Brad had explained who he was and gave her the approximate time of his arrival in Glenwood Springs and for his family to expect a guest as well.

“Okay, got it,” the girl said and hung up.

Apparently the girl hadn’t got it, or hadn’t bothered to give it to Jared, Brad thought irritably. Damn her! Now they’d have to find a ride into Meeker with no idea of the address of the new house. He’d have to settle for being dropped off at the lumberyard. Some homecoming! Dusk had fallen along with the temperature. They were hungry and thirsty, and Wilhelm was shivering in his thin jacket.

Brad picked him up and wrapped him in his arms. The stationmaster obliged his request for a ride by conscripting his nephew to take him to Cramer’s Lumber Yard.

“Looks like nobody’s here,” Brad said as they climbed out into an eerily quiet yard loaded with bundles of cut and processed timber. Where was everybody? It was a weekday, but not a soul was about. Even the saws were silent, and the office building looked deserted, not a light burning through the windows.

Wilhelm was shivering again, but not only from the cold. “Come on, Wilhelm,” Brad said, starting toward the office building. “Let’s go see what’s going on.”

He found the door unlocked and pushed it open. Immediately the room was flooded with light, and waves of warmth and the aroma of coffee and savory-smelling food rolled out to greet them as a chorus of “Welcome home, Brad and Wilhelm!” rang out. Brad stood dumbfounded until his mother and sister, Bobby and Margie, and Jared Cramer threw arms around him and Wilhelm, and the entire lumberyard crew surged forth to hug them. Only the girl that Brad guessed had taken his telephone message, pretty as a mountain peony, as it turned out, remained under the large WELCOME HOME banner, but her smile told Brad that her dumb-secretary act had been part of the conspiracy to spring the surprise on him.

Later, when the ballyhoo was all over, his mother explained that a State Department official had told her to expect him and Wilhelm at any time, so she’d had Laura, Jared’s new secretary, alert them when he telephoned because it made sense that he’d contact the yard.

Brad could not have had a more moving homecoming. His family, with Jared now at the head of it, had kept a place waiting for him in the spacious new house. They’d set aside a bedroom for him, incorporating his things from the old house into the new furnishings. True Blue was in the garage, some of its parts and all its wheels replaced with new ones. A chair in which no one had ever sat was reserved for him at the kitchen table.