1. Josie
Josie
In exactly four weeks, the Porter family reunion will assemble in my parents' backyard. Forty-one relatives. Two casserole tables. And somewhere among them, smiling, single, and recently relocated, the alpha my mother has hand-picked for me this year.
She does it every reunion. She thinks she's subtle. Last year his name was Davis, and he showed me photos of his boat for forty minutes while my entire family watched us like a nature documentary.
This morning, though, the reunion is still a month away and none of it is my problem yet. This morning, my biggest crisis is armed with a paintbrush.
The walk to Little Hollow Preschool takes eleven minutes if I don't stop, which I always do, because the walk goes straight down Main, and nobody gets down Main unbothered. The bakery's putting out trays. The Book Nook's cat is in the window judging everyone.
And at Dottie's Diner, in the second booth from the door, where by all accounts he has sat every morning since the invention of coffee, Pete raps his knuckles on the glass and points at me like he's hailing a cab.
I wave. He beckons. I point at my wrist where a watch would be if I wore one. He holds up one finger, mouths something elaborate, and I keep walking, because whatever Pete has, and Pete always has something, it'll keep until I have the strength.
Through the diner window, Dottie catches my eye over the coffee pot and rolls hers, which is Dottie for I've been listening to it since six.
This is my town. Eleven minutes of it, every morning, mountains on all sides and everybody in everybody's business, and I love every nosy inch of it.
I didn't grow up here. I grew up forty minutes down the highway in Pine Valley, in a house with a big backyard and a bigger extended family, and I moved to the Hollow five years ago for the teaching job. I stayed for everything else.
By eight forty, I'm on the alphabet rug, losing a negotiation.
“We don't paint Wren,” I tell Bodhi, down at his level. “Wren is a person. People aren't walls.”
“She said I could.”
“I didn’t.” Wren stands very still beside him, a blue handprint drying on her cheek.
“She said it with her eyes,” Bodhi tells me, grave as a tiny defense attorney.
“Eyes don't talk, bud. We use our words, and then we wait for a yes.” I look at Wren. “Did you say yes?”
“No.”
“That settles it.”
I hold my hand out. Bodhi surrenders the brush with a sigh, like I've ended something beautiful, and I send them both to the sink. Halfway there they're holding hands again. The war is already forgotten. That's the magic of being four. No yesterday, no ten minutes ago. Just right now.
Must be nice.
I'm good at this. I'll say it even though you're not supposed to. Twelve kids, half of them with strong opinions, one conducting an opera only he can hear, and I'll have every one of them fed, calm, and roughly horizontal by nap time.
It's the one room in my life that does what I tell it to.
For two more weeks, anyway. Then the term ends, the room empties out for the summer, and I become a woman with twelve weeks of unstructured time and no idea what to do with a single one of them. I try not to think about it. I'm very good at not thinking about it.
I restock the paint cups. I referee a dispute over whether dinosaurs can be firefighters, ruling yes, with conditions.
I peel Hazel off the bookshelf she is not allowed to climb and redirect her to the climbing structure she finds insulting.
The morning hums along, and I move through it the way I always do, a little smug about how well the machine runs.
“Miss Josie.” A tug at my sleeve. Junie, holding a drawing in both hands like it's made of glass. “It's my family.”
I crouch down. Four stick people and a brown blob. “Walk me through it.”
“That's Mama.” The tall one, triangle dress. “My daddies.” Three more, assorted heights, one with a beard that's mostly scribble. “And Biscuit.” The blob. A dog, I'm choosing to believe. She looks up at me, small and proud, her whole family in crayon. “Where's yours?”
“Where's my what, bug?”
“Your alphas.” She asks it the way she'd ask where I keep the glue sticks. “You can draw them on the back. There's room.”
She holds the paper up. Offering me the space.
I keep my face exactly where it is. My scent is another story. It thins out, going faintly burnt at the edges, and I breathe through it until it settles.
“I don't have any, sweet pea.”
Junie frowns, genuinely confused. “Why not?”
“Just haven't yet.”
“My mama says everybody gets a pack.”
“Your mama's an optimist.” I tap the beard daddy. “He's my favorite. Go put this somewhere safe before someone paints it.”
