He was right, though. They should keep their distance. The last thing she needed right now was another fling. What Savannah needed was to figure out why she kept sabotaging every good thing that happened to her. Getting wrapped up in Collin Tyler was not going to help her figure that out. She wondered if Slippery Rock had a therapist with a couch she could borrow for an hour or so.
Mama Hazel bumped her elbow into Savannah’s ribs. “He’s turned into quite the nice-looking young man, hasn’t he?” Her gaze, too, focused on Collin’s butt as he bent to pick up another crate of apples. He stood and Savannah swore she could see his quads and hamstrings ripple beneath the worn denim covering his thighs. She shook herself.
“I hadn’t noticed,” she lied, and quickly began rearranging the pie boxes on the folding table Levi had set up earlier that morning.
“Psshh,” Mama Hazel grunted. “You didn’t notice that boy about as much as I didn’t notice him.” Savannah shot her mother a shocked glance. “What? I’m married and over fifty. That doesn’t mean I’ve lost my ability to recognize Grade A Man Meat when I see it.”
Savannah blinked. She didn’t think her mother had ever said something so...sexual before.
Hazel giggled like a schoolgirl and the crow’s feet at her eyes deepened.
“I don’t think you’ve ever said anything like that to me before.”
“Then it’s high time I did. For example, and this will deepen that blush on your cheeks a bit, did you know your father—”
“No, don’t say it,” Savannah interrupted, shaking her head as she put her fingers in her ears. “I’d like to keep my illusions about you and daddy and your abstinent lives intact, please.”
“And just how did we get Levi if we were abstinent?”
“The same way you got me. Stork.” Savannah finished her pie box pyramid and started on a pyramid of blackberry preserves. Hazel laughed.
“You children are hysterical. Over twenty-five and still believing in the stork and that their parents don’t have the sex.”
“First, it isn’t ‘the sex,’ it’s just sex. And, no, parents aren’t allowed to have it. It’s in the parenting rule book.”
Hazel took apart Savannah’s pie pyramid, grumbling about the lattice work denting from the stack. “Hate to break it to you, Van, but there is no rule book. It’s just a lot of luck and figuring things out on the fly.”
Savannah chewed on her lower lip, considering. This wasn’t the place to have a conversation about her childhood, but so far she’d been pretty good at avoiding having it at the ranch. Maybe having it here, where they’d be interrupted occasionally by customers, would make it simpler.
“I made you figure a lot out on the fly.”
Hazel chuckled and finished arranging the pie boxes in a pretty fan pattern. “You were a challenge, that’s true, but I’ve always liked a challenge. And I loved you from the moment I laid eyes on you in the back of that social worker’s minivan.”
“I wasn’t much to look at.”
Her mother shook her head. “You weren’t. Hair all tangled up because the white officers who brought you in didn’t know what to do with it, dirty from head to toe, and wearing not much more than a few rags. You looked at me, and I just knew.”
“Knew what?” Savannah asked after a long minute.
“Knew you were mine.” Hazel wiped a dark brown hand over the pristine tablecloth. “Just like I knew you needed your space when you were in Los Angeles. Just like I knew you’d come back home when you were ready. The only thing I don’t know is how long you’re staying.”
Savannah wasn’t sure how to answer her. She’d left Slippery Rock because she didn’t feel she belonged here. Had followed her wandering heart to a reality show, and then a recording studio in Nashville. She had an album nearly finished, had been kicked off a tour and was now persona non grata in Nashville for at least a little while. She’d been back in Slippery Rock for nearly two weeks, and she knew she couldn’t hide forever, but for now, it felt right to be here.
More right than it had felt in any of the years she’d lived here as a child, and she thought maybe it was because coming back had been her choice. Sure, she’d been running away from something bad, but she could have kept running instead of stopping here.
