Page 6 of The Texas Hero's Homecoming

Well, at least she’d attained one dream. One goal. She’d failed the farm, and that would always stay with her. In the process, she’d broken her father’s heart. She knew it, even if Papa wouldn’t voice the words. She’d tried her best and failed. Teaching had become a necessity, to keep food on the table and the farmhouse from falling to ruin. She’d only been teaching six weeks, since the fall school year began, and it had been the best six weeks of her life.

“So, maybe we should start making plans,” Sam said, sipping the coffee that was probably bitter by now, without even flinching. Soldiers were used to bitter coffee. It was less about taste and more about caffeine. To keep them alert and aware of their surroundings while out on patrol.Any coffee works, as long as it’s hot and strong, her brother would say.

“You’re not talking about working on the festival tonight, are you?”

“Why not? We need to jump on this. Get a good start.”

She stood over him, arms crossed, weighing her options. He was right. There was little time. If only he hadn’t taken her by surprise by showing up here uninvited. She was still processing it. Still coming to terms with seeing him again. She’d always thought, if and when the time came to see him again, she’d feel nothing, or at least she’d be immune. But here she was, her emotions taking hold, as bitter as the coffee he just gulped down.

She walked to the oak desk nestled in the kitchen alcove and grabbed a pen and paper. This rustic farmhouse had served them well over the years. She’d grown up here, with her folks and Joe. Memories flooded her mind constantly. She worked hard to shove them away. Keep the hurting to a minimum. “Maybe, we just jot some ideas down.”

She took a seat facing him.

“Where to start?” he asked.

“Well, we need to harvest the pumpkins. There’s a crop of about five acres of nice big pumpkins out there. Plenty for the festival.”

“I’ll help Alicia and Seth with that.”

She wrote that down. “Most of the cornfields stopped yielding. But we can try to make a small corn maze.”

“That sounds ambitious. Maybe we try something easier first.”

“We always build an A-frame pumpkin house. It’s a pretty simple design and we save the wood in the barn every year, take it down in pieces. It wouldn’t be hard to reconstruct.”

“I remember. The shelves box in the pumpkins, so they have their own little space. The kids loved going in and out.” Sam smiled, a killer that tore her up inside. “You’d cry when your father would take it down.”

“Yeah, when I was ten,” she said. “I stopped crying over that house long ago.”

“Seems to me you were always crying about something.”

“Was not,” she shot back.

“Was.”

“Was not.”

“It’s not a bad thing,” Sam said. “You were a sentimental kid.”

He was right. She was sentimental. As a kid, she had dear feelings and she’d cry, but no more than any other young motherless child. Katherine Messina died when Autumn was seven and she had only a few memories of her mama. But the ones she did have were wonderful and she clung to them for dear life. Her mama teaching her how to make tamales. Her mama reading to her and singing sweet Irish lullabies to her at night.

Sam understood that. And whenever she would cry, he’d take the time to stop what he was doing to talk to her. Make her feel better. He didn’t know what his kindness had done to her. Autumn loved her brother, but her hero-worship had all gone to Sergeant Sam Russell, the man sitting at her table, coming back to civilian life, and helping her family out of a crisis.

“Let’s get back on track,” she said, looking at her notepad. There was no use dwelling on the past. “We’ll sell our pumpkins and sunflowers, but each child will get to pick one for free.”

“Good idea. What about candy apples? I used to love the ones dipped in chocolate,” Sam said.

She wrote that down. “Chocolate apples.”

“And pumpkin carving?”

“Of course.” She wrote that down as well. “And maybe a pie-eating contest.”

“And tractor hayrides.”

“And a haystack photo area.” She continued to jot down.

“Face painting?” Sam questioned.

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