Redwood Bend (Virgin River #18)(7)

“Bean soup?” Stu said under his breath.

“Didn’t you hear the man? You gotta trust Preacher,” Dylan said. Then he laughed. “My grandmother practically raised me on bean soup. Not the kind we’re getting here, she could barely open a can. All she could do was scramble eggs, make toast, warm up soup and…” He laughed and shook his head. “She used to fry hot dogs, but she always bought all-beef so I’d have protein.”

“You had a very strange childhood.”

“You have no idea,” he said.

When Dylan said his grandmother practically raised him on that soup, he wasn’t talking about his early childhood, but much later, when she brought him to Montana to take over parenting him. She must have had nerves of steel to do that; he was a screwed up, spoiled, arrogant, defiant fifteen-year-old boy. Not just a challenging teenager, but a star. How she pulled him through to normalcy was one of the great mysteries of the universe.

Sometimes he felt like a Charles Dickens novel—the best of times, the worst of times.... Being yanked out of his acting role and badass public life and carted off to some one-horse town in Montana, he thought he’d reached hell. On the other hand, someone finally cared about him. Focused on him. Worried about him. The first time Adele had given him bean soup, he spat it out, outraged. He’d been used to the very best; people had scrambled to keep him happy because if he was happy, they made money.

It had been years before he realized that Adele didn’t exactly have a passion for bean soup or fried hot dogs, either. She’d been a megastar all her adult life and knew all about ass**le child stars. And then he also realized she fed him bean soup every day until he finally thanked her for it.

“This is probably the best soup I’ve ever had,” Dylan told Jack.

“I know. When someone around here caps a pig, or any other livestock for that matter, a lot of it goes to the clinic where my wife, the town midwife, works. We have a doc over there, too, but Mel, my wife, she usually brings her share to Preacher, since she can’t cook worth crap and I feed my family here. It’s usually a patient fee or an advance on a future patient fee—we have an interesting insurance system around here. People who need the doc and Mel—they make sure to share the wealth regularly. So Preacher, the second he sees something come into the bar, he starts thinking about how he can stretch it, what he can do with it. He has a lot of people he wants to take care of. He doesn’t sleep at night until he has the best result imaginable. Mel might be the best thing that ever happened to me, but Preacher’s gotta run a close second. He’s the guy who makes this work.”

“Is this your hometown?” Dylan asked.

“Nah, I’m a city boy, more or less. I needed something quiet after twenty in the Marines.”

“You go to war?”

“Almost habitually,” Jack said. “A few of the men I served with decided to settle here. You from Sacramento?”

Dylan shook his head. “Little town up north—Payne, Montana.”

“How’d you hook up with Walt?” Jack wanted to know.

“Walt came through Montana and we met there. He was on some kind of solitary road trip, touring the U.S., and Montana is one of the most beautiful parts, so I took him into the mountains. We outran a moose once.”

“Don’t ever get the idea a moose is cute,” Walt said. “That sucker didn’t like me. Then Dylan took me into the air in his little plane,” Walt said. “I’ve been promising to show ’em my state ever since.”

“We were looking for someone to put together a road trip that would take us some interesting places we hadn’t seen, and by interesting I mean, off the grid. With some views.”

“Well, you got views, interesting and off the grid,” Jack confirmed. “So, what does a man do in Payne, Montana?”

That brought an automatic smile as he remembered Adele on the phone to a Realtor when she was hauling his messed up fifteen-year-old ass to Payne. She said, “Find me something with built-in chores.”

“Small charter flying business,” Dylan answered. “Little, bitty airport.”

Jack lifted an eyebrow. “Is there a big call for that sort of thing in Payne?”

“Some, but business is down like the rest of the world. When business is good we not only shuttle to larger airports, we pick up passengers all over the place and take them just about anywhere they want to go. We do a lot of corporate retreats, group trips, act like a real small regional sometimes, you name it. We’ve been known to fly hunters, rock bands and basketball teams. We’re flexible.”

“You’re a pilot?”

“Among other things. Stu’s head of maintenance, and Lang also flies and runs the instruction arm of the business—we give flying lessons, instrument instruction, et cetera. There are a few others attached to the company. Seems like we all have other things to do besides be on the road all the time.”

“Sounds like it could be fun,” Jack said. “If it makes a living.”

“We live in Payne, Montana, man,” Dylan said. “Population fifteen hundred. If we can pay for fuel for the planes, hay for the horses and oil for the furnaces in our houses, we don’t need that much of a living.”

“How do the wives feel about that?”

“Lang is the only married one and not only does his wife stay involved in the company, she tries to double up his schedule, keep him out of town more. Five kids, and she isn’t interested in six.”