The Construction of Cheer

by Liz Isaacson

  “No allergies,” she said. “Can I text you for the time? I haven’t even gotten back to my office yet.”

  “Oh, all right,” he said, laughing lightly afterward. “Text me when you know.”

  She said she would, and the call ended. Bishop got out of the truck, still whistling, and went to make his final assessment on these cabins. Their men had stayed here during the main cabin remodel, and they’d turned in quite a long list of items that needed to be fixed.

  Bishop took a ton of pictures and notes, prepping for the family ranch meetings he sometimes attended with Ranger and Bear. Sometimes Ward and Cactus were there too. No matter what, Bishop would have to have details about the damage and repairs needed for these cabins if he wanted the projects approved.

  They usually put their construction projects on a rotation. That way, all the cabins and houses on the ranch got updated periodically. The load across his shoulders and the rest of the Glovers was minimal, and he didn’t find himself with more construction than he could handle. The past few months had just been insane because of the barn project, and he’d voluntarily agreed to that.

  He opened the back door to the first cabin, the scent of mold nearly knocking him down the short flight of steps he’d taken. “Dear Lord,” he whispered. “Is everything going to go wrong this week?”

  Putting on his brave face, he entered the cabin. He wasn’t sure they could repair this place. It might need to be replaced, which went against their core family motto. Heck, the Ranch House might need to be rebuilt from the foundation up, and there wasn’t any recycling, reusing, or repairing that could save a house from a massive termite infestation.

  He’d do the work here, snapping pictures and taking notes. Then he’d return to the Ranch House to do the same for the roof. Then he’d know what he was dealing with. Plain and simple. Easy as pie.

  As he worked, all he could do was keep a prayer in his heart that he’d hear from Montana about dinner before too much of the day slipped away from him.

  Maybe his line about her eyes was a little pathetic. Maybe he did get every blonde’s number he could. Maybe he’d have to do something different with this woman if he wanted a different result.

  But what? he asked himself. After all, Bishop was just Bishop, and he didn’t know how to be anyone else.

  As he left the first, moldy cabin, his phone chimed, and Montana’s name sat there. A smile filled his chest and radiated from his face, especially when he saw her text.

  Dinner at seven okay?

  Dinner at seven is perfect, he typed and sent, his smile almost clownish. See you then.

  Chapter Four

  Montana pulled up to her aunt’s house just as her daughter started up the front steps. She scrambled to get out of a truck that had seen better days. It had been the vehicle she could afford, and it had served her well here in Three Rivers.

  “Aurora,” she called just as her daughter started to dig in the pocket of her backpack for her key. Montana hated that with every fiber of her being, and if she hadn’t pulled over to check her schedule and then text Bishop Glover, she’d have beaten Aurora back to the house.

  “Hey, Mom,” she said, and Montana smiled at her before turning back to get her backpack.

  “How was school?” Montana walked toward the front porch, her keys still out. Aurora didn’t seem to notice or care that she sometimes had to unlock the door and go into a house that wasn’t her own. Alone.

  Montana knew it. She felt it keenly every afternoon, and she worked to push away the bitter feelings that crept through her from time to time. She climbed the steps, clearing her head with each breath. “Hello?” she asked as she glanced to where her daughter stood.

  Aurora didn’t even look up, and she had her back to Montana, as she’d walked away from the door and toward the railing to say hello.

  Irritation fired through Montana, but she fitted her key into the lock and twisted to get the door open. “Who are you texting?” Montana noticed how her daughter’s head came up lightning-fast, and she turned back to her.

  “No one.”

  “Yeah,” Montana said dryly. She held out her hand. “Let me see.”

  “Mom,” Aurora said with plenty of attitude.

  “If you’re not going to tell me, I get to see,” she said, still waiting for her daughter to put the phone in her palm. “And none of these silly names like chicken nugget or lukewarm water.” Montana cocked her head and smiled at her daughter.

