When Dixie called the boys home, she asked Pops to come with them. When she got her sons into the tub, she took Pops to the kitchen, where the boys, who were not silent bathers by any means, would not overhear. There, once Pops was seated at the kitchen table with a dish of peach cobbler to work on, she told him first about Wade’s true background and identity.
Unlike her, Pops didn’t feel the least deceived. He laughed. “Ha! I knew there was more to that boy than he was lettin’ on. Rich, you say?”
“Filthy rich.”
“And him washing our dishes.” He laughed again and shook his head. “Did he say why he was here?”
“Yes, he did.” She told him the rest, about Wade’s heart transplant, and where his new heart came from.
Pops cried. His tears were a mixture of renewed grief at the loss of his only grandson, and pride that a part of Jimmy Don lived on in another person. More than one person, most likely.
“That’s something, isn’t it?” He wiped the moisture from his cheeks and eyes. “I’m so proud of Jimmy Don, I think I might burst.”
“I know what you mean, Pops.” She stood next to him, leaned against him and wrapped her arms around him. “He did good, didn’t he.”
Sniff. “He sure did.”
“Wade wants the boys to know.”
Pops peered up at her. “You don’t?”
Dixie sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t want them upset. They were devastated when their daddy died. Talking about this might bring all that back. They might get it in their heads that it’s Wade’s fault Jimmy Don died. That it’s not fair for him to be dead and Wade to benefit from it.”
“Is that what you think? That it’s not fair for Wade to be alive while Jimmy Don’s dead?”
“Me? No. Of course not.”
Pops twisted away from her and looked at her more closely. “Well, something’s got you all sideways.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She pushed away and turned toward the sink to get a drink of water. And to keep him from seeing the sudden blush heating her cheeks.
“And if you believe that,” he said, “I’ve got a six-legged dog I’ll sell you.”
“Pops, really. Why would I be upset about anything Wade says?”
“Maybe because him being so rich and all, he probably won’t be working at the diner much longer. It’s a cinch he doesn’t need the job. Might not even hang around town for long. Unless, of course, a certain person was to give him a reason to stick around.”
“Well, then,” she said, jerking up his now empty cobbler dish and carrying it to the sink, “you better be thinking up a reason to give him if you want him to stay.”
“Ha. Like you don’t want him to stay.”
“Why should I care one way or the other?”
“Dixie, you’re gonna make an old man out of me before my time.”
“That’ll be the day. Besides, you lie about your age so much, nobody’s quite sure how old you are. And I’m sure you prefer it that way. But if you really want to talk about someone’s love life, you can tell me about your visit this afternoon from Ima Trotter.”
“Hmph.”
From where she stood, several feet away at the sink, Dixie noted that the tops of his ears turned red.
Wade wasn’t sure what to expect the next morning when he met Dixie and the boys at the diner. The boys were their usual early-morning bickering selves. Dixie, however, would barely meet his eyes. He assumed that meant she was having trouble accepting and dealing with all he’d told her the night before. He couldn’t say he blamed her. It had taken him considerable time to get used to the idea of having someone else’s heart beating in his chest.
Come to that, he still wasn’t used to the idea, but he sure liked the beating. He liked being alive. It was just that the means by which that was possible took getting used to. If Dixie needed more than one night to come to terms with it, he could give her time.
He just wished she would look at him.
Dixie wasn’t ready to look at him. She wanted, badly, to have him put his arms around her and tell her everything was going to work out. And that was just stupid. When had she ever needed a man to tell her things were going to work out? She was used to handling things on her own, and had, to date, done a fairly decent job of it. She would continue to do so. To rely on someone else for happiness or stability or comfort or any other darn thing was to court disappointment, in her book.
To prove to herself that she didn’t really want to be held, she took a big step back from Wade emotionally and, when possible, physically. Time enough later to deal with one of the country’s richest, most eligible bachelors. All she wanted for today was for him to wait tables.
The day raced by in a blur of customers and orders and dirty dishes for Wade. He was getting pretty good at dealing with the customers and taking the orders.
Ima came in for lunch again.
“Good afternoon,” Wade said, placing a menu and a glass of ice water before her.
