But Roy wasn’t waiting in the parking lot. Davie was surprised; Tyler wasn’t. Roy would strike back, but not when there was a chance of getting his ass kicked in a public parking lot. He was the come-from-behind type. He’d use a tire iron, or maybe even a gun.

Serious business. But Tyler had had a lot of practice at watching his back. A lifetime of it, in fact.

And being a Creed, he didn’t have sense enough to be scared.

So he and Davie made a quick stop at Wal-Mart, for a sleeping bag and a cot, the usual personal grooming necessities and a change of clothes for Davie.

“You don’t actually expect me to wear these, do you?” Davie protested, once they were back in Kristy’s Blazer, headed for Cassie’s place to pick up the dog. He was holding up the pair of jeans Tyler had chosen for him. “They are definitely not cool.”

“Being cool is the least of your problems,” Tyler pointed out. “You’ll wear them.”

Kit Carson greeted them at the door when they got to Cassie’s, probably relieved to learn that he hadn’t been dumped there for the duration. Not that Cassie wouldn’t have been good to him—she was a little rough around the edges, Cassie was, but she had a gentle soul, a heart for lost dogs. And lost boys.

“Picking up strays now?” she asked, under the bug-flecked cone of light on her porch, watching as Davie hoisted Kit Carson into the back of the borrowed Blazer.

Tyler grinned. “Just carrying on the tradition,” he said.

Stillwater Springs was a small town. Cassie, having lived there since before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, had to know Davie, and his mother, too. Maybe she even remembered the summer Tyler had spent in Doreen’s bed, in the little room above Skivvie’s Tavern, learning to be a man.

“Is he yours?” she asked, proving Tyler’s theory.

“Could be,” Tyler answered. “His mother denies it, but she could have lots of reasons for doing that.”

“Like what?” Cassie countered reasonably.

“Like not wanting me to have a claim on him, back when he was little and she could still handle him,” Tyler said. “Doreen was always independent to a fault. Maybe there’s still a little of that left in her, even now.”

“This is going to complicate your life,” Cassie predicted, sounding resigned.

“Maybe my life has gotten too simple,” Tyler replied.

“Spoken like a true Creed,” Cassie retorted, but she was smiling—with her mouth, anyway. Her dark eyes were serious. “Folks have long memories, Tyler. Everybody—including Lily Ryder—is going to recall what happened between you and Doreen, and put two and two together.”

Tyler sighed. He hadn’t let on to anybody that Lily was on his mind, but Cassie knew him too well to be fooled by lies of omission. “Is she involved with anybody? Remarried maybe?” he asked, his voice sounding husky. He wouldn’t have put that particular question to anyone else on earth, not even Lily. His pride wouldn’t have allowed that. But Cassie, a wise middle-aged Native American with a teepee in her yard, was like a grandmother to him.

“No,” Cassie said. And she put a hand on his arm, a signal that she was about to say something he wouldn’t want to hear. “Her husband was a pilot. He killed himself two years ago.”

Suicide.

Tyler closed his eyes, thrust right back into the bad old days as surely and suddenly as if he’d stumbled into a time warp. He might have been a kid again, not a man standing on Cassie’s front porch, but a boy hiding on the other side of the kitchen door, out at the home place, listening as Sheriff Floyd Book, Jim Huntinghorse’s legendary predecessor, broke the news to Jake.

Angie’s dead. I’m so sorry. We found her at the Skylight Motel, on the old state highway. It was an overdose, Jake… .

Tyler had heard a wail, primitive and piercing, and thought it was Jake.

He’d only realized the sound was coming from his own throat when Dylan and Logan each took one of his arms and hauled him up off his knees, braced him between them.

Cassie squeezed his arm, hard, brought him back from the abyss, the place where the questions never stopped.

All of them started with the same word.

Why?

“What could be that bad?” he rasped. “A wife like Lily. A little girl like Tess. What would make a man throw them away?”

“You’re trying to understand again,” Cassie pointed out gently. “And there is no understanding, Tyler. People are fragile. They can break. It’s as simple—and as complicated—as that.”

Don’t try to understand.

How many times had he heard that advice, from how many people? Dylan, certainly. Logan, too. Even his late wife, Shawna, when she’d been trying to pull him out of some slump. And it wasn’t the first time Cassie had offered it, either.

The problem was, he couldn’t help going over the old ground, looking for clues. Analyzing. His mother’s suicide was the reason for so many things that had happened—and not happened—in his life. It drove him half-crazy sometimes, the need to know why she’d done it. Why she hadn’t been able to hold on, leave Jake, make a new start somewhere else.

“You’ll be seeing Lily, I suppose?” Cassie ventured.

“We’re having dinner tomorrow night,” Tyler answered, braced for more advice.

Leave it alone, Cassie had told him, after the breakup that summer, when he’d wanted to go back to Lily, beg her to forgive him for sleeping with Doreen, give him another chance.

Forget the girl, Jake had counseled. She’s too good for you, anyway .

Are you nuts? Logan had demanded, after bouncing him off the back wall of the barn a couple of times. Rolling in the hay with a waitress twice your age when Lily’s crazy about you?