the old fellow. “The big wind knocked down our barns and now they’re cleaning it up for us. Isn’t that so nice of them?”
Libby had placed a call to the insurance company once Mortie and Jax McClaren had left, but she hadn’t heard back from them. They wouldn’t just send a team out to start fixing things the next morning, would they?
Jax’s extended-cab pickup truck rolled into the driveway right then. The sharp truck gleamed white in the September sun. He parked but didn’t come straight for the house. He met with the workers out back, then came their way. Libby met him before he got to the side door. “You did this?” She motioned to the oversize machines churning a hundred and fifty feet away from them.
“Can’t rebuild until we’ve cleared the area, right?”
“Except I haven’t even heard back from the insurance agency. How will they know what to settle if they don’t see evidence?”
He held up his phone. “Pictures. I took several yesterday. Between those and the building’s footprint on the ground—”
“The what?”
“The space a building takes up on the ground is its footprint.”
“So the area of the base as opposed to the cubic footage.”
He smiled as if she was suddenly talking his language. “Exactly. They can figure that out mathematically. Did you have replacement coverage or cash value?”
She heard Gramps coming through the door and didn’t want him upset by too much talk. “Cash value. Which means only the estimated value of the property in current condition gets paid out. Correct?” She didn’t have to ask because she’d worried about that all night, hence the dark circles under her eyes. What was it about this guy that made her think about her looks?
“There are ways of making it stretch.”
“I can make a fitted sheet stretch. Money’s tougher. But you’re right,” she added as Gramps drew near. “There’s always a way to make things work.”
“Your grandma said we should get the best insurance we could because old folks like us can’t be fixing things on a thin dime, but I told her our policy was fine and look at this!” Gramps stumped his cane against the stone driveway. He remembered to use it fifty percent of the time. The other half he shuffled along, finding a foot grip. “Look how quick they got here. I guess I was right again, eh?”
“You did just fine, sir.”
Jax’s words and his deferential tone puffed up Gramps’s chest.
Libby knew the work crew had nothing to do with the farm’s thin insurance policy, and Jax could have inflated his own ego by taking credit.
But he didn’t.
He let an aging dementia patient claim the kudos and seemed fine doing it. What kind of man did that?
A nice one, her conscience scolded. There are lots of nice people in this world. Stop being jaded.
There were nice people.
Libby knew that.
But her family’s reputation in Golden Grove left a sour taste on a lot of tongues. Her parents hadn’t been the raise-your-kid-normal and go-to-church-on-Sunday sort and when Grandma sent them packing, they took the one thing Grandma didn’t want them to take.
Her.
Then sent her back with a sack of ill-fitting clothes when they got tired of her eighteen months later.
Folks had looked at her funny then. And some still looked at her funny, but now she was mature enough to shrug it off. “I’ve got to get CeeCee ready for school. Gramps, are you going to stay outside and watch the action?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” He’d set an old hat on his head. He was still in his pajama pants and a faded blue cotton T-shirt, but it was a mild morning. “If Mother comes looking for me, tell her where I am.”
“I will.” She was never quite sure if she should play along or explain reality to him, and no one seemed to have the answer. This time she played along.
Jax shot her a look of sympathy. The look felt good. As if someone besides Carol Mortimer understood the situation and was on her side, but she’d been fooled by a man before.
Her ex-husband had taught her a valuable lesson about trust. If she and CeeCee went through life as a duo, she was okay with that. She’d been raised by parents who really never cared. CeeCee would never need to say that.
The five-year-old met her at the door. “Look. I got all dressed for school so I can see the fixer guys. Okay?”
“Okay, once you eat breakfast. What’ll it be? A bagel or cereal or an apple?”
“Apple!”
“Ginger Gold or Gala?”
“The redder one.”
Libby cut the Gala into slices. She’d seen a study online that talked about the amazing health benefit of apples, how modern science proved the old adage “an apple a day” true. How apples were like the perfect food.
They would have lots of apples for the coming months. That was an added bonus of being on the farm. But with the barn gone and the insurance shortfall and the co-pays on Gramps’s meds, the already tight situation had just become impossible.
With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.
One of Grandma’s favorite verses in the Bible. The walls of the house were peppered with cross-stitched Bible verses.
Libby would cling to the idea that all things were possible. She hadn’t come back here by choice but by necessity. God had worked that timing out perfectly. So now?
She would put this firmly in His hands because once CeeCee was on that school bus, she had an orchard to spray, and right now she was just real glad she’d parked the tractor outside the barn before it blew down.
The tractor wasn’t parked outside the barn.
It was under the barn. Buried. And as the gaping mechanical claw reached in and scooped up a serving of weathered wood, a generous section of the tractor went with it.
Libby couldn’t take her eyes from the scene.
She’d parked the tractor here. Right here. At the edge of the driveway leading to the orchard because her phone alarm had startled her. And besides, they rarely put the tractor in the big barn except at the end of the season, once the apple sales were complete.
Gone.
Demolished.
Emotions didn’t just rock her this time. They fought their way for possession, like that giant claw digging through a debris field of shattered hopes and dreams.
Now
