by Judy Clemens
“Miranda,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Get out.”
“Excuse me?”
“Get out. Please.”
“Stella—”
“Out!” I banged my fists on the desk and stood up, leaning toward her. She slipped out of the chair, grabbing the arms, then scuttled to the door. She looked back at the piece of paper on my desk, but decided not to come after it. Wise choice.
When she was gone—leaving the door open, of course—I sank back into my chair. Queenie had stood up when I’d yelled, and now she did a little back and forth dance, eyeing me suspiciously. “Oh, come on,” I said. “You’ve never seen me lose my temper before?”
She harumphed, and lay back down.
I slouched at my desk, staring at the family pictures that Zach’s Uncle Abe—one of my best friends—had hung on the wall. My folks and me, when I was a little tyke. Me with my mom, when I was a teen. And then me with Howie, my longtime farmhand-slash-father figure I’d lost a year earlier when a crazy person had gunned him down in my milk parlor. What would I tell all of them if I lost the farm? Could I ever look at the pictures again?
Nick had money. More money than I could imagine. He and his family owned a housing business in Virginia and, even with the current economic situation, they weren’t lacking for work. Miranda had once accused me of only wanting Nick for his money, but of course that wasn’t true. It had started out that I’d wanted him in spite of his money, but now it was just…part of him. He’d offered to help out in the past, and I’d always turned him down, because I could always squeak by, but now…
Family farms were becoming a thing of the past. A cute, almost quaint kind of symbol with vegetable stands and specific customers. Tourists looked them up, hoping to get a glimpse of “the old days,” and people from the city visited to quench their two-hour longing for “the country.” But I didn’t want to be a blurb in a “Discover Pennsylvania” book. I wanted to do what I’d always done—to make my living by milking my cows and running my farm. Nick had moved up to Pennsylvania to be with me. He’d left his family and business in Virginia—with the help of the Internet—and seemed as happy as…well, as Barnabas was in his new stall.
“Hey.” Lucy leaned up against the doorjamb. “You okay?”
I looked at her for several seconds, then gestured to the chair. “I’ve got problems.”
Her mouth twitched.
“Yeah,” I said. “Funny.”
“You said it, not me.”
“Sit. Please.”
She came in, her brow furrowing. “You’re serious. What’s wrong?”
I leaned forward, rubbing my face. “You know how I’ve been asking you for the past few months about your job here—”
“Are you firing me?” The color drained from her face.
“No! No. Just listen.” I took a deep breath. “You love it here—”
She nodded.
“—and I love having you here. In fact, I couldn’t do it without you.” Nick couldn’t physically hold up any of the hard work. Well, he could once in a while, but with his MS he had to be careful. Besides, running a dairy farm wasn’t his thing. It was mine. I couldn’t expect him to change his life that much. He’d already made the move to PA. He didn’t need to do an entire career switch, too. And run a dairy farm on my own? After having a partner my entire life? Not going to happen. Not if I wanted to live past my present thirty years, which had clocked me over the head earlier that summer.
“You’re prepared for the fall?” Lucy had made money for the farm the year before by offering autumn activities—hay rides and a pumpkin patch and one of those vegetable stands I had really wanted to avoid.
“Sure. Everything will be ready, you know that. Stella, what’s going on?”
I pushed myself out of my chair and strode to the window, where I stared out at the quiet, empty driveway. “I’m running out of money. I can’t make enough to keep things going how they should be. Not anymore. The bank can’t do anything else, and the cows certainly can’t, either, not unless we go to three milkings a day, and I don’t think I could do that.”
Lucy was quiet.
I looked over my shoulder. “You don’t want to do that, do you?”
She shook her head. “So what are you saying, if you’re not firing me?”
“I have to…ask Nick.”
“Sure. It’s always good to talk things over with your husband. Or your fiancé.” She smiled.
“No, I mean I have to ask him for money.”
“Oh.” She studied my face. “Are you okay with that?”
I looked out the window again, letting my eyes run over the heifer barn, the yard, the house. The house itself wasn’t anything special, no architectural masterpiece. It was just an old farmhouse with all those farmhouse problems. Drafty in the winter. Insulation that had sunk to the bottom of the walls. Damp basement. Creaky stairs. But it was my house. And it had been my parents’. And now Nick was here. It was his home, too.
I turned back to Lucy. “You know, I think I am.” I surprised myself—and Lucy, I could see—by smiling. “He made his choice to come up here and be with us. I guess that means he’s a part of it now, too. It would be wrong not to ask him.”
Lucy sat there for a few moments before getting up and wrapping her arms around me. Not something she did on a daily basis. I stiffened, but after a few moments allowed myself to relax into it.