She trots off, satisfied. Posy wanders over thirty seconds later wanting up, the way she does a dozen times a day, and I set her on my hip and let her tuck her face into my shoulder. For a minute we both get to pretend the morning is going great.
“That was brutal,” Lily says from the doorway.
My co-teacher. My best friend. Currently holding two coffees from Dottie's and the look she gets when she's witnessed something I'd rather she hadn't.
“That was a four-year-old offering me real estate on her family portrait,” I say, setting Posy down at the play kitchen. “I'm fine.”
Lily hums, unconvinced, and lets it go.
I take the cup she hands me. The good one.
Oat milk, too much cinnamon, the order Dottie grumbles about every morning and gets perfect every time.
I knock my suppressant back with the first sip, same as always.
No heat, no cycle. A tremendous deal, considering the alternative is spending three days a season aching for a pack I don't have.
“Pete flagged me down through the glass this morning,” I say, to change the subject. “Full knuckle-rap. Pointing.”
“He's been on a tear since Monday. He's telling everyone the Johnsons are selling, which they're not, and that the new EMT's fiancée is secretly one of the Pine Valley Calloways, marrying down, which she isn't. She's a nurse. He's just a guy.” Lily sips. “Dottie threatened to decaf him.”
“She'd never.”
“She keeps the threat polished. Anyway.” And her voice does a small shift, casual laid over careful, which I should have clocked. “Your mom called the school line.”
I lower the cup. “When.”
“While you were in the paint thing. I told her you couldn't come to the phone, which was true.” She watches me over the lid. “She used the voice.”
“There's no voice.”
“Josie. There is a voice. That voice could strip the finish off a table.”
She's not wrong. My mother has a tone for when she wants something, and it's never about what she says it's about.
A casserole. A cousin's promotion. Whether I'm coming to the thing, and there is always a thing.
And tucked inside every thing, smiling, doing very well for himself, an alpha she's decided is just lovely.
“The reunion's in a month,” Lily says, gentle now, which is worse. “She's going to ask if you're bringing anyone.”
“I'm not bringing anyone.”
“I know. She knows. But she'll ask in the way where 'no' becomes a conversation, and the conversation becomes a car ride, and the car ride becomes dinner with a man named Gerald.”
“His name won't be Gerald.”
“It'll be Gerald-shaped regardless.”
Across the room, Posy holds up a pretend soup. I cross over and taste the empty bowl and tell her it needs salt. She nods like a serious little chef and gets back to work.
Then the fire engine goes by.
Twelve children hit the window like the building's been tilted. The truck rolls past slow, lights off, no emergency, just headed back to the station, and up in the cab Finn Morrow stares straight ahead, doing his level best to ignore an entire window full of waving toddlers.
He makes it almost all the way past. Then his hand comes up off the wheel. Barely. Two fingers.
Twelve kids lose their minds.
Grumpiest man in Huckleberry Hollow. Waves anyway. Every time.
He also happens to owe me a favor he's been hoping for two months I forgot about. But that's neither here nor there, and for one more hour my life stays exactly the size of this room, which is the size I like it.
I hold out until lunch. Barely.
I get through snack, where I negotiate a cracker-based trade agreement.
I get through circle time, where we learn that the opera child's saga has a sequel.
I get the room down for rest, lights low, white-noise machine doing its ocean impression, and the whole time my phone sits in my bag, ticking.
I tell myself I'm not going to call her back at lunch.
I'm absolutely going to call her back at lunch.
Then Lily takes the room, and I carry my phone out to the gravel lot behind the building where the cell signal lives.
Calling her back is self-defense. If I don't, she'll keep trying the school until somebody worse at lying than me picks up, and there is nobody in the entire state of Montana worse at lying than me.
It's not a moral stance. I'd lie constantly if I could.
The equipment just isn't there. My voice goes up, my ears go red, my scent does something tragic.
Small children have caught me pretending the class fish “went to live at the lake.”
She answers before the first ring finishes. “There she is.”
“Hi, Mom.”
“I tried the school.”
“I know. I was up to my elbows in finger paint.”
“I have wonderful news.”