“Oh, my, doesn’t that look cool and refreshing. I declare, it’s hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk out there.”
“Is it? I haven’t been outside since I came in this morning.”
Actually, he thought, every time he got near Dixie it seemed a little on the cool side. He would have to do something about that soon. When Pops came back to work, the only way Wade was going to see Dixie during the day was if he came in and placed an order. No way could he go back to washing dishes and take Miguel’s job away from him. The kid and his family appeared to have a serious need for money. Wade would not get in the way of the boy earning his pay, even if it was only minimum wage.
Ima took a long swallow of her ice water and set it down with a satisfied sigh. “Not very mannerly of me, guzzling my water that way, but it surely hit the spot. I think I’ll stick with something on the cool side for lunch. Bring me a BLT and a small side salad with Italian dressing, if you please.”
“Certainly.” He liked this lady, with her snowy white hair and face full of lines that said she’d lived. “Iced tea?”
“Perfect,” she said with a smile. “You tell that Dixie she’d better watch out. You’re taking such good care of the customers, we may not want her back.” There was a definite twinkle in her eyes.
Wade placed a hand on his hip and pulled out his best Southern accent. “Miz Ima, I’ve been telling her that very thing since yesterday.”
Ima cackled and swatted his arm. “Go on with you.”
“Yes, ma’am. Be back with your sandwich and salad as soon as they’re ready. Do you want to wait until then for your tea, or would you like it now?”
“You’ve learned your job quite well, young man. I’ll take my tea with my meal, thank you.”
Hers wasn’t an order he needed to turn in. The bacon was already cooked, so he could build the sandwich himself, and fresh bowls of salad sat covered in plastic wrap in the cooler. Dixie had four other orders going on the grill and didn’t need to be bothered. He built the sandwich, tore the cover off a salad and put both on a tray along with salad dressing and iced tea.
As he was serving Ima the meal a few moments later, the bell over the front door dinged, announcing yet another customer. Lunch business was booming. If this pace kept up, they could have a full house before long.
“Hey, Bill,” someone called out.
Bill Gray, the newspaper editor, waved in response, then sat down at a table.
“Heard a rumor about you,” the man at the next table said to Gray.
“Here you go, Miz Ima,” Wade said, placing her lunch before her and listening with half an ear to the various conversations going on around the room. “Do you need anything else?”
“If it’s about that last New Year’s Eve party,” Gray answered, “I did not dance on top of the table. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
“This looks just fine, Wade,” Ima said. “Thank you.”
“Naw, not that rumor. I know that one’s not true.”
“You should,” Ima said, joining in the conversation as Wade turned away. “You started it, Jim.”
“Miz Ima, you’re not supposed to tell him that.”
“It’s all right, Miz Ima,” Gray said. “I already knew who started it.”
“Forget that. Old news, pardon the pun. This is a new rumor,” Jim said. “I heard you were going to sell the paper and retire.”
Wade paused on the other side of the counter and blatantly eavesdropped.
“Sell the paper?” Ima said, shocked. “Is this true, William?”
“Don’t you think it’s past time for a new voice in this town? It’s time I retired, if I can find the right buyer,” Gray said. “I promised my wife when we married that one day we’d live in paradise. As much as I love this town, paradise it’s not. She’s got her heart set on Hawaii.”
Wade had to assume that Bill Gray had a good financial planner for him to be able to retire in Hawaii. There wasn’t a great deal of profit, if any, in small-town weekly newspapers these days.
“What a fine man you are, William,” Ima said, “to keep such a promise to your wife. Just do this town a favor and try not to sell the paper to some big conglomerate who’ll manage it from New York, or someplace like that. We need a paper that’s purely local.”
“I’ve been worried about that very thing,” Gray said.
“Order up!” Dixie called as she slapped the bell signaling an order was ready.
Wade filed the newspaper information away in his brain and pulled the burger from the order window.
And so the day went. Miguel kept up and seemed to be doing a good job. In the middle of the afternoon, with only a few customers on hand and none of them ready to check out, Wade saw Miguel come out to bus the two tables in the back, and used that opportunity to step into the kitchen to see Dixie.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
Her smile looked tired, just as it had when she’d unlocked the door this morning.
