But then he looked away from her.
The indifference threw her. He didn’t talk to his brother and he didn’t talk to his mom. He could have good reasons. But she had no vocabulary, she realized, with which to discuss someone who seemed to have severed himself from his family.
He turned back toward her again, and he suddenly looked weary.
“For crying out loud, Harwood,” he said gently, almost exasperated. “Get a pet. It’s pretty isolated out here. You should get a dog. A really big one. The kind that barks loudly at predators and prowlers and fetches the sheriff when you do things like fall down wells.”
Just the very notion of a pet made her go silent against a swoop of yearning.
He reached into his mailbox then and retrieved a flyer he must have missed yesterday.
“I’m not going to fall down a well,” she said finally. Sounding nine years old.
“I won’t hold my breath,” he said absently. He ducked his head to read the flyer, then he turned to walk away without saying another word.
She turned away, too, and sighed heavily, and the next intake of breath was richly redolent of manure.
Maybe she’d get used to it.
Damn, but it was practically a coup de grace. It was brilliant. And she ought not to admire it, but she was nothing if not fair.
And she was nothing if not a competitor.
Her trip back to the house was a little more leisurely than her initial bolt from it. Suddenly her phone erupted into The Plimsouls’ “A Million Miles Away.” Her sister. It was kind of nice that she wasn’t actually a million miles away now. She was just about twenty minutes away.
“Hey, Edie. What’s shakin’?”
“Avalon, I have to hit you up for a favor, and it’s a big one.”
Ah, siblings. Formalities like “how are you?” went right out the window in favor of expediency.
“Well, you know me. Go big or go home. Or go buy a big home. Ha ha. Ha.”
“Yeah. Ha! I’m so sorry to dump this on you, but I can’t believe I forgot it was my turn to host the Hummingbird meeting at my house today! We’re supposed to make friendship bracelets and plant seedlings in egg cartons or some such shit, because they need their gardening badges and I have to feed them lunch. I have all the egg cartons and the dirt. But a big order for a Saturday funeral came into the shop and my supplier sent me daisies instead of lilies and do you have any idea how ridiculous it will be to cover the scion of an old Sacramento family in Gerberadaisies? And now I have to scramble to find the right flowers and drive to Black Oak to beg Cheryl at ‘Coming up Roses’ for her supply of flowers or I could lose the funeral business and I can’t let thishappen.Do you think you can fill in for me for at least an hour? I can get them all set up for you and I’ll be back as fast as I can. Probably inside an hour.”
Eden made it sound as though she’d forgotten to lock the lion cages at the zoo.
But Eden was burdened with perfectionism. The prospect of failure was probably torture, not to mention letting people down. Avalon wanted to save her, because she really hated it when Eden suffered.
Also, she knew she could bank the favor. Because that was the law in the world of siblings.
“Wait—the Hummingbirds are Annelise’s scout troop, right?”
“Yes. About eight little girls. Smart ones. Darling girls. So sweet and good and just adream.”
Eden oversold it. Avalon was suspicious now. “Didn’t you tell me one of them is mouthy? The one who has a brother with a sad mustache and a skeevy vocabulary?”
“Yeah.Youshould get along great with her.”
Avalon snorted.
She could only imagine what the others were like.
Shelovedkids. She was, by nature, whimsical and energetic and prone to non-sequiturs even as an adult, and she wasn’t particularly daunted by the prospect of wrangling a whole passel of little girls. It sounded like a blast.
In that little pause she could hear goats bleating.
And the metallic, rhythmic clang of some kind, reminiscent of weekend mornings and her dad attempting to whack their old lawn mower back into life.
And just like that, an evil little lightbulb pinged on above her head.
“Hey, Eden—you know what? You should bring them up here! We’ll drag a picnic table out front and do the crafts there. Plenty of room for them to run around and have a good time and tire themselves out.”
“That’s a fantastic idea!”
“And hey, do you think you might have any old clothes you can spare that might fit me?”
“I’ll look. And I swear I’ll only be gone and leave you with the girls for an hour or so. You’re the best!”
“I am,” Avalon agreed placidly, turning around and looking in the direction of Mac’s cottage, as if she was addressing him. “I am indeed.”