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high school ended, Josiah didn’t want to marry Susan. He didn’t want to marry Tim, for that matter. He simply wanted to be somewhere… different. Somewhere without the little lines telling him that he should want to marry Susan instead of Tim. Somewhere a girl like Jeannie might not feel like she’d be better off putting her life at risk than facing her parents with the results of an accident in the back seat of a car after the Valentine’s Day dance.
    That being said, he could have been bitterly disappointed in California.
    Yes, it was true. San Francisco State College was a lot different than upstate New York. There were no boundaries—either personal or moral—that Joe didn’t get a chance to cross. It was a good thing Josiah was relatively bright, because he killed a lot of brain cells in college—and had learned to use a rubber right quick after his first dose of penicillin for the clap, because there wasn’t much, both male and female, that he didn’t do.
    In spite of all that (and a harpy of an attending professor who thought that men shouldn’t be nurses, and who butchered all of his papers to try and prove that point), Joe finished up his schooling with a bachelor’s degree in nursing, which, in the early eighties, could get him a job about anywhere in the country.
    But by then, Joe was tired of the city and really tired of having his personal boundaries overridden, especially by so many sweating, heaving bodies. Sex was okay, but he would rather have it be kept personal, thank you very much, and he would be just as glad to wait for the right persons to keep it that way.
    Besides. He missed the quiet of the Adirondacks. He missed the way you could walk a mile from one house to the next without seeing anyone.
    He looked around. At first he wanted farmland, but Bakersfield and Fresno held no appeal to him whatsoever, and he started looking into the Sierra Foothills.
    He liked pretty much everything north of Rocklin, which, back then, was a flea speck of a town whose only claim to fame was Sierra Community College. He got a job at Auburn General and, after living in a rental for a little while, started looking for his own property.
    Foresthill was about a twenty-mile commute, which wasn’t bad, even on the bike, and like he said to Casey, you couldn’t hear anything. Not a neighbor, not a car. Just the rush of the wind in the trees overhead and the occasional owl.
    Of course, the morning after Casey arrived, there was the goddamned neighbor’s dog, who wouldn’t shut the fuck up, and Josiah groaned as he rolled out of bed.
    Oh Jesus, couldn’t that ornery old geezer feed his fucking Rottweiler? (Joe had learned to embrace swearing in college. It was, to his mind, even better than pot and beer, and he planned to keep that habit a lot longer than he’d kept pot and beer, too!) With a yawn and a stretch, he put on a jacket over his scrub top and put his feet into moccasins. He’d left the thermostat at sixty the night before, and it was damned cold in the house in the morning, but since he hadn’t had time to insulate, he couldn’t afford to heat it all the way when blankets would do just fine.
    He’d showered the night before but hadn’t dried his hair, and it was a frightful, kinky mess down his back as he padded toward the garage, but he didn’t care. If the damned dog had woken Casey up to see him look like the bride of fucking Frankenstein, Casey would have let him know already.
    Casey was not, in fact, his first rescue. His first rescue had been a pair of kids who’d been left on the side of the road like unwanted kittens. (He’d rescued a number of those too, and he remembered to put a giant scoop of cat food into the bowl by the door leading from the kitchen to the garage.) He’d taken them home, given them baths, fed them, and called social services the next day. Social services had come and gotten them, and Josiah had spent the next week picking cootie nits out of his hair because he