“Pretty good,” she answered. “How about you?”
“The same. Miz Ima says I’m so good you might be out of a job.”
“Oh, really?” She flipped a ground beef patty on the grill. “What do you say?”
“I say you’ve got nothing to worry about. No way would I want to do this very often. I have enjoyed it, though.”
“You have?”
“It’s always educational to do someone else’s job for a couple of days. Gives you a new perspective. Plus I enjoy meeting the people.” He hesitated. “Were you able to decide about telling the boys?”
“That was slick. Start off talking about jobs, then, wham, hit me with what’s really on your mind.”
“Are you going to answer me?”
She sighed and met his gaze squarely for the first time that day. “Yes. It’s your thing, so I want you to tell them. But I want to be there. And I want to talk to you before you tell them.”
“That’s fair. It’s fine. Thank you, Dixie.”
She shook her head. “I only hope it doesn’t upset them.”
“I think they might surprise you.”
“Come have supper with us tonight,” she said.
The heart in question did a little flip-flop. He hadn’t expected an invitation to supper. “I’d love to. What time?”
“About six. We eat early.”
“I’ll be there. Oh, does Pops know?”
“About you and your heart? Yes.”
Wade nodded. “Did he take it okay?”
She shrugged. “Better than I did. He agrees with you that Jimmy Don turned out to be a hero.” She started to say more, but Miguel returned just then with a tubful of dirty dishes.
Wade got the message. She didn’t want to talk in front of Miguel. He nodded toward the grill. “Is that burger about done?”
“Another minute or two. I’ll holler.”
“I’ll get back out there, then.”
She watched him walk out and wondered what other surprises he might throw at her before everything was said and done.
After work Wade showered and put on clean clothes, then killed a little time checking his e-mail. His mother was having a fit because he wasn’t home yet. His sisters appeared to love the extra work piled on them since his illness. His father pretended to be irritated at having to go to the office nearly every day again, but Wade knew the man welcomed the chance to get away from the house, i.e. “Mother,” as often as possible.
Wade knew his parents were not only deeply devoted to each other and in love, they were also crazy about each other. That did not mean, however, that Dad could hang around the house all day, as he’d done much of the time during the two years Wade had been running the corporation before his heart had decided to go on strike.
No, Mom kept a running list of projects that needed doing, and if someone was home, she considered them fair game. “If you’re going to be underfoot, dear, why don’t you take that box of clothes to the Goodwill,” or, “There’s a bag of canned goods on the kitchen counter that needs to go to the Food Pantry to help feel the homeless.” Or, “The dog needs to go to the groomer today. You wouldn’t mind taking him, would you? I thought not.”
Telling Mother “No” took great fortitude and an ironclad reason. She could shoot holes in anything a hapless spouse or child could think of. After all, as she was fond of reminding them, nothing was more important than keeping Mother happy.
And, oddly enough, that was the exact truth. All of them loved the little tyrant so much, they would do anything for her. If she knew that—and she did—she never used it against you. Much.
With his e-mail taken care of for the time being, and the hour still a little early to show up at Dixie’s, he decided to take a stroll down Main. There was something about Main Street in Tribute that appealed to him, especially around the town square. He liked the variety of shops and businesses, the friendliness of nearly everyone he passed on the sidewalk.
While he was out, maybe he would pick up some flowers for Dixie and a bottle of wine for dinner.
The five-o’clock rush hour in Tribute was naturally a far cry from the same event in Manhattan. Here traffic definitely picked up, but if there had ever been more than three cars per lane backed up at the town’s only traffic light, it had probably been the homecoming parade for the high school.
As for walking, people generally scratched their heads and offered him a ride. If you couldn’t park within twenty feet of the door to wherever you were going, the predominant course of action was to drive around the block a couple of times until a space opened up. And when you did park, it was usually an SUV or a pickup as opposed to an actual car.
As he approached the town square he eyed the gray granite courthouse on the south side, with its small, manicured park stretching out to form the center of the square, with a street on each of its other three sides. A wide sidewalk ran straight from the courthouse steps, all the way through the middle of the park to Main Street, opposite the courthouse.