She announces it the way she'd unveil a cake, and my scent goes sharp out in the cold air before the rest of me catches up. My body has known this woman for twenty-eight years. It recognizes the sound of an ambush.
“You remember Sandra. From book club. Her nephew just moved back to Pine Valley. Settled, lovely, an alpha, runs his own accounting firm. His own firm, Josie. And single.”
“Mom—”
“He's a little quiet, but you talk plenty for two.”
“I'm at work.”
“It's one dinner. I already told Sandra you'd say yes, so it would be quite awkward now if you didn't.”
“You told Sandra?”
“His name's Gerald.”
I take the phone away from my ear and look at the mountains for a moment. Two hours ago I stood in my classroom and told Lily his name would not be Gerald.
It's Gerald.
A magpie lands on the fence post and stares at me.
“Josie? Are you still there?”
“I'm here.”
“He could just meet us at the reunion. It's perfect. The whole family around, nice and casual, no pressure at all.”
No pressure. From the woman who's spent my entire adult life applying it with both hands and a warm smile.
The whole reunion plays out in my head while she talks. I've lived it a dozen times, so every detail is accurate. The long table. The kids' end, the couples' end, and then my end, down between the coleslaw and Aunt Deb's sympathy.
Every settled pack leaning in over dessert to ask, so kindly, when it's going to be my turn, while my own scent announces to every alpha in a half-mile radius that I am, biologically speaking, extremely available.
And this year, the new feature. Gerald, seated beside me. Gerald, pulling out my chair. My mother across the table with her hands clasped, watching us with her hands clasped like it's all finally going according to plan.
“Mom.”
“And before you say you're too busy, your cousin writes entire novels, manages a pack, and is giving this family a baby, sweetheart, so I know it can be done.”
And there she is. Cara. Cara, who I love.
Cara, who went home and ended up bonded to her three high school sweethearts, which is a very different thing from conjuring three alphas out of thin air, not that anyone in this family is interested in the distinction.
She's been deployed against me on every one of these calls since, like a closing argument.
Here's the truth about me, and it isn't flattering.
When I get cornered, I don't push back. I never have.
I reach for whatever makes the worried sound in someone's voice stop fastest. I've spent my whole life being the easy one, the fine one, the one nobody has to fret about, and I am so tired of being the project this family gathers around to fix.
“You don't have to set me up,” I say. “I have a pack.”
Silence.
One full, beautiful second of it. Inside that second, the worry just drains out of the line, gone, like a plug pulled from a sink.
And it feels good. It feels embarrassingly good.
“You have a what?”
“A pack.” Take it back. Take it back right now, you absolute catastrophe of a woman. “I, um.”
“You have a pack?” Her voice climbs somewhere I have never heard it go. “Josephine Anne. Since when? How long? Who are they? Frank.” Her hand muffles the speaker. “Frank, she has a pack.”
From somewhere deep in the house, my father makes the sound he makes for touchdowns.
“Mom—”
“You'll bring them. Oh, you have to bring them, everyone will be there, all of us, finally—”
And then her voice cracks. Right down the middle.
“Baby, I have been so worried about you. And you've just been keeping them all to yourself?”
And that's the sound of it. The worry I've spent twenty-eight years trying to smooth off that voice. Gone. Replaced by something so happy it hurts to hear.
This is the moment. A braver woman laughs and says Mom, I panicked, there's no pack, I'm sorry. The sentence is right there. Eleven words. I've talked toddlers off ledges with less.
“They can't wait to meet you,” I say.
Excellent teacher. Patient friend. Genuinely fun at parties.
And the single most spineless liar the great state of Montana has ever produced.
She's crying when we hang up. Happy crying, dish-towel crying, calling for my father again before the line even goes dead. I stand in the gravel lot and let my scent do whatever it wants, since there's no one out here to fool but the magpie.
A month. A guest list with three blank lines on it. A mother forty minutes away, weeping with joy over a pack that does not exist.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and make myself breathe. Okay. Okay. I wrangle twelve four-year-olds a day. I made this crisis, which means I can unmake it.
I need three alphas. I need them in a month.
And one of them already owes me a favor.