  Aurora smiled back, and she giggled in the next moment. “I really liked Sam,” she said. “He stopped texting.” She sighed as she put her phone in Montana’s hand, and Montana started flipping it over in her fingers.

  “I know, baby,” Montana said. “But you’ve got your back-up boys, right? What about that boy in your drama class? Daniel? Dexter?”

  “David,” Aurora said, grinning. “I still like him. He’s so cute, Mom.” She pretended to swoon and go weak in the knees, and she bumped into Montana.

  Montana grinned at her daughter, though her patience had already started to wear thin. She had no idea how to parent a fourteen-year-old, boy-crazy girl. She’d liked boys as a teenager, sure. But she’d never had a serious boyfriend. She went out with a lot of different boys, and she had a friend group of boys and girls that didn’t date each other.

  Aurora was forever telling Montana about how so-and-so liked this one boy, and they were holding hands at lunch. Then one of them would friend-zone the other, and before she knew it, the boy was texting Aurora or someone else in the group. Not only that, but once they “broke up,” they kept hanging out.

  Montana didn’t understand any of it. She looked at Aurora’s phone while her daughter started telling a story about how she saw David in the hall, and she’d been brave enough to say hi.

  “Wow,” Montana said. “Look at you being brave.” She glanced up from the boy her daughter had been texting. She held up one hand so Aurora could give her a high-five. “Who’s Ollie?” She looked at the texts again, but she didn’t understand this kind of flirting. “He’s invited you to his house in the afternoons.”

  Aurora reached for and took her phone from Montana. “He’s a boy in my French class,” she said. “He’s really good at pretty much everything, and I…maybe…sort of…got a D on my last French test.”

  Montana gave her daughter a glare. “What? We went over the vocabulary. You knew it.” She put her backpack on the kitchen table. “Those flashcards were for French, right?”

  “Yes,” Aurora said. “She did something weird on the test, and I didn’t understand any of it.” She sighed. “Don’t worry, Mom. I can go in one day before lunch and retake it, but….” She looked away from Montana and opened the fridge.

  “You want to go study at Ollie’s.” Montana had seen several of the texts.

  “His dad picks him up every afternoon, and they live out on this lane off the south highway. He said he’d ask his parents if I could come tomorrow, and you can just come get me after you get done at the college. It’s on that side of town.”

  “You have it all worked out, don’t you?” Montana asked, plucking an apple from the bowl in the middle of the counter.

  Aurora turned around with a can of soda in her hand. “Yes,” she said. “It’s close to the college, Ollie said.”

  “What’s Ollie’s last name?”

  “Osburn,” Aurora said. “Please, Mom? You can stay as long as you want, and you won’t have to rush home at three o’clock to meet me here, and I’ll get to study.”

  “Mm hm,” Montana said, trying to decide how to phrase the question she wanted to ask. She took a few more bites of her apple while she popped the top on her soda and took a drink.

  “And Ollie’s just a…friend? Or we think he’s super cute too?”

  “Oh, he’s super cute,” Aurora said, squealing a little bit. “And, Mom, he’s tall. And dark, and you’re always telling me I need some height and some color so my kids aren’t pale dwarves.”

&n
bsp; Montana laughed with her daughter, finished her apple, and drew her into a hug. “I love you, bug.”

  “I love you too, Mom.”

  “I’m….” Montana didn’t know how to tell Aurora about Bishop. “I have a business meeting tonight,” she said, the words only a little false. “I might have found another job that could help us get a place of our own.”

  “I like living with Aunt Jackie and Uncle Bob,” Aurora said. “I have my own room, and the yard is big enough for a dog….” She lifted her eyebrows, such hope in her eyes.

  Montana shook her head, but she kept a smile on her face. “We’re not around enough for a dog, sissy.”

  “I know.” Aurora left her can of soda on the counter, where Montana would likely pick it up, dump whatever she hadn’t drunk down the drain, and put the can in the recycle bin. “So, what’s the new job?”