She didn’t want to tell her mother about Nashville yet, though. If she never had to tell her, that might be for the best. Savannah had a feeling Hazel’s support might not survive a blow like that. And where would she be if the one person who had been fighting for her all her life suddenly stopped fighting for her? What if Nashville was the thing that made Mama and Daddy and Levi realize they never really loved her at all?
A few customers began trickling in the doors. Savannah put on her best reality-show contestant smile and focused her attention on the locals buying her mother’s pies and jams instead of the unasked questions in her mom’s dark brown eyes.
By noon they had sold out of Mama Hazel’s pies and had only a couple jars of preserves left. The cool of the early morning had long passed, and when a break in customers occurred, Savannah offered to run down to the bait shop for a couple of cold drinks.
She crossed the street, waving to a family in a minivan who allowed her to cross early. Barrels filled with marigolds, petunias and impatiens were placed every few feet along the main street of town. She’d always thought they were too hokey for words, but the familiarity of them was actually nice.
Bud’s Bait Shop, which did double duty as a sandwich shop, was blessedly cool when she opened the door. A small bell hanging over the door tinkled. Air-conditioning poured into the hot street, and Savannah breathed deep.
Bud stood behind the counter, and he seemed shorter to Savannah. He still wore his salt-and-pepper hair in a comb-over, and his overalls were a pinstriped blue-and-white, just as she remembered.
Hand-written signs advertising night crawlers and worms were taped to a glass-fronted cooler on the left side of the counter. On the right was a menu for cold cut sub sandwiches, coleslaw and potato salad. The same brands of fishing lures lined the shelves, and along the back wall were fishing poles in every color, shape and size Savannah could imagine. It was like stepping back in time.
“Hey, Bud, two Cokes, please. From the fountain.”
“Savannah Walters. I heard you were back in town. What’s going on with that fancy Nashville record deal?” he asked as he shoveled ice into two oversize foam cups and set them under the fountain machine.
“It’s going,” she said, and ordered herself to come up with something better to say to the question nearly everyone in town had asked since she’d returned. “I cut the last song a few weeks ago.” She didn’t bother to tell the now-familiar lie that she was taking a break from the tour. Lying made her feel almost as squidgy as anticipating how people would treat her when they learned why she’d really left Nashville. “How’s the bait business?”
“Better the bait, the shorter the wait,” Bud said. “Be better if we could get some rain in here, cool off the water. Hot lake makes the fish lazy.”
“I always thought a hot lake made the fish frisky.”
Bud put lids on the cups and punched a few numbers on the register. “Depends on the day, I suppose. That’ll be two dollars.”
She handed him the money, stuck straws in her back pocket and picked up the drinks. “See ya later, Bud.”
“See ya, Savannah,” he said as she pushed the door open with her hip. “You tell Hazel if she has any preserves left, I’ll take ’em.”
Hot, sticky air assaulted her, making her wish she’d put the straws in the cups for a quick sip before leaving the air-conditioning of Bud’s shop.
She hurried across the street, handed her mother one of the Cokes and shoved her straw through the plastic lid before taking a long drink. She closed her eyes, letting a few of the bubbles tickle her
nose, enjoying the taste. The advisors for the reality show had told the contestants to back off sugary drinks and fried foods during the show, hoping to keep everyone svelte and looking good on the cameras.
Savannah had kicked her Coke habit cold turkey. Until today. And she didn’t even care that the cup in her hand represented about three hundred bad calories. It tasted like heaven.
Finally, she looked around. Most of the other vendors were tearing down tables and displays. Their table was completely empty. “Darn, Bud was hoping for a jar of preserves,” she said.
Hazel nodded. “I swear, that man has to be about fifty percent preserves by now. I saved him a jar, and I’ll have your father drop it off when he stops in there for his usual Saturday cheat meal.” Bennett’s cheat meal consisted of a sub with every kind of lunch meat Bud had on hand, a slathering of mustard, and Colby Jack cheese. Savannah’s stomach growled. Not a good idea. Cheating with a soda was one thing; a sandwich like Bennett’s might send her into a deep food binge.
