Chapter 31
Devyn
T he chickens too?” Ellie whines, throwing her bucket to the ground and stomping toward the coop. “I already cleared out the sheep and horse stalls.”
“Well, remember how much shit you got yourself into next time you try to flood a guest room,” Hunter shouts as she storms off, her strawberry hair whipping angrily in the wind.
“I can’t believe she flooded your room.” He whips off his hat and runs his fingers through his hair, like he does when he’s stressed out.
“Cut her a little bit of slack. She’s only nine, after all.”
“Almost ten . She knew better.” He shoves his hat back on his head and looks like he might storm off just like she did, but I take his hand and he sighs, releasing more than stress into the air. More than flooding. And even though I wish he’d let me all the way in, to whatever else is plaguing him, I know what it’s like to live with scars.
I won’t press him. Instead, I rise to the tips of my boots and kiss his forehead. He releases a deep breath and curls his arms around me, resting his chin on my head, and I can only hope he’ll open up to me all the way when he’s ready.
“I don’t know what got into her. She keeps insisting she was only helping me.” He scrunches his brow. “It doesn’t make any sense. She likes you. Like, really likes you. She all but gave me the go-ahead the night of the Halloween tree.”
“The Halloween tree?” I peel away and meet his eyes, my heart swelling with happiness. He’s been falling for just as long as I have.
Now it’s my turn to cast him a cocky smirk.
“Why, Mr. Isaac , ” I tease in an over-the-top southern drawl, “that was nearly three weeks ago, was it not?”
Hunter Isaac, the bad boy next door , blushes , and I absolutely love it.
“I’ve never not been sweet on you, Ponygirl.”
I bite my bottom lip to keep the pair from pressing against his and forgetting what it is we’re doing out here in the first place.
“Do you suppose I could talk to her? Woman to woman?”
“She’s only nine.”
“Almost ten,” I say with a pointed finger to his nose. He scrunches it at me. “I hate to break it to you, Hunter, but that is not a little child.” I point to the coop a few yards ahead of us where a tall, gangly ‘tween sticks out of the wood, her brightly beaded anklet decorating a stray, barefoot limb of painted toes.
“That is a little lady right there. You better face the facts before they face you. She’s smarter than you’re giving her credit for.”
His face scrunches up, like he’s appalled at the thought. Of her growing up, most likely. Most parents make that face when you say, ‘Oh, wow, she’s gotten so big,’ or similar customary phrases. Sadly, I can’t say I get it.
I don’t understand what it’s like to see your baby grow up in front of you like he does.
Doesn’t mean I can’t help him out where a woman’s touch could make all the difference, though. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to.
Desperately so. She’s grown on me in a way I can’t describe. I think because she’s Hunter’s, I feel closer to her.
“Let me talk to her.”
He smiles, softening and letting some of the stress fade from his face. “Go ahead,” he says, lowering to kiss me long and deep before he retreats to the stables.
I make my way to the chicken coop, my boots working in tandem with the land, unlike my heels all those weeks ago. She knows I’m there before I can announce myself, Hunter’s kid and all, and the uncanny similarities between the pair has me, once again, in awe of the fact that he raised this young lady. On his own.
“You were right,” Ellie says on a low sigh that’s void of her signature pep.
I follow her voice to the far back of the coop, where she’s crouched next to the nesting boxes from the inside. I suppress a laugh. It’s not that I don’t take her seriously, but she’s a kid in a coop, and I can’t not giggle a bit at how adorable she looks snuggled up next to the hen we call Polly. She’s a gorgeous black silkie, and my eyes dart to Ellie’s in question, one she answers with a click of her tongue and another deep, long sigh.
“I put Polly on these eggs two days ago, and she hasn’t left them since. Except to eat and poop, which I did witness on account I slept in here on Tuesday.” She runs out of air explaining and sucks in a quick breath that makes me laugh out loud. “Then our duck laid an egg, and I stole it. It’s been under Polly for a whole day, and she’s just sittin’ on it same as her other two, even though she didn’t lay it. Even though it doesn’t even look the same as her other eggs.”
The passion behind her eyes runs wild, her curiosity and wonder coming in never-ending waves. A scientist. A lady. A girl who is screaming for answers.
“I reckon we’re gonna hafta call him Chuck, huh?” She lifts her chin, eyes shining like bright blue sapphires against the night sky, and I confirm what I already suspected, that she absolutely does not hate me.