A small sign at the curb proclaimed the green lawn as City Park. In the middle of the east side of the park stood a large monolith of dark granite. Wade had studied it up close. He’d stood back and watched as others approached it. Some walked away in tears, others with a sigh. On it were engraved the names of all the town’s war dead. The first listing was a man killed in 1889 in the Spanish-American War. The most recent, a woman in the Army National Guard killed in Iraq earlier this year.
There was a separate, smaller monument listing those who’d died in what the monument called the War Between the States. It was divided down the middle, one side for those who’d fought for the North, the other for Southerners.
Wade stood near the Civil War monument and glanced across the street toward the newspaper office. So Gray was going to sell out and retire? How interesting.
Glancing at his watch, he realized he’d killed a little more time than he’d meant to. He picked up his pace and bought a small bouquet of mixed flowers at the grocery store down the block. He decided against the wine. He would save that for a time when it would be only Dixie and himself. And that time would definitely come, he vowed. She was much too important to him; he couldn’t keep away from her for any length of time. Even if she wouldn’t go out with him, he would simply keep asking. She couldn’t say no forever, right?
But first he had to get through tonight, with the boys. He prayed to find the right words with which to tell them what their father meant to him.
It was disconcerting, Wade admitted silently, to find himself more nervous as he approached the McCormick house than he was that day a couple of weeks ago when he stood before Dixie’s Diner for the first time and wondered what he might find inside.
He’d found a whole new world. A minimum-wage job as dishwasher, he remembered with a smile. But before that he’d found a woman who captured his mind and, it seemed, his heart. He’d found a friend in Pops. He’d found two young boys who very soon had come to mean the world to him. He’d found a community that fascinated him, called to something inside him, made him feel welcome and at home.
Now if he didn’t find the right words for what he had to say, he could hurt Ben and Tate, and that was absolutely the last thing on earth he wanted to do. So, please God, let the right words be there for him.
He started up Dixie’s street, and there they were, those two bright, happy, fun boys of hers, running toward him as if he was their best friend in the world and they hadn’t seen him in years.
It had been two hours.
“Wade! Wade!”
“Mom says you’re coming for supper.”
“Flowers? What’re those for?” Ben asked.
Tate jabbed his older brother in the ribs with his elbow. “That’s what guys do, they bring flowers to the lady when they have supper.”
“What do you know.” Ben shoved Tate away.
“Do you know what etiquette is?” Wade asked.
Dancing around and beside him as he walked up the street, the boys snorted and giggled.
“That’s like, Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Ben said.
“Yeah, and saying please and thank you,” Tate added.
“That’s right,” Wade said. “It also means that when a lady invites you to dinner in her home, you should take her a hostess gift. I decided on flowers. You think she’ll like them?” He held them out for inspection.
Both boys shrugged. “Sure,” Tate said.
“Prob’ly,” Ben decided. “Girls like junk like flowers.”
Junk. Wade smiled.
Ben and Tate marched him up the steps and through the front door.
“Mom!” Ben yelled.
“Wade’s here!” Tate hollered.
Wade pursed his lips as Dixie stuck her head around the corner from the kitchen. “You don’t have to yell. I’m right here. Hi, Wade. Glad you could make it.”
“He brought flowers.” Ben didn’t sound any too impressed with the idea.
“Thank you,” Dixie told Wade. “They’re beautiful. Let me put them in water. Boys, go tell Pops it’s time to eat. Help him get over here if he needs it. Then wash up. Supper’s ready.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison.
As they raced past her for the back door, she shook her head. “I won’t throw your food out if you walk,” she called.
They didn’t slow down until they hit the door of Pops’s apartment.
Wade studied Dixie as she stared out the window into her backyard. He didn’t know how to ask what he wanted to know, so he asked something else. “Are you going to be okay with Miguel?”
She glanced at him a moment, then took a vase from a cabinet and filled it with water. “You’re really not coming back?” She took her time arranging the flowers in the vase.
“I can’t justify taking a job somebody else needs, when I don’t need the money.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right. Stupid question. I forgot you’re rich. Here come Pops and the boys.” She moved to the stove and took the lid off a pan of spaghetti sauce.
