“All finished. Everything with four legs has been fed and watered. Horses are all exercised, and even Haskell’s dog and cat are fed. His niece is over there now. She can take care of Hooter and Blister from now on.” He turned up the bottle and downed a fourth of it before coming up for air and a loud burp.

Dewar plopped down on the porch step beside Raylen. “Is she going to keep the place, or do you have a chance at buying it?”

“She says she’s going to keep it. I asked her what she was going to do to make a living in Ringgold, Texas, and she said she was going to feed the dog and pet the cat. If Haskell is giving her all of his money as well as those twenty acres, she won’t have to do anything but feed a dog and pet a cat.”

“What’s she look like?”

“Damn fine. She’s got jet-black hair and the darkest brown eyes you’ve ever seen.”

“You took with her?”

“Not me. That could be a big problem if things don’t go right, what with us being neighbors and all,” Raylen answered.

***

Liz stood in the middle of the living room floor and turned around slowly. The room was bigger than the fifth-wheel travel trailer where she’d lived her entire life. A fireplace with a real chimney was centered on the north end with a stone apron in the front. Two brown leather recliners flanked the sofa. The coffee table sat on a real cowhide area rug. A wheeled cart on the east side of the fireplace held a small television set, and as if something had to be used to balance the arrangement, a ladder-back chair was on the other side with a pot of silk greenery on it. That whole arrangement scarcely took up half of the big room.

The south end was covered with empty bookcases, floor to ceiling. Uncle Haskell had said that she’d have to start her own collection because he was taking all his beloved Westerns with him. Another sofa faced the bookcase. That one was orange and yellow floral velvet, had deep cushions and big round arms that begged for someone to settle in with a good book. A wagon wheel chandelier hung in the middle of the room over a library table with a set of horse head bookends and a well-worn Webster’s Dictionary in the middle. An antique oak business chair was set at an angle as if waiting for Uncle Haskell to come back and look up a word.

It wouldn’t take a lot of rearranging to give the room a more open and less cut-up look. Take the table and put it in front of the bookcases. Move the floral sofa under the window to the east and angle the fireplace arrangement.

“Oh, oh! And a Christmas tree right there with lots of presents under it, and garland looped around the ceiling caught up with Christmas bulbs. And cedar boughs strewn on the mantel with a nativity scene in the middle.” Liz talked to the dog and imagined just how things would look.