Page 79 of Where It All Began
“I think this is exactly what we need,” she promised him.
“I do, too,” he agreed. “Thanks for raising us here, Mom. I can’t imagine a better home.”
Her eyes clouded for the umpteenth time today. “You better start complaining about your brothers before I start crying again.”
Hazel climbed out of the truck. She held a shopping bag of hot dog and hamburger buns. Michael slid a case of beer out of the backseat and looped another bag over his fingers. His eyes were red, his jaw set.
Best friends from birth. That’s what John and Michael had been. Everyone here had a history that was rooted around everyone else. It was the beauty and the pain of Blue Moon.
Beckett dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “Love you, Mom. I’m gonna help here, and then I’m going to go fix the canopies. Those two idiots are setting them up all wrong.” He winked at her and took the load from Michael. Phoebe pulled the man in for a long, hard hug. She felt his shoulders shake once in a shared grief so sharp it cut the air, making it hurt to breathe.
Michael pulled back half a step. His mouth worked open and closed a few times, but nothing came out. Phoebe patted his cheek. “I feel exactly the same way,” she promised him. “Now, go get the grill off the porch and fire it up.”
Grief called for movement. Anything to keep you going forward one step and a time.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
There were tears and watery smiles as an entire town gathered to grieve one of their beloved on the land he’d tended.
For Phoebe, the pain and love curled together into something bright and hot that was fighting to escape her chest. She took a minute to herself, walking back down the drive that John had once wondered if they should pave. But she had loved the cheerful clouds of dust that followed them as they came and went.
Every inch of this farm was home to her. And yet it would never be the same. Not without John Pierce striding through the fields with two dogs and at least one kid on his heels. Not without him taking a moment in the middle of a corn field to just stop, breathe, to honor the pulse of nature. Not without him in their bed or in the kitchen peeking at whatever recipe she’d cooked up for dinner that night.
There wasn’t one hole where the man had been. There were a thousand.
She stopped and turned, facing the farm. The pretty little farm house had truly become a home, full to bursting at the seams with love and boys’ sports equipment. The red barn had been added on to as their menagerie of pets grew. Melanie II had finally gotten a friend. And then another and another. They had four retired dairy cows that enjoyed sunning themselves in grassy pastures. Leopold the donkey occupied the front pasture and tolerated the dogs and cats that snuck beneath his fence.
She’d wanted chickens but now? Now she wasn’t sure. Could she stay here? Could she run Pierce Acres herself? Would she even want to? The appeal of this life had been John. Now what was the appeal?
She heard the engine of a station wagon easing off the shoulder of the road behind Bill Fitzsimmons’ Gremlin. The driver was a stranger with fear in his eyes.
“Excuse me, I don’t mean to interrupt your party.” He was a good-looking man, broad of shoulder and clean-shaven. His hair was graying around the temples, and his eyes crinkled when he smiled up at her. “I was hoping you could tell me how to get to Cleary before my three daughters murder me for insisting that a day trip would be more fun without any technology.”
Phoebe found a genuine smile for the man trapped with three annoyed redheads.
One of the girls gave an exasperated sigh. “Dad, Itoldyou we need our phones. They have GPS!”
“He’s doing the best he can, Em. Your bad vibes aren’t helping,” the girl in the front seat said, fiddling with the fringes on her halter top. She looked like she belonged in Blue Moon.
“People have been crossing continents for centuries without that beeping, obnoxious ‘Make a U-turn’ technology,” the man argued, mimicking a snooty techno tone.
Phoebe laughed, and it felt like a few knots inside her loosened up enough that she could breathe.
“Serves me right for wanting some uninterrupted quality family time,” he sighed out the window to Phoebe.
“They grow up fast,” Phoebe said, thinking of her own sons. “Force them into these things as long as it’s legal,” she advised.
His smile was warm, almost familiar.
The youngest daughter crawled over her sister and stuck her head out the rear window. “Maybe we should stick around here for the day?”
Phoebe followed the girl’s gaze to where all six-feet-four-inches of handsome Donovan Cardona wandered past with a deli platter balanced on top of a case of beer. Donovan was as much one of her sons as the three bickering men she’d been tempted to lock out of the house today. However, he generally had more sense.
“Do you have a piece of paper?” Phoebe interrupted the brewing argument in the car. “I can write down the directions for you.”
The man pawed through the glove box of his ancient station wagon with desperate hope and triumphantly produced a tablet and a stubby golf pencil.
“I can’t thank you enough,” he whispered fervently. “You’re saving my life right now. They were minutes away from tying me to the roof rack and giving up on the whole adventure.”
