Chapter 1 #3
The teen grinned, and he looked just like his mother when he did.
“Got it. I’ll introduce Presley to Makayla.
She’s eleven. And there are a couple boys about the age of yours.
I’ll hook them up, too. And as for you, Miss Chloe, Lily’s only one year older than you.
She likes stuffed animals. Do you like those? ”
Chloe looked up at him in wide-eyed admiration. “Uhh huh. I like unicorns.”
“Ahh. Then you’ve need to meet Olive. She’s five and obsessed with unicorns. She’s a twin, too. She has a twin brother named Owen.”
“And Jack," Rose started as seven women piled outside onto the big, wrap-around porch carrying tall glasses of iced tea and lemonade sweating in the June warmth.
"I know, Mom. Don’t let anyone die."
Rose retorted, “I was going to say, don't turn anything pink!"
The women came apart laughing.
"I only did it one time," Jack called back,with the dignity of a man who has made his peace with a thing.
"Hi. You must be Sunny," said a woman who was wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. "Oh, you have to tell her, Jenna."
"I own a ranch and rented barn space to the stock from a rodeo over the winter.
Jack got the bright idea at one of our get-togethers at my ranch to dye one of the bucking bulls pink.
Hot pink. And he enlisted all those heathens—" She gestured at the pack of kids who came tearing around the corner of the house again. “—to help him.”
Another woman added, “He chose a bull called Bodang. He’s one of the top professional bull riding bulls in the world and was scheduled to buck at the World Rodeo Championships a few weeks later.
And no matter how much Sully and the other cowboys scrubbed that bull, they couldn’t get all the pink dye out before he had to go to Las Vegas. ”
A third woman added, “That bull came out of the chute on national television the color of a baby's nursery, threw the number-one bull rider in the world in two seconds flat, and the announcer laughed so hard he had to hand off the mike to the color man. The whole arena howled with laughter.”
Another chimed in. “Bodang ended up coming in second overall in the bull rankings last year. But Cash, he’s my fiancé, bought him after Worlds and is working with him, conditioning him and stretching him so he’s more flexible, and thinks he can win Worlds this year.”
Rose finished up with, “Jack’s threatening to dye him blue this year, and my fiancé, Cooper, is offering to help him. Cash is panicked that they’ll actually do it.”
"Meanest neon pink animal God ever made," said yet another woman, and the whole group lost it again.
Sunny laughed too, a real one reached all the way to the bottom of her belly, and for one unbudgeted second felt the weight lift her shoulders a tiny bit.
They folded her in. That was the only word for it.
She was handed a glass of lemonade and a porch chair and told a series of names she had no hope of keeping straight that first night.
Jenna, who ran a ranch and had the tanned hands to prove it; Bonnie, who said she was running the whole town at the moment and didn't seem to be joking; Natalie, Grace, Charlotte, and Tessa. She remembered Tessa’s name because she took one assessing look at Sunny's good-but-three-years-old shoes and offered up the fact that she ran the only clothing store in town and got things in on consignment all the time.
She said Sunny should stop by. No charge to look, after all.
They asked her nothing she didn't want to answer.
Instead, they told her whose kid was whose, which of them had cried at the grocery store that week, who'd fixed whose furnace.
They had a shorthand that came from shared suffering, the kind that only came from standing in the same foxhole at the same time.
But to her vast surprise, they didn’t make her earn her way in. They just made room in their sisterhood, the way they casually set up another card table for the kids, who were eating in the kitchen, and made room for four more children with zero fuss.
Presley and Makayla, the eleven-year-old who belonged to Tessa, had their heads together and were talking and laughing up a storm. Sunny hadn’t seen her daughter this animated and happy in months.
Supper was a noisy, hilarious affair, and every time Sunny glanced from the dining room where the women sat to the kitchen, all four of her kids were grinning ear to ear.
After supper, she pitched in to help clear the tables, throw away the paper plates and plastic cups because life was too short to spend it washing dishes, according to the WoWS and fold up the two card tables in the kitchen.
The women adjourned to the living room while Jack hauled the kids back outside in the last of the light for one last play before it got dark.
He’d apparently arranged some sort of team activity, for half the kids snuck in the door and tiptoed through the kitchen until someone shouted in the backyard and the other half of the kids charged inside as well.
Sunny watched the first herd thunder past with Chloe installed on Jack's shoulders, shrieking like a small auburn warlord and laughing uncontrollably as Jack intentionally jostled her until her teeth rattled.
Sunny looked around the women gathering around her in wonder. This was the first time she’d been with other people in three years when she hadn't had to stay alert and on guard for the gotcha waiting to ambush her.
Her old friends from before the scandal had been kind to her, continued to invite her to social functions, and hadn’t judged her to her face.
But inevitably, somebody made a snide comment wondering how much money Winston hid that the lawyers didn’t find, or dropped a veiled reference to his suicide, or sometimes they even asked outright if she knew where his missing millions were.
As if she would be sticking around California and all its painful memories if she had any idea where his secret stash of money was hidden.
"All right." Rose dropped onto the sofa beside her, having put away the last of the food. "Down to business, Ladies.”
The women went silent, looking at Rose expectantly.
Rose said, “Sunny needs a job and an affordable place to stay, and she's too proud to say so, which I respect, so I’m doing it for her.
" She said it matter-of-factly, and the other women heard it matter-of-factly.
Sunny got the distinct impression members of this group had brought worse problems than hers to the meeting over the years.
Rose turned to the youngest member of the group, a schoolteacher whose name escaped her, and said, "Natalie, didn’t you say you’re losing the current tenant in your rental soon? When’s she moving out?”
Right. Natalie. Sunny made a mental note that Natalie was the only one wearing a wedding ring along with her engagement ring.
"It's empty as of last week." Natalie answered Rose.
Then she turned in her chair to face Sunny.
"It’s three bedrooms, 1 ⒈／⒉ baths. A bungalow on Larch Street, two blocks from the elementary school and a block from Main Street.
It's small and the kitchen's from about 1987, but everything works, the roof's new, it’s fully furnished, and the rent's whatever you can do.
I would so much rather have you in it than a stranger.
" She tipped her head thinking. "Will your kids be okay in a three bedroom house? "
Presley was the only one of her children old enough to remember the mansion they used to live in. And she’d been a saint the past three years, never once complaining about their reduced circumstances and financial difficulties.