Page 13 of Wild Child
With great effort, I mentally set Ellie aside and shoved my phone into my back pocket. She wasn’t the only one I came to see. With a quick smile, I shut the door, and headed to Mom’s hair salon.
Time to scare the highlights out of her.
3
Ellie
“Those chickens won’t water themselves, you know.”
My head jerked up at the familiar, lyrical sound of Lizbeth’s voice. She tossed a bowl of food on the ground, and a flurry of feathers flocked to it. In the distance, the guinea hen screeched. I sighed and set the canister for the water trough down. Water glugged into a metal bowl.
“I know.”
Lizbeth leaned against the fence next to me. She wore a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that said,Get your buns frosted.It covered an adorable, rounded belly. Even at seven months pregnant, she looked lovely as ever. Shimmering locks of bright red hair spilled onto her shoulders. A tattered romance book lingered under one of her arms. She’d probably read it in the car on the way down the canyon from where she lived in Jackson City.
“It’s your birthday, so why do you look like someone just kicked Thor?”
My dog prowled around outside, attempting to stuff his face between the slats of the fence to get to my hens. I shooed him away with a little tap of my shoe near his face, and he snorted.
“Devin’s home.”
Her expression turned so pale I thought she’d faint, but she waved me off with a hand before I could reach for her. Her shock comforted me, and I didn’t know why.
“What?”
I nodded, barely able to believe it myself. “He stopped by the coffee shop earlier today.”
I recounted what I could remember in odd snippets that didn’t string together well. Lizbeth asked for more details to clarify the confusing five minutes in which I’d seen him. All the while, my mind seemed to unwind. Talking it out helped it not feel so stuffed and heavy in my head.
“Sweet baby pineapple.”
Lizbeth shook her head as chickens cluttered our feet. Something about the flurry of feathers and constant cooing eased me. I reached down, grabbed my favorite hen, and held her against me. The soft, downy feathers were silk on my fingertips and soothed the prickles inside.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Fine.”
She tilted her head with a fierce glare. For being so lithe and thin, she was a powerful little thing.
“Stop it. How are you?”
Fractured. Stunned. Startled. Relieved. Uncertain.
“I’m not really sure,” I said, which was true enough. She seemed to take that in stride. How should I feel? Devin had returned from the dead after three years. Part of my heart couldn’t stop caring that he’d made it back from deployment. We had seven years of inseparable friendship before those three of absence. Not even his awful departure could take those years back.
But did they mean anything now?
“Fair,” she murmured. “I’m pretty shocked, and I didn’t love him like you did.”
I scowled.
She grinned brightly.
“It wasn’t what I thought it would be,” I admitted quietly. “Seeing him again, I mean. It was . . . weird. He seems the same, but he’s also so different. That’s probably what he thought of me, too.”
Although surely I hadn’t changed like he had. Or had I? Did I have the same sharp edges? Did I seem more mature?
Piecing my life back together after the shock of his enlistment and into something totally new had been intentional and painstaking. My senior year of high school had been the loneliest I’d ever known. Devin’s departure had thrust me into a world without him I hadn’t been ready for.
