Chapter 20 #3
His eyes, fixed on the lake, had a glint she recognized as the one he got when he was extremely pleased with himself and refusing, on principle, to show it.
“Don’t go spreadin’ that around town,” he grumbled.
“I’m telling everyone in Cobbler Cove.” She wagged a finger at him. “And you can’t stop me.”
She lowered herself onto the top step of his porch, with Brown Dog leaned against her side
“Arlo, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. You might have noticed Makayla calls you Pops.”
He kept looking at the lake, but his coffee cup had gone slightly tilted in his hand.
“She wants you to be her grandpa,” Tessa said. “She’s just been, you know, working up to asking.”
“Mm.”
“So. Will you?”
“I don’t,” Arlo said carefully, “want to be called Grandpa.”
“She likes Pops.”
“Pops is acceptable.”
“I’ll let her know.” A pause. “And thank you.”
He took a long pull of his coffee and finally looked at her, and gaze was not quite as steady as he probably wanted it to be.
“I lost my family,” he said, “when Fern went. Didn’t expect to find another.”
“You found the three of us. And we think of you as family.”
“I’m aware.”
She got up and kissed the top of his head, the way she had used to kiss the top of her grandfather’s head when she was home from school for Thanksgiving and hadn’t yet imagined a world in which Reginald wouldn’t know her name.
Arlo huffed and pretended to be put out, but Brown Dog sighed contentedly.
She walked back across the wet grass to her own porch with the morning sun warming her face.
That evening, she put on a dress.
It wasn’t the silk shell or the Eileen Fisher blouse. Loretta had eaten both of those weeks ago. It was a simple blue cotton dress with three-quarter sleeves and a flared skirt. She brushed her hair until it shone, and headed downstairs.
Dillon was on the porch with Makayla, sitting in his new rocking chair as if he had been sitting in it for years. Makayla was in hers, fiddling something soft and slow that Tessa didn’t recognize. But it sounded, in the quiet evening, like a lullaby.
Dillon looked up as Tessa came out the door.
He rose to his feet and took his hat off, and then just looking at her.
“Tessa, you have got to stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Coming through a door looking like that.”
She rolled her eyes, felt herself blushing a little, and sat down in her rocking chair beside him in his.
Makayla, who had not stopped fiddling, smiled without raising her eyes.
Tessa took his hand across the space between the rockers, and his fingers laced into hers as if they had been built for the job.
Loretta brayed across the pasture, probably at nothing, because she brayed at everything. Captain and Maple were curled together at the foot of the porch steps.
Arlo sat in Fern’s rocker on his own porch, his hat tipped back on his head., listening to Makayla play. The look on his face was not quite a smile but was very close.
He raised his hand slowly, in something that was either a salute or a benediction or both.
Tessa raised her free hand in answer.
Makayla wound through the closing measures of whatever it was she was playing, and somewhere, Fern was sitting in a fourth, heavenly chair, with her feet up on the porch rail and a glass of something stronger than coffee in hand. And she was, at very long last, quietly satisfied.
Want to spend a little more time with Dillon, Tessa, and Makayla? Access an exclusive bonus scene featuring them in my note to you at the end of this chapter.
…and now for a sneak peek at the next yummy hero in the Cobbler Cove series in
A FAMILY FOR RENO …
The truck's door frame and Reno's brace had strong opinions about each other, and neither one was inclined to compromise.
"Lift it higher," Dillon said impatiently behind him.
"I am lifting it higher."
"You are not. You’re lifting it the same amount you've been lifting it for the last minute."
"You're a vet. What do you know about knees?"
"I know they bend. Yours has forgotten how."
"It has not. My knee has been instructed, by an orthopedic surgeon, not to bend more than thirty degrees for the first week. There's a difference."
"There’s no difference, you absolute houseplant. Get in the truck."
In the back seat, Makayla snickered. Tessa, beside her, said, "You boys are going to make us late," in the patient tone of a woman who'd already accepted that her future husband and his brother were going to bicker until the cows came home and possibly through several subsequent generations of cows.
Reno gritted his teeth, leaned hard on his cane, swung the braced leg up a fraction of an inch he had absolutely been managing the whole time, and folded himself into the cab. Dillon shut the door behind him with the firmness of a man who'd been waiting too long to do it.
"Fasten your seat belt," Dillon told him.
"Stop nagging me."