The spicy aroma made Wade’s mouth water. “Smells great.”
“It’s Pops’s recipe. When the chamber of commerce meets for lunch once a month in the banquet room, this is what they order.”
“Heck of a recommendation—the entire chamber of commerce. By the way,” he added, hearing the boys and Pops near the back door. “If Pops needs to stay home for another day or two, I can wait tables again. I’m getting pretty good at it.”
“Maybe if we put a sign out front—‘come in and be served by one of the country’s richest, most eligible bachelors’—we’d fill the place up.” Her tone was snappish and biting.
“I’m not going to apologize for being rich, Dixie. Some of it I inherited, some of it I earned. Either way, I find it a source of pride, not shame. I’m sorry it upsets you.”
Her shoulders slumped. “No, I’m sorry. It’s silly of me. I just had this nice little fantasy going on in my head—”
He grinned. “You’ve been fantasizing about me?”
“—and now I find out you’re a different person.”
“I’m not. I’m the same man I was last week, Dixie. My money and my new heart don’t change who I am inside. What’s changed is your perception of me.”
Dixie knew she was procrastinating when she made the boys wipe down the counters and the table a second time. The dishes were in the dishwasher, ready to be washed. She didn’t run the machine until bedtime, because it was hard to hear the television over the noise. Everything else was neater than usual.
“C’mon, Mom, are we through?”
“All right,” she said with a sigh. “Let’s go to the living room.”
“Awright!” The boys slapped hands, then bumped butts. Then raced the entire five feet to the living room.
With another sigh, Dixie followed at a much more sedate pace. She pulled the boys with her to the sofa and sat down between them so the three of them faced Wade in the easy chair and Pops in the recliner. “Wade has something he wants to talk to you guys about. Pops, are you sticking around for this?”
“Thought I would, if Wade doesn’t mind.”
“Mind? I’d be relieved.”
Pops nodded in acknowledgment.
“What do you wanna talk to us about, Wade? Little League?”
“No, silly.” Ben reached around Dixie and gave Tate a disdainful shove. “He’s going to tell us he’s leaving.”
“What makes you say a thing like that?” Dixie demanded, stunned.
Ben shrugged and studied the toe of his sneaker. “What else you gonna do when Pops goes back, fire Miguel? I’m not dumb, you know.”
“No.” Dixie wrapped her arm around him and kissed the top of his head. “No, you’re not dumb.” She pulled Tate to her with the other arm and kissed him, too. “Neither are you. You’re both pretty darn smart. Now let’s be quiet and listen to what Wade has to say.”
They looked over at Wade expectantly.
Wade wiped his damp palms along the thighs of his jeans. “First, I’m not leaving town. At least, not right away. But you’re right about Miguel. If he works out, he needs the job a lot worse than I do. You see, I don’t need the money at all. I’ve got enough money without having to work.”
“Are you rich?” Tate asked.
“Yes. I’m what most people consider rich.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell us?” Ben asked.
“No, not really. But I did want you to know that. Not because I like to brag about being rich, but because you might hear it from somebody else in town, and I’d rather you hear it from me first. Are you okay with it?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you,” Wade told them. “There’s something important I need to explain to you, but I’m not sure exactly how to make you understand, because it’s pretty complicated.”
Wade thought for a moment, then looked at the boys. “Have you two ever had a dog?”
“Yeah. His name was Tippy,” Ben said.
“He got hit by a car and died,” Tate added.
“I’m sorry. That’s tough. You must have been pretty sad.”
“We had a funeral and everything.”
“I’ll bet Tippy appreciated that.”
The boys shrugged and looked down at their feet.
It was all Wade could do to keep his hands and voice steady. He didn’t want to screw this up. He had to make them understand, and he wanted, desperately, for them to accept him as readily after he explained as they had before.
“How would you have felt,” he said, “if, when Tippy got hit by that car, there was another dog, on the other side of town, who was very sick. His heart was failing him, even though he wasn’t very old. He was so sick that the vet said that if he didn’t get a new heart, the poor pup wouldn’t last the night. And what if they could do dogs like they do people—they could do organ transplants. What would you think if they wanted to take Tippy’s heart, because Tippy’s not using it anymore, and put it in this sick dog across town? Would that be okay with you?”