  “Oh, it’s this ranch south of town,” she said. “They need a full-time carpenter for a while.” She hoped. She should probably pray, but she didn’t want to hitch everything to hope and prayer.

  “South of town is perfect for me to go to Ollie’s after school….” Aurora said.

  Montana shook her head. “You can go tomorrow,” she said. “But you’re not going every day.”

  “Maybe I could, though.”

  “Aurora.” Montana shook her head again, stronger this time. “His parents are going to be home tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And you know we don’t go in a boy’s bedroom.”

  “I know.”

  “If he sends you pictures of himself, you….”

  “Mom, I know.”

  “Tell me as if I don’t know.” Montana sometimes felt uncomfortable talking to her teenager about boys and hormones and sex, but it had to be done.

  “I show you the picture, and then I tell him not to send me things like that, and then I block him.”

  “Good,” Montana said. “But before that, you tell him your mother is coming over with an assortment of hammers.”

  “Mom.” Aurora laughed and rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’m going to go do that English essay that’s due tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Montana said, not really registering what her daughter had said until she was halfway down the hall. “Wait,” she called. “I thought you finished that.”

  “Almost done,” Aurora said, and the next thing Montana knew, her bedroom door clicked closed.

  “That girl is going to be the death of me,” Montana muttered. She looked up to the ceiling. “It would be nice if I could get some help with her.”

  Montana had prayed for help in every stage of Aurora’s life. When she’d come home from her apprenticeship one day and found her husband had brought someone else home, Aurora had been four years old.

  She’d finally packed their bags, and it had just been the two of them for the past decade. Most of the time, Montana was just fumbling her way through the darkness.

  She turned to the fridge too, because as part of her rent, she made dinner every night. She’d gotten a package of chicken breasts out of the freezer that morning, and she set them on the counter so she could put a stock pot on the stove with plenty of salted water.

  Once she had the pasta boiling, she got to work butterflying the chicken breasts and dredging them in flour and then panko breadcrumbs. They sizzled in the hot butter and oil, and once they were crispy and brown, she put them on a plate and added flour to the fat in the pan.

  She’d just whisked in cream, cream cheese, and parmesan cheese when her phone rang.

  Aunt Jackie’s name sat on the screen, and Montana tapped with a clean knuckle to connect the call. “Hello,” she said. “Dinner’s almost done.”

  “I’m getting the bread,” Aunt Jackie said. “And you’re fine to go to your meeting tonight.”

  “Okay,” Montana said. “Thanks.”

  “Bob should be there any minute. Remember he’s got that boy with him.”

  Montana’s mind blanked for a moment, and then she remembered that Uncle Bob was looking to hire someone to do the yard work this year. “I told him we could do it,” Montana said. Cooking and yard work were how she could sleep at night, knowing she couldn’t pay her aunt and uncle much in rent.

  “Apparently, this boy has some magic system Bob wants to try.” Aunt Jackie sounded like she’d believe it when she saw it.

  “Okay,” Montana said. “But I feel bad.”

  “You can still feed the chickens and milk the goats,” Aunt Jackie said. “Don’t worry, Ana. There’s plenty to do.” Something scratched on her end of the line, and she said, “Oops, I have to go. See you in a few minutes.”

  “Yeah,” Montana said, letting her aunt’s nickname for her flow through her. She hadn’t been called Ana in a long time, and the name took her back to sweltering Texas days like the ones she’d experienced last summer.

  Aunt Jackie and Uncle Bob had lived in Three Rivers for a very long time. Montana used to come visit her in the summer when her mother would take all the children for an extended vacation.

  Later, Montana had realized that her mother got the kids out of the house for as much of the summer as possible so Daddy didn’t kill one of them.

  She had three siblings, and they’d all somehow landed in Texas.

  None as far north as her, though, and they didn’t live with long-lost relatives while trying to raise a teenager by themselves.

  Montana loved her siblings. What they’d done carried enough blame to keep her from texting them very often, and she didn’t like dwelling on the cracks in her family relationships.

