Redwood Bend

I can drop the boys at summer school for you. Will you promise not to go a round with the bear while I’m gone?”
“Promise,” she said.
Mitch came flying out the door, eyes wide, Andy on his heels. “Whoa!” he said. “How long have they been there?”
“A few minutes,” Dylan said. “Come here, let me tell you about my horses. I have two—did you know that? And a few cows.”
“And a bull and chickens,” Andy added.
“And goats and a couple of barn dogs,” Dylan said. “It’s a lot like this place, except I live in a valley and look out at the mountains instead of living in the mountains and looking down at the valley....” And by the time he was telling them about blizzards in Montana he had one twin on each knee.
And he knew exactly what he had to do.
Dylan hadn’t been to his grassy hill alone since leaving those texts that he’d be out of touch for a while. He turned on the phone somewhat reluctantly and saw what he expected—a ton of voice mails, emails and texts. Of course there were quite a few from Hollywood and while he was curious, he didn’t want to waste a lot of time going through them.
He called the one person who hadn’t left him a ton of messages.
“Yo,” Lang answered.
“Hey. You real busy?” Dylan asked.
Lang laughed. “You have reached Childress Aviation—busy is the one thing we’re not. What’s on your mind? Take your time.”
That made him wince, that the company was far from busy. But he pushed through the worry. “I haven’t told you anything about Katie Malone,” he said to his best friend. “You probably saw the kids in the car when we stopped to change her flat—twins. Five-year-old twin boys.”
Lang groaned. “You know, that’s one thing I’ve always been grateful for—that we had ours one at a time. They’re hard enough that way.”
“She had them and raised them almost entirely alone. Well, her brother has always supported her where he could—good male role model for a couple of little boys. Her husband was killed in the war before they were born. He was a highly decorated Green Beret, a hero, a Medal of Honor recipient.”
Lang just whistled.
“I said something about how hard that must have been to bury her husband while her twins were about to pop,” Dylan said. “And I asked her if she had any regrets about falling for this risk-taking soldier and you know what she said, man? She said she was grateful for every second.”
Lang was quiet for a moment before he said, “So, you found her. The one.”
“I found her. There is no one like her in the world. And she’s pregnant.”
There was a chuckle that came all the way from Montana. “You always did get ahead of yourself.”
“I have a lot to prove,” Dylan said. “You probably know this already, but I don’t have one freaking medal to my name. I have a lot to prove to her. To myself.”
“It’s going to come naturally, you’ll see.”
“The boys have never been on a horse or in a small plane. They’ve never reached under a hen for an egg, and they don’t know what a blizzard is.”
“I can’t count the number of times I wished I didn’t know what a blizzard was. They make me wonder how you talked me into this place,” Lang said.
“And times like spring in the mountains when you thank me. We have to flip for who gets to chase wildlife off the runway, it’s so much fun. I’ve heard you say you’d never raise your family anywhere else.”
“That’s what the snowplow is for, chasing the wildlife. Those twins ever ride in a snowplow and chase a big, mean old moose off a runway so a plane can land?”
Dylan laughed. “I think that’s a no. Here’s what I want to do. I want to bring them to Payne, just to show them where we live. How we live. I want them all to know what it’s like there because when a woman with kids is having your baby, you don’t ask one person to marry you—you ask a family to marry you. But here’s the thing you need to know up front—if she can’t see her way to living in Payne, I’ll live wherever she lives.”
“Absolutely,” Lang said.
“She might just say no to everything,” Dylan said. “If she does, then I pull up stakes and live wherever she lives because…” He let his voice trail off.
“Because you’re going to have to be a part of that.” Lang finished that sentence for Dylan.
“Yep. That’s how it is,” Dylan repeated. “That puts our company kind of up in the air, ha-ha. But first things first.”
“Want me to