Tate shrugged and grimaced. “I dunno. I guess.”
Ben looked thoughtful. “Would we get to watch?”
Leave it to boys, Wade thought wryly. “I don’t know. I don’t think they let spectators in the operating rooms. You know, because of germs.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Ben said.
Tate still seemed to be having trouble with the idea.
“What if I told you that Tippy had signed a donor card before he died, saying he wanted his organs to go to other dogs when he died.”
“Dogs?” Ben asked. “More than one?”
“Well, a dog’s got lots of organs, just like a person. There’s a heart, lungs, two kidneys, a liver.”
Tate perked up. “Eyeballs?”
“Why not?” Wade said.
“What about the tongue? Would they want Tippy’s tongue?”
Wade smiled at Tate’s sudden enthusiasm. “I don’t know. It would depend on whether or not another dog needed a new one, I guess. Would all that be all right with you guys?”
“Sure,” Tate said.
“It’s the same as organ donation in people, right?”
“You know about that?” Wade asked. “About people donating their organs when they die?”
“Sure,” Ben said.
Dixie ran her fingers through Ben’s hair. “Where did you learn about organ transplants, honey?”
“I dunno.” Ben shrugged and flopped his hands out. “School. We talked about it a lot last year when the teacher’s daddy had a kidney transplant up in Dallas.”
“How about you?” Dixie asked Tate. “Did you talk about this at school, too?”
“Sure,” he said with a shrug. “But that was about people. We didn’t talk about dogs.”
“Okay, wise guy,” Dixie said to Wade with a smile. “Now you have to turn it around.”
“I’ve got it,” he told her. “Would it surprise you boys to know that your dad was an organ donor?”
“Our dad?” Ben asked.
“Really?” Tate asked.
“Really,” Wade answered.
Ben turned his head slightly and peered at Wade out of one eye for a long moment. He crossed his arms and leaned back, still eyeing Wade thoughtfully. “How come you know about our dad?”
“Because when your dad died, I was like that sick dog across town. My heart was quitting. I’d been in the hospital in New York City for weeks. They told me I had to have a new heart or I was going to die. It got really bad. A couple of hearts became available, but they didn’t match with me, so they went to someone else who needed a heart. Lots and lots of people need new organs, and not very many people donate their organs.”
“You got our dad’s heart?” Ben asked.
“I did, Ben. I was dying. They told me if I lived through the night it would be a miracle. My mom and dad and sisters were all there in my hospital room, praying for a miracle. And then a terrible thing happened. Your dad got hit by that cab in New York, and he died. I know that made all of you very sad, because you loved him very much, and he loved you.”
“I cried,” Ben said, hanging his head.
“We all did, honey.” Dixie hugged him to her side. “We all cried, for days and days, because we missed him and didn’t want him to die.”
Tate sniffed. “So they, like, put his heart in you and made it start beating again?”
“That’s exactly what they did, Tate. It saved my life. And I want you to know, I want all of you to know, how grateful I am that he was brave enough to sign that donor card and have it marked on his driver’s license. He was a brave, brave man, your dad was. A generous man, and I know he loved the two of you more than anything in the world.”
“Did it hurt?” Ben asked.
“Did what hurt?” Dixie asked.
“The what-do-you-call-it, the transplant. Did it hurt?”
“I was pretty sore for several days after the surgery, but they knocked me out for the operation, so I never knew.”
“Jerry Beaver had his appendix out and he’s got a cool scar. Do you have a scar?” Tate asked.
Wade smiled slightly. “I do, and it’s a doozie. Runs from my neck to my navel.”
Both boys’ eyes widened with awe.
“Wow,” Tate said with what sounded a great deal like reverence. “Can we see?”
“Tate, what a question,” Dixie protested.
Wade winked at Tate. “Girls get squeamish about that sort of thing. Maybe I’ll show you sometime when there are no girls around.”
“So,” Pops said easily, “you’ve got Jimmy Don’s heart beating right there in your chest.”
“That’s right,” Wade said. “How do you feel about that, Pops?”
