Page 98 of Keepsake
I hugged her back, but she felt entirely unfamiliar to me. My brain couldn’t help but do a comparison with Lark. She wasn’t the right size, and she didn’t smell like Lark.
Luckily, Maeve got jealous. “Me too,” she said, forcing herself between our legs, wrapping herself around my knees again.
I broke off the hug to pick her up, and the little girl wrapped her arms around my neck.
“Aw,” Chastity said. “That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”
I felt the familiar sensation of my face flushing. “I lived here when she was born,” I explained. “I showed up a few months before.”
“Good timing. They probably needed your help then.”
“You have no idea,” Leah said, entering the room and the conversation at the same time. “After Maeve was born, Isaac and I didn’t sleep for five months straight. But Zach got up every single morning at dawn to milk our cows. He made coffee. He fed the chickens and collected eggs. He held this place together, and I’ll never be able to thank him enough.”
My cheeks burned brighter at the praise. I’d forgotten those days. In fact, my own memory of that time was different. Sure, I’d done all the farm work that Leah mentioned. But manual labor was easy. The hard part of those months had been my confusion. I’d spent my first year feeling about as valuable as a clod of cow shit on the bottom of someone’s boot.
Being thrown away will do that to a guy.
“The only thing hedidn’tdo was hold the newborn baby.” Leah laughed. “It wasn’t until Maeve began to crawl that he’d pick her up.”
That was also true. “She seemed really breakable,” I said in my own defense.
“Is that why?” Leah teased. “I assumed it was because she screamed her head off for the first few months of her life. And what nineteen-year-old guy wants anything to do with a screaming baby?” Leah held out her arms for Maeve, but the little girl shook her head and clung to me. She knew that Leah wanted to put her to bed.
“I don’t scream,” Maeve said then, sliding to the floor and resting her chin on my knee.
“You’re right,” I agreed, and she gave me a silly smile. “What a crazy idea.” I reached down to wiggle a finger in the soft place just below Maeve’s ribs, which was a tickle spot. And she let out a shriek that could wake the dead.
Leah seized the moment, grabbing a cackling Maeve from me and hurrying out of the room with her.
In the silence, I turned to Chastity and found her smiling at me. “It makes me happy to see you doing well.”
“Thanks,” I said, wishing she were right. A week ago I’d been doing great. Tonight? Not so much. But that wasn’t her fault. “Tell me how I can help you.”
She shrugged. “I’m sure there will be some way or another. But Isaac and Leah have been great. They’re going to help me find a job somewhere. My old manager will give me a reference.”
I wondered if it could really be as easy as that. “There must be something. I want to help. It’s my fault that you got in trouble. I’ve always felt bad about it.”
She cocked her head. “Haven’t you been listening? You did me a favor. If you hadn’t ruined my virtue, I’d be married to a sixty-year-old man right now, and I’d have two kids and a third one on the way.”
Isaac walked in then with a glass of water. “If Zach’s not listening, it might be all that wine he guzzled at dinner. Drink this.” He offered me the glass.
And here I’d thought nobody had noticed. I took the water and drank it down.
“Good boy.” Isaac ruffled my hair like I was a kid. Then he sat down on the footstool. “I noticed that your girl didn’t come for dinner tonight.”
“She’s not my girl,” I said, with a shake of my head.
Isaac and Chastity made almost identical woebegone faces.
“I can’t fix that right now,” I said slowly. But in spite of the wine, tonight’s weird reminiscing had got me thinking. Yesterday Isaac had asked me that question—would I have been ready to meet Lark right after I left Wyoming? I’d brushed the question off. But I’d been a bigger mess back then than I cared to admit.
Poor Lark. She was right back where I’d been, still too close to the park bench and the lonely highway to relax.
“Give it time,” Isaac said again.
“I’m going to,” I decided. “She’s leaving tomorrow, and I can’t change that. The only thing to do is regroup for a second assault on her defenses.”
“That’s my boy. And you sound like Griff’s movies.” Isaac chuckled.
