Page 104 of Clara Knows Best

“Which one’s the girl?”

“Baylor. Duh.”

“Well, send her over!” she said heartily. “I’d like to wish her joy!”

“Sure,” he said, amused. “I’ll see if I can find her.”

“Bless you, Asher! There’s hope!”

Baylor was the one. Clara knew it within moments of meeting her. She was quiet and timid, but clearly tempted by the pay rate and the lack of fast food involved.

“It’s calm and quiet, it’s safe, and it’s reliable,” Clara told her. “Dr. Pike and Dr. Wilder are both professionals, easy to work for, super nice and so patient. I’ve never even seen them get mad. Well, not at work. Dr. Wilder is my mom, and she gets mad like normal moms at home. But it’s a great work environment, and they’ll be happy to work with you about taking time off and things like that. I don’t want to get too personal, but if you had a baby, you could probably even bring it to work with you. There’s a lot of downtime.”

Baylor’s eyes widened a little in a way that told Clara it was more than a remote possibility. “Can I have an application, please?”

With the job fair out of the way and a hopeful candidate lined up, Clara could turn her focus to Yoli’s wedding.

She sat on the living room floor that evening with invitations spread out before her on the coffee table. They’d printed them at the office that afternoon as soon as Yoli had confirmed the priest’s availability, and the bride had taken half of them home to address and stamp.

Clara was halfway through her share of the guest list when she noticed the man on the couch behind her and to the left. She wasn’t sure how she had missed his arrival; his sock feet, crossed at the ankles, rested on the table a respectful distance from her stack of envelopes. He was slouched low against the cushions, his eyes on his tablet, scrolling so slowly and steadily that she knew he was reading a book.

She smiled to herself, peeled a stamp and stuck it on the envelope she’d just addressed. There were only about a dozen other places Jesse could have chosen to read for a couple hours before bed.

40

Clara was distracted all week, multitasking like crazy at her desk, working quietly on her phone the whole way to and from work, and if she wasn’t spending her evenings at Yoli’s with all their girlfriends, she was working on the wedding dress itself. She had taken over the front living room, apparently finding her own bedroom too small, and had no fewer than three dress dummies partially clad in white lined up under the front window.

Jesse was grateful for her distraction…mostly. It wasn’t easy on a man’s ego to go from her new best friend to a mere blip on her radar, but he knew it was for the best. He had his ticket for Friday afternoon on the same plane he’d come in on three weeks before. He’d miss Yoli’s wedding, but they’d pretty much just met, and it was starting to look like she had a million relatives anyway, so they probably needed all the space they could get.

The reception was going to be at the Wilders’. The Victorian mansion in town that housed the doctors’ office was much prettier, but the first floor was divided into millions of tinyrooms. The Wilder house was not as picture-perfect but it was just as grand and far more spacious.

All that only meant that the Colonel and Dr. Wilder were nearly as busy as Clara was, and Jesse was largely left to his own devices. This was good, he told himself. He could fade into the woodwork all week, and they would hardly notice when he left. There wouldn’t be any tearful, clinging goodbyes or questions about his plans to return.

And he was starting to think returning wouldn’t be such a good idea, not while Clara lived there. Things were getting a little too cozy for his peace of mind.

When they got home from work Clara went to her dress dummies and he went to let Greer out. When she’d done her business, he put her on a leash and they walked slowly over the property, visiting the horses on their way back.

By then he had missed dinner, so he ate alone, read or watched Netflix on his tablet for an hour or two, and went to bed.

This worked pretty well until Friday, which made him a little nervous. Maybe it had all been a mistake. Maybe she had forgotten that he was going, and would cause a huge scene at the last minute.

But she didn’t.

On Friday, she came into his office near the end of the day, sat in the chair across from his (her mother’s) desk, and crossed her legs comfortably.

“Leaving today,” she remarked.

“Yeah.”

“Need a ride to the airport?”

“No, I figured you wouldn’t have time. Asher’s giving me a lift. He wants to show me his truck.”

She nodded as though she had expected as much. “Excited to get back?”

“I don’t really…get excited about stuff. The way you do,” he said cautiously.

She grinned. “You’re so cool.”

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