“I think it’s a miracle that part of my grandson is alive and beating long after he’s gone. I’m proud that he was able to save your life that way.”
Wade felt a lump the size of a golf ball rise in his throat. “Thanks, Pops. That means a lot to me.” He looked over at the boys, one on each side of their mother. He looked at their mother. “It would mean even more if the rest of you felt that way, because I’ve got to tell you, as far as I’m concerned, boys, your dad is the biggest hero I’ve ever known.”
Their eyes got big and round.
Tate swallowed and looked up at his mom. “A hero? Our dad’s a hero?”
“Well,” she said, putting her arm around him, “he saved Wade’s life, and probably several other lives, too. I guess that makes him the best kind of hero, don’t you think?”
“Golly.” Ben couldn’t seem to take his eyes off Wade. Then he blinked and looked up at Dixie. “Does that mean his name will go on the monument at city hall?”
Wade’s heart gave a little thump inside his chest.
“Naw, son,” Pops said. “That’s for people who got killed in wars.”
Ben frowned. “That doesn’t seem right. A hero’s a hero, isn’t he? How come some of ’em get a monument and some don’t?”
“I don’t know,” Pops said. “That’s just the way it is.”
“Don’t you worry,” Wade told Ben. “We’ll figure out some way to make sure everyone knows what a hero your dad was. That’s why I came to town in the first place. To make sure my heart donor’s sons were all right, and to make sure his hometown knew what a good man he was.”
“Golly,” Ben said again.
“Well,” Dixie said to the room in general. “Wade’s given us all a lot to think about, hasn’t he. But right now it’s bath time for you two. Say good night to Wade.”
The boys wanted to argue, but Dixie was having none of it. She stood firm and in a few moments had them headed for the bathroom.
“Good night, Wade,” they said together.
Ben paused behind his brother. “Wade? I’m glad you didn’t die. I’m glad our dad’s heart saved you.”
Wade’s vision blurred. “Me, too, Ben. Thanks.”
“Come on, boys,” Dixie ordered from the doorway to the hall. “Let’s go.”
Wade slumped back in his chair and watched them disappear down the hall. A minute later he heard bathwater running.
He was so relieved to have that discussion behind him, he felt weak with it.
“You handled that real good,” Pops said.
“Thanks. I’ve faced angry shareholders, irate employees and mutinous boards of directors, and none of them were as scary as this was.”
Pops chuckled. “Yep, kids can be tough. But these two do all right.”
“They’re the most well-adjusted kids I’ve ever seen. You and Dixie, and I guess their dad before he died, have definitely been doing something right.”
“It’s Dixie more than me, and damn sure more than Jimmy Don. He was my grandson and I loved him to pieces, but about the only things he taught those boys was how to ride a horse and how to lie around on the couch and watch TV. And he went and sold their horse to pay his entry fee in a rodeo up in Kansas. Broke their little hearts, he did. But he loved them. And he loved that girl in there, too. He just didn’t know how to be a husband or a daddy. Hell, I don’t think he ever figured out how to be a grown-up. But I guess you don’t need to hear about all his flaws.”
“Not really.” Wade smiled. “He did all right by me. That’s all I care about.”
“You gonna leave town, now that you’ve come clean about who you are?”
Wade leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know.”
“You want some advice from an old codger who never learned how to mind his own business?”
“I don’t know about that, but I’d take advice from you any day of the week.”
Pops chuckled. “I’d say if a man had leanings toward a certain woman, he ought to ask himself, is there anything better than this waiting back home for me? Forget the job, forget all them damn directors and employees. None of them can keep a man warm at night or sit beside him when he’s old. This is a good town. Or, if it came down to it, probably wouldn’t hurt a certain woman and her boys to see a bit of the world, maybe move to New York.”
Wade closed his eyes briefly. “Are you giving me your blessing, Pops?”
“I would never do such a thing. I’m just saying, is all.”
“Thank you, Pops. Thank you. But I’m not sure the woman in question wants what you and I might want. She was none too happy to find out who I really am. It could be that she’s hoping to see the last of me.”
“Well now, that’s your job, boy. You’re supposed to convince her she can’t live without you.”