Savannah took the white cloth from the table and began folding it. Hazel took it from her. “Don’t do that, sweetheart. I can get it. Why don’t you go see if your father or brother needs anything?”
Savannah felt a little like a teenager, being told where to go, but Hazel had always been particular about how things were folded and put away. She figured letting her mother do the grunt work would actually save time. And give her a moment to apologize to Collin Tyler for...whatever that had been at the lake.
Okay, so she didn’t want to apologize to him so much as just talk to him again. The man was like a denim-clad, dusty magnet, and maybe if she talked to him her brain would wrap around the fact that he was just another guy.
Nothing special.
She caught a glimpse of him through the plate-glass window fronting the inside of the market, and her heart thumped in her chest. So maybe he was grumpy and uninterested in her, but there was definitely something attractive about Collin Tyler. Maybe she would just ogle him a little.
She found a stall that had already been emptied out in the parking lot, sat on the table and watched. Levi and her father had things clearly in hand at the dairy table. A couple of farmers loaded their leftovers into the beds of their pickup trucks. Collin sat on the gate of his truck, feet dangling inside dusty boots, and a tight T-shirt covering his torso. He was chewing on what appeared to be a piece of straw, making Savannah laugh.
Only in Missouri would a twenty-eight-year-old orchard owner sit on the gate of his truck chewing on a stick of straw like some actor in one of those black-and-white comedies from the 1940s.
Only in Missouri would the man not look ridiculous doing it.
Okay, maybe cowboys in Texas or Wyoming could look that good being a stereotype, too. But still.
“He looks ridiculous,” a sullen voice said to Savannah’s left. A young girl with long blond hair in a French braid, wearing a faded T-shirt, ripped jeans and Chuck Taylors rolled her eyes when Savannah turned in her direction. “Like we’re living in the eighteen hundreds instead of the twenty-first century.”
“I take it you don’t like farmers’ markets?”
The girl scuffed her shoe against some loose gravel. “Not when I’m here under duress. He says I owe him compensation.”
“Amanda Tyler, right?” The girl nodded. Savannah didn’t remember her exactly, but her features were too similar to Collin’s to deny, and since she was too old to be his secret love child, she had to be his sister. His other sister. Savannah and Mara were the same age, although they’d never been close friends. Amanda was clearly several years younger. “Savannah Walters.”
“I know who you are. You almost won that singing show last winter.” Amanda breathed a heavy sigh. “Even people who get out of this town don’t really get out of it.”
Oh, she could so relate to the teenager. The last place she’d wanted to be when she was sixteen was Slippery Rock. People either called her Levi’s sister, ignored her completely or made not-quite-whispered insinuations about her adoption and the possibility that either Bennett or Hazel had a love child. Or that she was a drug baby from Springfield who needed to be saved by the wholesome Bennett family. The speculation was endless. She patted the table beside her.
“Pull up a corner of the table and we can plot your exit from the oppressive Slippery Rock.”
That got a grin from Amanda. She sat beside Savannah, swinging her legs.
“Why do you owe him compensation?”
She mumbled something Savannah didn’t catch, but before she could ask again, Collin interrupted.
“I said five minutes, not fifty.” Annoyance laced his words and his expression, which was focused on Savannah rather than his sister.
“There was a line at Bud’s and I was barely gone fifteen,” Amanda retorted. She shoved the cup in her hands at her brother and stomped off. “I’ll be in the truck if my penance is over.”
“What did she do?” Savannah couldn’t resist asking.
Collin looked from her to his sister’s retreating back, and then winced when she slammed the door of his truck. “She shouldn’t have been—” he squeezed his eyebrows together as if searching for the right word “—bothering you.”
