Creighton's Hideaway by LoRee Peery

gravelly laugh before he finished. “Can’t help but notice such a good-lookin’ filly.”
    “There is more to Shana than her looks, Rog. She’s stressed. She’s probably in financial trouble. And that raises my protective instincts. She means a lot to Rita and you know how I love Rita. Shana’s a savvy career woman. A city woman. I doubt she even owns a pair of jeans.” He stared off into the distance.
    “You’re sold on her all right.” Roger took off his hat and slapped it against his thigh before he returned the dusty protection to his head.
    Creighton lowered his eyes and watched the tail end of a striped ground squirrel disappear in the dirt. Then in frustration, he scrubbed his hands over his face. “That’s why it won’t work. She’ll go back to her job in Lincoln. And the big difference between us, she doesn’t believe in God. According to the Bible, I can’t get mixed up with her.”
    Roger pushed up the bill of his sweat-stained hat, scratched his hairline, set the hat back in place, and studied Creighton from beneath the rim. “I’m not book educated, but I’d say you’re already mixed up with her.”
    That’s the truth .
    “But what do I have to give her? There’s always the possibility that I’ll end up a mean old drunk like my old man. I don’t have a steady income. I’m moody.”
    “Aw shucks, I just realized I forgot my violin,” Roger interrupted with a mime to go along with his words. “OK, I agree that you’re moody. But I would imagine that she can make you laugh. You kept up your real estate license, right?”
    Creighton nodded.
    “There you go. You have a resource if you need to make money. Put that faith of yours into practice and go with the flow. Be honest with yourself. Do you think it’s a mistake that she’s here on the ranch?” The more he talked, the rougher Roger’s voice rasped.
    “You’ve given me something to think about, pal. Now I better take it all to the Lord.” Creighton rubbed the back of his neck, feigned a punch at Roger. “Mind if I ride along with you for a while?”
    “Glad to have the company. Just don’t ruin my tunes by singing along.” Roger spoke the last five words as notes to an unnamed song.
    “If you’d ever get with the program and play country tunes, I’d know ‘em all so I wouldn’t spoil your precious rock ‘n roll,” Creighton jibed.
    He pushed Shana to the back of his mind, with the certainty she would stay in his thoughts much longer than she’d be on the ranch.
     
     
     
     

8
     
    Shana organized her notes, selected the best parts of her interviews, and cut and pasted text for two hours without leaving her chair. She stood and stretched and rolled kinked muscles then searched for a diversion from the bookcase. As much as she treasured her old classics, she found her mind too scattered to get into any fictional muddled shenanigans.
    A Nebraska magazine with a wooly bison on the cover slid from the stack so she took it outside. She looked up from the deck bench and scanned the skies. Still gray. A glance back down at her book page revealed the tiniest movement. Shana soon became enthralled by a tiny white spider. Its clam-shaped claws grew larger than its body. Against the white of the page, the spider looked yellow. She watched the creature crawl to the edge of the page and then disappear on its web.
    What would it be like to disappear on a web like that? She slammed the magazine closed. Maybe I have disappeared for a while, here in Creighton’s hideaway.
    She slid to the side of the narrow bench in search of the elusive golden spider, and shivered. A premonition crawled down her spine. The old cliché, “someone walking on my grave,” held new meaning.
    “A life chapter. Is that what I’m going through here?” Saying it out loud made it a transition of sorts.
    The sky may have been gray, but the earth was too full of color for her to lose herself in mental blues. There was nothing wrong with this