Kristina Knight - Christmas In A Small Town

Now she was here, and she was remembering how much fun she’d had with her grandfather’s dogs and the dogs at the trainer’s in Kansas City. This was something she could do, something that held value. Something that would keep her near her grandparents. After only a couple of days with them, Camden was already dreading leaving them again.

Six clambered up to her when they stopped at the barn. When the older dogs went inside, Six stayed, looking up at Camden with excitement vibrating through his little body. She took the green tennis ball from her pocket and tossed it. Six took off at a run to chase it down. The three other dogs with them this morning watched Granddad for an opening, but he closed the kennel door, and they lost interest.

“Six is too little for real stock work,” Granddad said. “He’d make a better pet than a working cow or sheep dog.”

Six caught up with the ball and turned around, the neon green of the covering showing between his teeth. He dropped it at her feet and waited. Camden bent, tossed the ball again and watched the puppy chase after it. Granddad had stopped to watch, too. One of the dogs in the run whined. He shot the dog a look. It stopped.

“I was thinking, if it went well, I could train a few others for showing. You know, stock-dog showing is popular at fairs and things. People who don’t have ranches or farms can be just as passionate about the training. About the sport of it.” Camden winced. Comparing her grandfather’s work to a sport was probably not the best wording. Other than baseball, she didn’t think he was interested in any sport.

“The sport of it, huh?” he said after a long moment.

“If it goes well, we could maybe build the dog school back up. It would create another way to make money for the farm. More people would bring their dogs to you. You might even have more outlets for runts like Six.” And she would have something to do. Something that was hers.

Something she could be proud of doing—a kind of fulfillment she never found while competing in pageants and then training contestants.

The beauty queen thing was never something Camden wanted—that was always her mother’s dream. And the irony of her walking away from a world that required training only to go into a different sort of training wasn’t lost on her. The difference was that the dogs she’d train would have a skill that required more than good genes.

Six returned, and she held the ball until he quieted. “One more time, then into the run. Okay?” The little dog’s tail wagged, and he seemed to smile at her. “Last one, ready?”

The dog vibrated a bit harder. Camden threw the ball, and Six took off like a shot.

Camden knew she wasn’t being fair about the pageants. There were legitimately good reasons to take part. The scholarships opened educational avenues for a lot of women. Pageants taught poise, even if they focused a little too much on appearance, in her opinion. They also celebrated talents like music and creative writing and put a focus on charity work.

But she didn’t particularly care that she wasn’t being fair; competing hadn’t been her choice.

It had been her responsibility.

When her mother was floundering after her father died, Camden competing in pageants seemed to lessen Elizabeth’s depression.

Camden knew a lot of beauty queens who were smart, who were passionate about their work. Maybe if her mother had let her choose her talent or her volunteer work, she could have been passionate about pageanting. But Elizabeth Camden Harris Carlson had only cared about winning. As a Kentucky Miss and then a North America Miss herself, she knew what it took to win, and she hadn’t allowed Camden to veer from the chosen path. Camden had worn the same color dresses as her mother, had sung the same song her mother sang during competitions and used the same platform her mother had used during her days as a pageant girl.

Hell, even if she’d chosen something of interest to her, Camden wouldn’t have liked parading around on those stages, smiling until her cheeks hurt. That was what made it so easy to walk away, not only from the pageant world, but from the rest of her life. She only regretted that it had taken until now to walk out.

“Showing at fairs, huh?”

“It could be fun. Challenging,” she corrected. Not once in her twenty-six years had she won a conversation with her mother or stepfather by describing something as “fun.” How ridiculous was it that she hadn’t realized until she was twenty-six that she’d made only a handful of decisions about her own life?

“Nothing wrong with doing something just for the fun of it, kiddo,” Granddad said. “You think I’d’ve trained dogs all my life if I was only in it for the money?”

She’d never thought about her grandfather as liking anything. “I, um...”

“I trained dogs because it was fun. It was challenging, too, but so was accounting. I hated accounting. Hated sitting at a desk all day just to come back the next and do the same thing again.”

“You were an accountant?”

Granddad grinned, and it was the first smile she could remember passing over his face since she’d come back. “Did the books for most of the businesses in Slippery Rock at one time or another. Until I decided there had to be more to life than sitting at a desk fifty weeks out of every year. I didn’t start the dog school until your daddy was in school. And I didn’t start it because it was challenging, I started it because Bennett Walters needed a new stock dog to help keep the dairy cows in line.”

Camden blinked. This was more information than she’d ever known about her grandfather. “You started the school on a whim?”

He shrugged. “I liked dogs. I didn’t like the way the dogs were being treated when the trainer Bennett hired brought a few to his place. Figured it was something I could do that would get me outside a little more, especially during the summer months. So I trained that dog for Bennett, then a few more area ranchers asked for dogs, and within a couple of years I was spending nearly all my time training the dogs. Shut down the accounting business and haven’t worried about it once.”

“Then why aren’t you training any longer?”

“A man has to retire at some point, Camden. I thought it was time.” She started to protest, but Granddad held up a hand. “Why don’t you tell me more about stock competitions.”

“They use sheep, goats, chickens. A few calves. One trainer works a few dogs to get the animals from one pen to another, and they’re judged on speed, agility and time.”

“Sounds like what I did when I was training.”

“It’s a lot like a training session, actually.” Camden couldn’t get the thought of her grandfather retiring out of her mind. He wasn’t that old, maybe in his midsixties. Sure, it was the age when a lot of people retired, but he’d loved working the dogs. How could he just stop? “That competition show in Tulsa I mentioned? Six couldn’t compete in that one, but you could get an idea how the show circuit differs from the working circuit. If you wanted to go.”

“Your grandma’s not going to want to go to Tulsa this close to the holidays,” Granddad said. He opened the run for Six. The dog went in and began sniffing. Probably for water. Camden grabbed an empty bowl from a shelf and filled it from the sink on the wall. Granddad did the same for the other dogs. “All these runs used to be full,” he said after a while.

“I remember.” She’d come out here every morning that last summer, watching Granddad and her dad and the collies from the hayloft above. Listening to the men talk about training methods. Elizabeth never set foot in the barn. She’d rarely left the porch, insisting that the dirt would ruin her shoes. God, her mother had hated this place. It was no wonder she had never wanted to come back.