Lucy sighed. “Oh, Stella.”
“What?”
She leaned back and looked into my eyes. “I do believe you’re growing up.”
Chapter Eight
I found Nick in the kitchen, his laptop open, papers all over the table. He was staring at something on the screen so intently I figured it must be something really important. I wasn’t sure if I should interrupt, or not.
“Nick?”
He glanced up, then gestured me over. “I’m glad you’re here. I need your help understanding this.”
“Nick, you know numbers aren’t my strong suit.” Little did he know just how weak I was feeling at the moment when it came to those pesky digits, especially the ones with dollar signs—or negatives—in front of them. But I went to stand behind him, anyway, and set my hands on his shoulders, expecting to get an instant headache from the spreadsheet. But instead of columns and numbers I saw a picture of a cat. Or, sort of a cat. It was a weird black one, standing in an awkward position, but it was definitely a cat.
“What is that?” he said.
I leaned closer. “I was going to say a cat, but—”
“You see a cat?”
“Of course. It’s right there. Can’t you see it?” I felt his forehead. “Are you having an episode?”
He pulled my hand away, keeping hold of it. “I’m fine. But I can’t see the cat. All I can see is the silhouette of a dancer.”
“A woman or man?”
“Woman. Standing with her back to us, her toes pointed, her face tipped our way.”
I squinted, and tilted my head. “Nope. Can’t see it. Just the cat.”
He sighed. “Oh, well. I guess between the two of us we see them both. That’s good enough for me.”
I laughed. “Me, too.”
He turned toward me. “Were you looking for me?”
“Yeah. You have a minute?”
“For you? Always.” He scooted his chair away from the table and held out his arms.
I sat on his lap and looked down at his face. “You know how I’ve wanted to run the farm on my own? How I haven’t wanted to take anything from you?”
“Sure.”
“And you believe me? That I’ve never been after your money?”
He laughed. “Of course.”
“Good. Because it’s true. It’s always been true.” I hesitated.
He wasn’t running away screaming yet, and he had to know what was coming. My stomach churned. I’d always forced away any thoughts of accepting his money, and now I expected myself to just ask?
Like it was nothing? I scooted off his lap and leaned against the counter, gripping it so hard my fingers hurt.
“Stella.” His voice was kind. “If you need money, you know you only have to ask.”
I took a shaky breath. “Nick, I…I was wondering how you would feel about maybe contributing something to the running of the place. Since…since it is your home now, too.”
He blinked. And he stared. And then a smile broke out on his face, like the sun coming up after the Apocalypse. He came over, resting his hands on the counter on either side of me. So close I could hardly breathe.
He brushed a finger over my eyebrow. “You just said this was my home.”
“Well, it is, isn’t it?”
“Any place with you is my home. But, yes. This lovely, drafty old place, and the barns, and the cows, and the yard that needs mowing every other day. They’re all my home now. And I can’t believe you’re going to let me help take care of it. How much money do we need?”
Happiness radiated off of him. Out of him. And I could feel myself smiling right back. He leaned in to kiss me.
“I knew it!”
Nick’s nose crashed into my forehead. He spun around to stare at Miranda, his hand over his face. I wondered just how much blood was spurting out of his nostrils.
“I knew she was after your money!” Miranda screeched. “I told you! I said it at the very beginning!”
“Miranda.” Nick used his free hand to pat the air, like it would calm her, even though she was in her raging crazed woman mode. “You’re eavesdropping.”
“Am not.”
“And you didn’t hear the whole conversation.” He took his hand off his nose and looked at it. There wasn’t any red.
“I heard enough.” She glared at me. “I heard you ask her how much money she needs. Like you’re going to say no to anything when she’s got her hands all over you.”
I took a breath to say some not very nice things, but Nick glanced back at me, his eyes pleading. I looked at the floor, clamping my lips together.
“Miranda.” He was using his calm-but-mad-big-brother voice. He’d had lots of practice with that. “You were listening to a private conversation.”
“About our family’s money!”
“No. This conversation was about my family’s money.”
“But I am your—” She choked off her sentence, then pointed a shaking finger my way. “She is not your family until you sign on the dotted line. And if she has her way, that’s never going to happen!”
I jerked my head up. “What?”
“She won’t even talk about the wedding.” Still not addressing me. “I gave her a way toned-down budget today, and she wouldn’t even look at it! I don’t think she wants this wedding to happen at all! She just wants…” She shot daggers at me with her eyes—or maybe the pitchfork she’d saved me from a month before. “She just wants you to save her precious cows.”