Savannah sat straighter, reading between the lines. He didn’t really see this situation as Amanda bugging someone, he saw it as his innocent baby sister being led astray by Savannah Walters, Screwup. “You really think in the two minutes we were talking I could have convinced her to...what? Run away from home?”
“Isn’t that what you did?”
“I tried out for a reality show. I was over twenty-one. It isn’t the same thing.”
“That isn’t what I was talking about.”
Savannah blinked.
Collin watched her for a long moment, and then said, “I was talking about homecoming night, my senior year, your junior.”
Her breath caught in her throat. She didn’t think anyone outside the family knew about the time she really had run away. The night the boy who’d asked her to the homecoming dance, the boy who’d made her feel like she might finally fit in here, had called to tell her he couldn’t take her to the dance because she was mixed race. She’d been waiting by the front door in the pretty peach gown she and Hazel had found in Joplin, she’d straightened her hair and spent an hour on her makeup.
And she’d wanted to die.
She’d run as far as she could, gotten lost in the woods between the ranch and the lake, and spent most of the cold, rainy night hugging a tree trunk and hoping there were no wolves or bears in Missouri. Bennett had found her at dawn the next day. He’d carried her home, but no matter how gently they’d asked what had happened, Savannah hadn’t been able to tell them.
People in town trusted and liked the Walterses, despite racial tensions in the area, but she wasn’t really a Walters. She was different, and that boy made sure she knew it.
“How did you know about that?”
“Who do you think drove all the country roads with Levi that night while your dad and my grandfather and Sheriff Calhoun searched the woods?”
She swallowed. He’d helped look for her. God, no wonder the pristine Collin Tyler wanted nothing to do with her. Collin, who had the perfect life with his perfect family whose roots went back further than the Walters clan. Collin, who was a Tyler by birth, unlike her, a Walters by adoption.
“I should thank you for helping Levi that night. And it was no bother talking to Amanda. Mama Hazel sent me out here to get out of her way and into my dad’s. I decided to steer clear of both and enjoy a cold drink. Amanda made for a little company.”
“Still. She had her orders.”
“And I’m not the kind of influence you want around her. Well, from what I recall, teenage girls don’t do so well with orders. You didn’t answer my question. What did she do? Skip c
urfew?” Savannah knew she should drop the subject, but she couldn’t. Despite Amanda’s obvious annoyance at Collin, there was something very connected about the two of them. Family dynamics fascinated her.
Collin rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “What hasn’t she done? Cut class, skipped curfew. She was with the kids who set that fire downtown just after you got back into town. Last weekend she duct taped the one-ways downtown to run the way she thought made more sense. She needs a keeper.”
Savannah chuckled. “Sounds like some of the stuff you guys did back in high school.” Pranks and raids she’d never been invited into, not that she was bitter. Even if Levi had asked, she would never have gone.
“Totally different.”
“Because you were boys and she’s a girl?”
Collin’s mouth twisted to the side and a little stab of attraction hit her belly. Lord, but a man twisting up his mouth shouldn’t be so hot. Especially when said man was once again dusty from head to boots. At least he’d dropped the piece of straw.
“We never taped off downtown. We didn’t set any fires—”
“I didn’t see her name in the police blotter.”
“Technically, she was trying to put it out, but that doesn’t—”
“I remember something about the five of you absconding with the sheriff department’s boat,” she interrupted him.
“We were pretty sure there was a drug deal going on at the sandbar at the time. And no one would listen to us.”
“So five high school football players were going to do a citizen’s arrest, at night, on potential drug runners in the middle of the lake?” She tilted her head to the side. “You guys wanted to take your girls out on the lake that night, admit it.” He beetled his brows again. “In the grand scheme of things, your prank was a lot more dangerous than taping off a couple of streets.”
“It’s still not the same.”
“Of course it isn’t. She’s your sister. Doing idiotic things is part of growing up. It isn’t like she’s on the fast track to the supermax prison in Colorado.”
Famous in a Small Town Page 8
