Ty nodded. “I can be here every day at seven.”
Lacy relayed that, and then her hands continued moving. Mitch shook his head, signed some more, and they seemed to enter a silent staring contest for a moment.
Lacy finally turned to him. “It’s not every day. Just Monday through Friday.” She cut a quick look at Mitch, who gestured forher to go on. “He might want to do video calls with you, and he’ll assess your dog alongside his. He’ll essentially train you as you train the dog, and everybody will learn together.”
Mitch seemed stern, but Ty didn’t mind that. He was used to strict rules, respecting animals, and being as responsible as possible. In the rodeo, he’d had a team relying on him to be at the top of his game, on time, and open to coaching.
“I really appreciate it. This feels like the right thing for me to be doing right now.”
Lacy relayed the message, and Mitch’s smile burst onto his face. He stepped forward, shook Ty’s hand, and said one more thing to Lacy before folding his arms.
“He says he’s glad you’re all-in,” she said. “I’ve got the contract in my office over at the Academy.” She folded her arms too. “But it’s a conditional position.”
Ty frowned and practically growled, “Conditional on what?”
“You have to enroll in our beginningandintermediate sign language classes,” Lacy said. “The beginning classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Intermediate classes on Wednesdays and Fridays. So you’ll need to be here those evenings from five to seven-thirty.”
Ty really didn’t like being told what to do, though he’d followed plenty of rules in his life. He looked down at the six dogs surrounding Mitch, then over to the one still perfectly obedient to Jacob, panting at his side while this conversation happened.
A sigh moved through his whole body, and he shifted his weight from being on both his feet to just his right. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll enroll in both classes.”
Lacy smiled broadly and relayed the message to Mitch, who also grinned. “Great. I have all the paperwork for both classes—and your new job—in my office.” She tipped up on her toes andswept her lips along Mitch’s cheek. She said a few more things to him, and then gestured for Ty to follow her.
“Good news is, there’s no more steps, and you can come back out here and observe Mitch and Jacob for the rest of their training session once we have the paperwork done.”
“Great,” Ty said, and he nodded to Mitch, then tipped his hat to Jacob before turning to go with Lacy.
He’d spoken true. This did feel right, even if he suddenly had to make the hour and twenty-minute drive twice a day.
He hadn’t exactly told his parents about this, but he would. They’d support him, because he’d be getting out and living again, something he knew they whispered about when they thought he couldn’t hear them.
He’d talk to Pete and Paul too, and everyone would adjust schedules for him so that he could do this, still be out at Three Rivers working with horses, and then get to his sign language classes.
Ty had never thought his life would include him training hearing dogs after a significant, career-ending injury, but for the first time since he’d woken up in that hospital bed, with half his body shattered and the only life he’d known gone….
He finally felt like his life had a purpose again.
34
Brandon’s phone rang as he finished setting another post in the row that would become the goat enclosure. He’d need to rent an excavator or skid steer again to move the rocks he wanted in this enclosure, because he wanted to house goats here so Lenny could get milk and possibly even cheese to sell in her online store.
They’d been brainstorming that idea for a couple of weeks now, ever since she’d told him that she wanted to sell some of the goods her land produced. They’d done a video call with Callie Walker, who’d been raising bees for decades, and she told them that it was quite easy to get hives and that they should be producing by autumn. Maybe not enough to sell, but for sure by the second year.
That kind of information fit so well with Lenny’s future-forward thinking, and she’d been thrilled with the idea of bees. “They take up hardly any room,” she’d said after the call. “And if we can get six or seven functioning hives, we could produce three or four hundred pounds of honey per year.”
Lenny’s chickens loved the mobile mini coops, and she rotated them every handful of days so they all got to free-range. Her strawberries had been growing nicely, and she wanted toplant five acres of pumpkins in the spring to be able to sell those next fall as well.
Brandon admired her long-term vision, and he’d been steadily working on getting two more enclosures done—one for goats and one for turkeys—and he’d started mapping out the cold storage unit that he wanted to put on the north side of her house. He’d thought about a storm shelter as well, and he thought those two things could probably go together.
“That also needs an excavator,” he muttered to himself as his phone stopped ringing.
He’d barely had time to breathe before it started up again, and Brandon pulled one glove off and his phone out of his back pocket to see his brother’s name there. His heartbeat swooped and skipped, and he swiped to answer the call quickly.
“Dawson? What’s going on?”
“Caroline just went into labor,” Dawson said, his voice intense and clipped. “I know you’re really far away, so I just ran the kids down to Link’s, and we’re coming off Shiloh Ridge right now.”
He didn’t ask if Brandon could come. Brandon had already volunteered to come take care of Colt and Joy when Caroline had her new baby.
