Cover Of Night

Sherry poked her head out of the kitchen door. "All through in here. I’ll see you in the morning. Hope your mom gets here okay."

"Thanks. I do, too; she’ll never let me hear the end of it if she has car trouble or something."

Trail Stop was so remote that there was no easy way to get there, no nearby airports for commercial flights, and only one road in. Because her mother hated the small propeller planes she could have flown on to get closer, and because renting any sort of vehicle at their tiny landing strip was almost "mission impossible," she chose to fly into Boise, where she knew there would be rentals available. That made for a long drive and yet another sore point with her concerning Gate’s chosen home. She didn’t like having her daughter and grandsons living in another state, she didn’t like Idaho – give her a metropolitan area over a rural one any day – and she didn’t like the inordinate trouble it took her to visit. She didn’t like it that Cate had bought a B and B, which meant she seldom had any free time; in fact, Cate had visited her parents only once since buying the B and B.

All of those were valid points. Cate admitted it, and had even told her mother so. She herself would have preferred to stay in Seattle, if she’d had a choice.

But she hadn’t, so she’d done what she’d thought was best for the twins. When Derek died, leaving her with nine-month-old twins, not only had she been devastated by losing him, she had been forced to face reality about their finances. Their combined incomes had provided a good living, but Cate had gone to part-time when the boys were born and most of her work she’d done from home. With Derek gone, she had to work full-time, but the cost of quality day care for the boys had been prohibitive. It almost didn’t pay for her to work. Her mother couldn’t, help with their care, because she worked, too.

They had savings, and Derek had purchased a hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy, intending to add to it as his income increased. They’d thought they had all the time in the world. Who could have anticipated a healthy, thirty-year-old man dying from a staph infection that attacked his heart? He’d gone rock climbing for the first time since the twins were born, scraped his leg, and the doctors said the bacteria had likely entered his body through the small wound. Roughly thirty percent of people carry the bacteria on their skin, they’d explained, and normally have no problems. But sometimes a break in the skin allowed infection to start, and maybe for some reason the immune system was temporarily depressed, say from stress, and the infection would roar through the body despite all efforts to stop it.

The how and why mattered, on an intellectual level, but emotionally all she knew was that she was suddenly a twenty-nine-year-old widow with two baby boys to care for. From there on out, all of her decisions had to be made with them in mind.

With their savings and the insurance money, and careful budgeting, she could have remained in Seattle, close to both her family and her in-laws. But there would have been nothing left over to pay for the twins’ college education, plus she would have had to work such long hours she wouldn’t have seen much of her own children. She’d gone over and over her options with her accountant, and the most logical plan he could devise was to move to an area with a lower cost of living.

She had been familiar with this area of Idaho, in the Bitter-roots. One of Derek’s college buddies had grown up here, and told him the rock climbing was great. He and Derek had spent a lot of Weekends climbing. Then when she and Derek met at climbing club and began dating, it was only natural she would join the weekend climbs. She loved the area, its ruggedness, the staggeringly beautiful scenery, the peacefulness. She and Derek had stayed at the B and B she now owned, so she had even been familiar with the place. The former owner, old Mrs. Weiskopf, had been struggling to take care of it, so when Cate decided to go into the inn business and made an offer, the old lady had jumped at it and now lived in Pocatello with her son and his wife.

The cost of living in Trail Stop was certainly lower, and from the sale of their condo Cate had made a tidy profit, which she promptly set aside in the boys’ college funds. She was determined not to touch that money unless it was a matter of life or death – theirs. She lived completely on the proceeds from the B and B. which didn’t allow much room for extras. But the morning food business gave her a little leeway, if nothing went wrong and she had no unexpected expenses, such as this morning’s plumbing emergency. Thank God it had been so minor – and thank God Mr. Harris had refused payment.

There were pros and cons to the life she’d chosen for herself and the boys. One of the pros, the biggest one, was that the boys were with her all day, even’ day. Their young lives were as stable as she could possibly make them, with the result that they were happy and healthy, and that was enough to keep her there. Another pro was that she liked being her own boss. She liked what she was doing, liked cooking, liked the people in the community. They were just people, maybe more independent-minded than their metropolitan counterparts, but with quirks, strengths, and weaknesses like everyone else. The air was clear and clean, and the boys were perfectly safe playing outside.

One of the items in the con column was the area’s remoteness. There was no cell phone service, no DSL. for the computer. Television was a satellite system, which meant a heavily snow-blocked reception. There was no such thing as a quick trip to the grocery to pick up a few items; grocery shopping involved a one-hour trip each way, so she made the journey every other week and bought mountains of supplies. The boys’ doctor was also an hour away. When they started school, she would have to make that drive twice a day, live days a week, which meant she’d have to hire help. Even collecting the mail took effort. There was a long line of rural mail boxes down at the main road, more than ten miles distant. Anyone heading that way was obliged to take the community’s outgoing mail and bring back whatever had been delivered – which meant keeping a supply of rubber bands handy to keep each person’s mail separated from the others – and then deliver it to the recipients.