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getting the roof redone. Now he needed to fix up the carport, because the snows were going to crush it, and he didn’t have much longer.
    He heard the kid rooting around in his room and sighed. Well, help he might need, but he’d been planning on a work party with a bunch of people from work, not on recruiting slave labor from the side of the road. He’d sort of lied to Casey about that the night before. He would have done about anything to get that kid off the side of the road, because he hadn’t looked like he’d make it one more day.
    And Joe might still have the work party, and he might still let Casey help with the repairs on the house. He might still do that. But one thing was for sure: he wasn’t going to be calling social services today.

Lean on Me
    ~Casey
     
     
     
    J OE was a tough sonuvabitch, that was for certain. They drove the dog to the vet’s, and since Joe had also taken him in for his rabies shots, they didn’t have to kill the damned thing and dissect his brain. Joe seemed especially relieved about this, but Casey was sort of hoping he’d get to shoot the slobbering monster himself. The one guy to be nice to Casey in two months, and the dog damned near tore his arm off? Casey was not amused, and everything was not copacetic, and Casey was not forgiving.
    Joe told him to take a deep breath and let it go. There was no use holding a creature’s nature against him. It was like beating a child for spilling milk.
    Casey had subsided then, although he’d made Joe go to the hospital before they went to get clothes. He was sweating buckets by the time they pulled into the tiny parking lot of Auburn General, and his breathing was strained with the effort of keeping back the pain.
    The admissions nurse, a pretty woman with brown hair and freckles, knew him and took him into a cubicle to clean the wound. Casey knew he wasn’t kin, knew he was just some stray off the street, but for some reason, when she went to pull the curtain to give him privacy, a sound came out of Casey’s mouth a lot like the sound that had come out of Rufus’s when Joe had picked him up out of the bed of the pickup truck.
    “Let the boy stay,” Joe said easily. “He doesn’t like to be left alone.”
    The nurse glanced at Casey in his scrubs and moccasins, and Casey stared defiantly back. “Nice,” she muttered. “Your nephew?”
    And then Joe said a curious thing—something Casey would use a lot in the coming years as a reason to hope. “Friend of the family. C’mere, kid.”
    Casey did, sitting in the small chair by the head of the bed. The nurse checked out the wound, grunting, and then said, “Okay, the doc’s probably going to want to give you a tetanus shot and a shot of antibiotics. It’s all puncture wounds, and they’ve got scabs now—irrigating them is going to be a bitch, and they’re probably going to get infected anyway, even with the shot, so you’re in for a ride. You’re sure this dog didn’t have rabies?”
    Joe pulled out the piece of paper he’d gotten from the vet, proving that he didn’t have to go through the rabies course, and the nurse seemed satisfied.
    “I’m doubting you’ll be able to work for a couple of days. I’ll trade out your shifts for a week, if that’s okay.”
    Joe sighed. “Five days.”
    “A week.”
    “I’m going to be working on my carport the whole time. It feels like sort of a scam. Five days.”
    “God, you’re stubborn. Five days it is. If you finish your carport, does that mean we’re not having the work party?”
    “I’m going to need some serious help.” Joe nodded. “I’m saying the work party’s still a go. Next week. My pizza, my beer, my hammers and nails.”
    “Good. I’ll tell Jimmy and the guys. They’re looking forward to it. You bought good beer when they helped with the roof.”
    Joe smiled a little and she left, and Casey watched as he plumped the pillow, adjusted the bed so it was sitting up, and then leaned back. “Might as