"I'm not nagging. I’m telling you, as a licensed medical professional, that—"
"You’re licensed in cows."
"Knees are knees."
Tessa laughed in the back.
Reno glanced over his shoulder and saw Makayla holding her violin case in her lap with both hands, like it might fly out of the truck if she set it down.
She wore jeans, pink boots, and a pearl-snap shirt that Reno was fairly sure would have given Tessa heart failure two months ago.
Makayla’s hair was in a French braid he’d watched Dillon do with the same deadly concentration he performed emergency surgery on a foal.
Reno fastened his seat belt.
The Apple Pie Creek Roadhouse had once been a barn once and never quite forgiven the renovation.
It had tall knotty pine tables, mismatched stools, and a stage that tilted slightly.
The band setting up was four middle-aged men in cowboy hats.
The stand-up bass who looked like he could fight a grizzly and win.
Reno liked the place immediately, on principle.
The roadhouse was nearly full this Saturday night, and more people were still coming in. Tessa had called ahead, explained Reno’s leg injury and charmed the owner into reserving a table for them in corner, which normally wasn’t done.
For all his complaining earlier, Dillon was great about wrangling a fifth barstool and lifting Reno’s braced leg onto it. He even set a beer in front of Reno.
He wasn’t going to drink it because of his pain meds. That and he’d sworn off booze three years ago in the wake of his life imploding. He’d spent a few months trying to drink away the guilt and grief to no avail. Drinking had only made him feel worse, and he’d decided it wasn’t for him.
Makayla went backstage with Wallace, part-time band leader and full-time rancher. Dillon had stitched up a heifer for Wallace a few months back, and the guy’d returned the favor by agreeing to let Makayla come up on stage and fiddle a song with the bluegrass band.
Tessa sat across the table from Reno. She was wearing a soft blue blouse and jeans that he wouldn’t, in a million years have guessed she even owned, let alone actually wore. She looked anxious and a lot more nervous than Makayla had.
"She's going to be fine," Reno said. “Dillon says Wallace is a nice guy and had grandkids of his own. He won’t let the crowd be mean to Mak.”
Apparently, that outcome hadn’t occurred to her, for she suddenly looked on the verge of going backstage and calling off the whole thing.
He said casually, "You're twisting that napkin like it personally wronged you."
Tessa looked down at her hands. Smoothed the paper napkin on the table and picked up her water glass, which she commenced trying to strangle.
"You're a terrible lawyer," she informed him pleasantly.
"I'm an outstanding lawyer, thank you very much. That’s why I know you’re seriously considering chickening out on Makayla’s behalf.”
She said in that smooth, gentle way of hers that had steel beneath it, "I don’t need you psychoanalyzing me just now."
"I'm being supportive. There's a difference. And I’m telling you, if she comes out and plays Mary Had a Little Lamb, this crowd’s gonna love her. She’s so cute in those pink boots and bedazzled cowgirl hat, they can’t help but like her.”
“Mary Had A—” Tessa broke off grinning. “You haven’t heard her play violin before, have you? She moved past playing Mary Had A Little Lamb at the age of three.”
Reno blinked, startled.
Dillon swung a leg over the stool beside Tessa with two more sodas and a basket of fries. The moment he smiled at her, Tessa's shoulders came down a good two inches out of their tense hunch.
As for Dillon, Reno had never seen his stoic, I’m-not-meant-for-family brother look happier. For the last few weeks, trapped on Dillon's sofa with his bum knee propped up and nothing to do but watch his brother, he’d witnessed Dillon coming back to life one molecule at a time.
An image came to mind of the Dillon who'd picked him up at the airport three years ago, after Reno's life fell apart. He’d been a polite stranger in a veterinarian’s coat.
He recalled the Dillon who'd come home two months ago from a hard calving, fallen into a chair beside the sofa, and said with absolute flat conviction, Reno, I’ve done a deeply stupid thing, and her name is Tessa.
Nope, he hadn’t seen this smiling, happy Dillon since they were kids living on the Steele Ranch in Texas.
It was a good thing to see.
Still, he had to look away from Dillon and Tessa after a while. They way they leaned in toward each other like magnets drawn together, the way they looked deep into each other’s eyes and smiled quietly—it made the back of his throat ache for reasons he didn’t care to examine.
Was he a coward about facing his own feelings? Guilty as charged.
Wallace stepped up to the mic and the crowd quieted down.