Still.
“Why did you flood the guest room, Ellie?” I ask. Plain and simple.
When I was a kid, everyone was always trying to sugarcoat life for me. Make it dazzle and shine, so the moment was never dull, conflict always controlled, but all it does is harbor disappointment that breaks loose years later like a cannon, all-encompassing and aimed to kill.
No, honesty is always best.
“I was trying to make you sleep together,” she mumbles.
“ What ?”
Does she know what she just said?
I must show every range of questions across my features because Ellie bursts out in a fit of giggles and then claps her hand over her mouth, clearly understanding a whole lot more than her Papa thinks she does because she says, “Ew, no! I didn’t mean that way. I mean, like…well, you’re in love, aren’t you? And if you’re in love, you won’t leave. Guests leave.”
“And just so we’re clear…you don’t want me to be a guest?”
She nods.
“I want you to be for real married to Papa.” She climbs out of the coop and down the ramp meant for livestock and not sixty-pound pint-sized cowgirls, landing on the dirt with a thud and darting her little eyes up at me. “If you’re for real married, you’ll stay. And if you stay…” She trails off, widening her eyes and turning her head away in determination.
A determination I can read with every fiber of my being. Because it’s me through and through. Somehow. Even though she isn’t my Ellie, not really, she shares this with me all the same.
I can tell. She won’t let me see her cry.
I twirl her around and guide her to the nearby bench where we sit. “If I stay…maybe what, Ellie?” I ask, eyes locked on hers as she struggles to hold back the tears building within them. “I don’t like to cry, either” I admit, holding her stare. “But we don’t have to. We can let the tears sting and burn together as long as we want, because we don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do. We don’t have to love the hand we’re dealt just because people say we should. And we certainly don’t have to be okay . ”
She nods, her nostrils flaring. “If you stay, they won’t make me leave.” She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply, then watches the silkies, deep in thought. How does one explain the huge emotions sparring within when they’ve only had a decade to learn them?
“Penelope was a shitty mom,” she finally says, looking at me sharply to gage my reaction to her language, but I don’t budge. I may not be her mom, but if I were, I wouldn’t care if she threw a curse word in there a time or two if it helped her express how she’s feeling, and Hunter would think the same. Somehow, I inherently know that.
“Go on,” I say.
“She didn’t want to stay with her babies, even though that’s literally the only thing she had to do. She had one job, and she didn’t care enough to do it. I thought maybe it was her eggs, but I tried different eggs, you know? But she wouldn’t do it. Until you came along and said to try the silkies, so I did. Polly.”
She inclines her head toward the coop, referring to the bird who remains affectionately stationed atop her eggs—and of course, the duck egg—with no signs of leaving.
“Polly loves those eggs, Dev. She stays on them like her life depends on it.”
I quirk a brow. “Yet you still seem so frustrated.”
“Why can’t Penelope do it, too?”
She kicks her boot at the dirt, and chunks of mud and debris flake off into the air, and we watch it fall. She gasps as bits of it hit her arm, then she looks back up at me with apologetic eyes.
“It’s okay. You can cry if you want. Or you can kick the ground. You can be as angry as you want about the things you feel in your heart, Ellie.”
She pauses, shoving her face into my gut and locking her tiny arms around my waist, letting the tears fall freely like she hasn’t done it in all her life.
Maybe she hasn’t.
I comb my fingers through her hair, pulling the tear-drenched strands away from her cheeks and forehead, and wrapping her in an even tighter hug as we rock, back and forth, in a way I don’t think either of us has ever experienced as a mother or a daughter.
“You know, I had a Penelope, too. In real life.”
She sits up, wiping her face on her sleeve and pulling her knees to her chin. “You did?”
“Yup,” I say, letting it hang in the air, an unfinished answer.
“Did you ever get a Polly?” she finally asks, looking ahead at the pinkening horizon.
“No.”
I look into the eyes of a little girl raised by the only man I’ve ever loved. A little girl with so much tenacity and promise. An innocent child who was born, not of her own choice, but because two system-failed teenagers didn’t know another way. A child who is only alive and healthy today because the man I’m madly in love with chose to make it so.
A child I love , as crazy as that may be.
And I know, right here and now, why my life has led me to this moment.
Why I never got my Polly.
So, I tell her, the girl who stands here, asking me the same things I begged of the world before her.
When I was her.
“Because I was meant to be a Polly.”