I pushed myself off the counter. “Now look here, Miranda—”
“Stella.” Nick swiveled, putting himself between me and his sister. He laid his hands on my shoulders, and looked down into my eyes. “Do you trust me?” he whispered.
I couldn’t speak.
“Do you trust me?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then, please. Let me handle this. Okay? Why don’t you go back outside? Go hammer something. Or break something. Or kick something—but not with your sore foot.” He smiled, but it wasn’t his usual carefree one. Nothing like the one he’d had just moments before when I’d asked him for money. Go figure.
“Okay.”
He kissed me lightly and let me go. I slipped out of the kitchen, not looking back at Miranda. I wondered just how long she was going to be staying in our house.
Chapter Nine
Miranda screamed out of the drive, slinging gravel as far as the next county. She’d only been in there with Nick for maybe ten minutes, but apparently that was enough.
“She going home?” I tried not to sound too eager.
Nick rested on the gate, next to where I was taking his advice and hammering a new fence post into the ground.
“She said she was.”
My breath caught.
“But she didn’t take any of her stuff.”
Crap.
“So I expect she’ll be back sometime after supper, when she’s had her fill of Doylestown, or wherever she’s going to go to shop and eat.”
“We’ll just plan on being gone by then.”
“Where are we going?”
“To that Rikki Raines concert, remember? If you want.”
“Sure. But speaking of food, I’m hungry. Want me to make something?”
“Unless you want to eat at the fair again.”
He made a face. “I think I’d rather have something not deep fried this time.”
“I’ll be in soon.”
Lucy pulled in the drive, back from picking up her daughter, as Nick walked toward the house. Tess bounded out of the car, yelling hi to Nick and doing a cartwheel. She was nine, and every bit as energetic as you’d think.
“No Lenny?” I asked Lucy when she came over. Lenny was Lucy’s husband, also my friend and biker buddy.
“Working late. People want their bikes all fixed before the fair’s poker run later this week.” She looked after Tess, who was running around the house, Queenie on her heels. “Plus, Tess went over to work with him today, after lunch, so he wasn’t as productive as he would’ve liked.”
“You know she’s always welcome here.”
“Of course, but when she gets it in her head to be with her new daddy, I don’t want to get in the way. And he won’t say no.” Her voice caught, and I looked away to give her some privacy. She loved Lenny, and he was a great dad type, but he would never replace the dad Tess had had before. Or the husband Lucy had lost. But then, Lenny wasn’t trying to replace him. He was just trying to pick up where the other guy had left off. A long road for all of them.
“Talked with Nick,” I said. “He’s game.”
Lucy smiled. “I’m not surprised. Are you? But something’s wrong.”
I recounted the whole Miranda experience.
“I wondered why she was driving like a teenager. She almost blew us off the road on our way in.” She shrugged. “She’ll get over it, and come back.”
“I don’t know, she was pretty pissed off. She’s probably off telling her mom and sister all about how I’m going to drain the gold from the kingdom, and next thing you know the entire clan will be here trying to drag Nick away.”
“You said his mom and older sister are different from Miranda.”
“I guess. But who knows what Miranda will tell them, and what they’ll believe?”
“Nick is levelheaded. Someone had to teach him that. Maybe his mother.”
“I hope so. With my luck the only sane one was his dad, since he’s the only one not around anymore.” Nick’s father had died a year and a half earlier, prompting Nick’s travels to Pennsylvania, when he’d shown up at the farm disguised as a barn painter.
“Hang in there. Unfortunately, when you marry someone, you get the whole family in the bargain, whether you want it or not.” She should know. Her late husband’s family had tried to get her arrested for killing him, even though it had been an accident. They’d finally relented, and while their relationship with Lucy wasn’t exactly friendly, at least they weren’t siccing the cops on her anymore.
“Well,” she said. “I’m headed in to milk. You guys taking off again soon?”
“That was the plan. Unless you want me to stay and help. I’m not dead set on getting back to the fair. Rikki Raines is okay, but not on my top-ten list, or anything.” That would be hard, since most of my top-ten list were either dead or not performing anymore. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lynard Skynard, the Eagles.
“No, go ahead. Milking is my Zen time, and Tess is fine with Queenie, or catching up on her TV watching.”
She left, and I packed up my tools. Nick
had some spaghetti and salad ready by the time I got in, and before long we were cleaned up and on the road, this time in Nick’s Ford Ranger. The fair was busier this time around, since the public was now allowed in, just for the concert. The exhibition buildings wouldn’t be open to them until the next day. Nick drove around to the 4-H entrance, since my being Zach’s sponsor got us in for free. We found a parking spot and walked into the family area, where all the 4-Her families had set up their campers. A path through the middle would take us to the main fairgrounds.
