used to, Granny Annie,” Cash said, taking her skeletal hand in his. “A long time ago. When Lee and I were kids. I’m Cash.”
Annie fiddled with her glasses, large-framed holdovers from the Reagan era. “Cash Cochran? Dwight’s youngest boy?”
“That’s right,” he said, pain flashing briefly in his eyes. “I was so sorry to hear about his passing—”
Annie snatched back her hand, looking like she might smack Cash with the brush. Deaf she might be, but Emma’d put her money on the old gal in a back-alley brawl any day. “He’s been gone how long now? And you’re only now showing up?” Her thin, wrinkled lips smashed flat, she inched back to the canvas to jab “leaves” on “trees.” “Everybody loved that boy. Everybody. Seems to me a friend would’ve at least come to his funeral—”
“He didn’t know, Annie. Really.” At Annie’s if-you-say-so shrug, Emma said to Cash, “Why don’t you help yourself to that coffee while I check on my daughter? She’s home from school with a cold, nothing serious. I’ll be right there.”
Then she hightailed it down the hall, stealing a few seconds to deal with the blow of discovering her husband had lied to her. Not to mention escape Cash’s eyes. Big, hurting eyes that made a woman want to get inside and tinker. Fix things.
Like she didn’t have enough to fix already.
Too bad she couldn’t lock up her nurturing instincts as easily as she had her libido. Between widowhood and being pregnant and the farm and everything else, all thoughts of hanky-panky had been shoved into a locked file drawer marked “Expired.” But her chronic attraction to the brokenhearted? To the grave, baby. To the grave.
She’d long since given up trying to figure out her penchant for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to break free of whatever put expressions like that on their faces. Lee had razzed her about it all the time, even as he said that was why he loved her, because her heart was even bigger than her butt.
A comment only Lee could have gotten away with, she mused, pausing outside Zoey’s door. Lee, who’d also always wanted to make everybody happy. Even if that meant—in his case—keeping one or more parties in the dark.
Leaving Emma with the tidying up.
Thinking, So what else is new? she finally peeked through Zoey’s partially open door into an explosion of sour-apple green and bubble-gum pink. A conglomeration of skinny appendages, freckles and wayward hair, her daughter was drawing, sprawled on the rag rug Annie’d made for her when she was a baby, in the same colors that had inspired the prissy color scheme. Beside her towered a mountain of used pink tissues, like blobs of cotton candy.
“How’re you doing, baby? And throw those tissues in the garbage.”
“They’re yucky.”
“Which is why you get to throw them away. Not me.”
With a sigh strong enough to rustle the offending tissues, the child gathered them up, then stood and dumped them into her trash can, decorated with a big-eyed Disney princess. “Is the man gone?”
Apprehension curled in the pit of Emma’s stomach. Not eagerly anticipating the upcoming conversation, nope. “How’d you know about him?”
“Saw him out the window.” Blue eyes, no less sharp for their wateriness, shot to Emma’s. “Who is he?” she croaked, like a baby bullfrog.
“An old friend of your daddy’s. And keep your voice down, he’s right in the kitchen.”
“How come?”
“Because he and I have stuff to talk over. Grown-up stuff.”
Zoey sniffed out a put-upon sigh, a trait she’d perfected by two, before blowing her nose again. “He looks like that guy Daddy used to listen to all the time on the country music station.”
“That’s because he is.”
Eyes popped. “You serious?”
“Yes. And no, you can’t tell anybody.”
“Is he gonna stay?”
“Here? No, of course not. He’s got his own place.” Emma paused, briefly considering the weirdness that was Cash Cochran moving back to Tierra Rosa. “He used to live here. In this house, I mean.”
“No way!”
“Yep.”
Pale eyebrows pushed together. “He doesn’t want it back, does he?”
“I highly doubt it. And even if he did, it’s ours now. Nobody can take it from us.” At least, that was the plan. “You want more juice?”
“No, I’m good,” Zoey said, handing Emma her empty glass before flopping back onto her tummy on the rug, like she didn’t have a care in the world. Considering how attached Zoey’d been to her daddy, the child must’ve inherited Emma’s fake-it-till-you-make-it gene. However, her recent disposition to inviting in every cold virus that passed through town led Emma to suspect she wasn’t over her daddy’s death nearly as much as she let on.
“Hey,” Emma said. Zoey looked up. “Love you.”
That got a holey smile in response. “Love you, too, Mama.”
Releasing a breath, Emma tromped back down the hall to discover Cash—clearly not inclined to stay where he’d been put—standing in her tiny dining room, his fingers curled around a mug, staring at the sixteen-by-twenty J.C. Penney photo special taking up a good chunk of the paneled wall by the window.
“This is real nice,” he said, in the manner of somebody who realized he’d missed out on a thing or two.
Emma forced her eyes to the portrait, even though it made her heart ache. Lee’d gone on Weight Watchers the year before; he’d been so proud of how much he’d slimmed down he’d insisted they get their picture taken. Although slimmed was a relative term. For both of them. Now, though, she was glad she’d shoved her pride where the sun don’t shine and done what Lee’d wanted. Aside from their wedding album, it was the best picture she had of him. If she’d had any part in making him as happy as he seemed in that picture, she supposed she’d done okay.
Sure, she was ticked that Lee’d skirted the truth about what he’d told Cash, but no doubt he had his reasons. He always did. She sighed over the dull pang that became fuzzier around the edges every day. Heaven knew neither of them was perfect, but they’d been good together. Real good. The kind of good a smart woman knew better than to expect more than once in her lifetime—
“Your boy—he okay?”
Wrapped in his father’s arms from behind, Hunter beamed his customary infectious grin at the camera, his glasses crooked as usual. But how could she have forgotten, even for a moment, that the rest of the world saw “normal” through a completely different lens than she did? That to most people her boy’s slanted eyes and thick neck and fine hair defined him in a way that provoked either pity or discomfort, if not both. If Cash was feeling either of those things, though, she couldn’t tell.
Emma