  She finished putting together dinner just as Uncle Bob walked in the back door. “Somethin’ smells amazing,” he said, his Texas drawl as thick as honey. He grinned at her, and she hugged him.

  He was a big, tall, wide wall of a man, and he ran an outdoor outfitters store in town. Aunt Jackie did some work with him on the weekends, but otherwise, she worked as a nurse at the hospital in town.

  “It’s all ready,” she said. “Aunt Jackie said she’ll be here any minute with the bread.” She started for the hallway, where a narrow doorway led to a set of even narrower steps. Her room sat at the top of those, and Montana could admit she didn’t hate it. Only two bedrooms and a single bathroom existed on the second level of the farmhouse, the rest of it a sprawling one-story rambler.

  Her bedroom had a slanted ceiling on one side, and Aurora’s had a mirrored slant on the other side of her bedroom. The bathroom sat between them, and Montana felt like she and Aurora could get out of her aunt and uncle’s hair with their second-floor bedrooms. She’d loved the slanted ceiling as a child, and she did now as an adult too.

  “Don’t wait for me,” she said. “I’m eating at a business meeting tonight.”

  “Okay,” Uncle Bob called after her. “I’ll be outside with Steven for a bit.”

  “All right.” Montana went upstairs and started searching through her closet for something to wear that said professional business meeting and that wasn’t made of denim.

  Montana pulled up to the massive mansion-like homestead at Shiloh Ridge and found Bishop sitting on the top step as if men like him did such things. “Play it cool,” she told herself.

  She hadn’t been able to go downstairs wearing a denim skirt like she’d planned. She’d be peppered with questions from everyone in the house, including the lawn man Uncle Bob had hired and then invited to stay for dinner. Didn’t they all understand that she’d rather not admit that this business meeting was really dinner with a good-looking cowboy?

  That good-looking cowboy rose to his feet and came down the steps, making Montana’s breath lodge somewhere behind her tongue. He’d said some pretty cheesy lines that day, but Montana hadn’t been flirted with in a while, and she hadn’t minded them so much.

  She finally opened her door when she realized she was still sitting in her truck.

  “You look nice,” Bishop said as he approached.

  Montana lo
oked down at her clothes. They were clean, at least, but she’d ended up wearing a practically white-washed pair of jeans with a blouse as green as an emerald. It had pure white stitching on the sleeves, collar, and hem, and Montana wore it when she wanted to draw out the color in her eyes and provide strong contrast for her sometimes embarrassingly blonde hair.

  “That’s hardly a compliment,” she said. “But thank you.”

  “It’s not?” He seemed genuinely confused.

  “Nice?” she repeated. She looked from the sexy black cowboy hat on his head down to his boots. They were dark brown and tucked up under a clean pair of dark wash jeans. He wore a belt buckle that glinted in the evening sunlight, and a pale green dress shirt, open at the throat.

  He was perfection, and Montana started having thoughts about him she hadn’t had about a man in a long, long time.

  “Amazing then,” Bishop said. “You look amazing.” He grinned at her, and it was clear the man went out with a lot of women. Did she really want to be another one?

  “That’s better,” she said, teasing him. Teasing him. She didn’t even know who she was anymore. “Are we staying here? Or…?” She left the sentence there, because she didn’t want to eat under the same roof as his sister.

  “Nope,” he said. “It’s about a ten-minute walk. We can drive in five.” He looked at her truck, no judgment on his face. “So walk or drive?”

  “We can walk,” she said.

  He nodded and gestured for her to turn and go in front of him. She did, and when they reached the wider lane beyond the truck, he came to her side easily with those long legs.

  “It’s a nice night,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “And that, cowboy, is the proper usage of the adjective nice.”

  He looked at her, those light blue eyes dancing and lighting up with stars. In the next moment, he burst out laughing, and Montana felt like she’d conquered the world.

  “I think we’re gonna get along just fine, Montana,” he said, grinning at her. “Let’s go over the most pressing jobs I’ve got here.”