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I don’t know who let these people get ducks.
They clearly hadn’t considered the implications of old people looking after ducks in the winter in Montana. It wasn’t like we lived in Florida up here. These people were already walking hospital admissions without the threat of rogue ducks in icy weather.
We walked out into what could only be described as a bloodbath.
Without the blood.
Fine.
A featherbath.
It was a featherbath.
There were feathers everywhere. White, brown, black, purple—why was there a purple feather? Surely that wasn’t from a duck?—feathers were strewn across the smattering of snow that had dusted the ground early this morning. A sizeable number of the residents were outside, wrapped up in their winter best, and appeared to be desperately trying to put—
“Is that a coat?” Kinsley asked, squinting.
I removed my glasses and used the end of my scarf to clean them, then put them back on. “Looks like it. What are they doing over there?”
“I don’t think I want to know,” she replied, simply reaffirming that my earlier thought was absolutely correct.
We should have gone for soup instead.
God, I loved soup.
My stomach rumbled.
Great. Now I was hungry.
Kins glanced at me but didn’t say anything, although she couldn’t hide the small twitch of her lips.
This was what happened when I skipped breakfast.
“Grandma, what is going on?” I asked, drawing level with the bench where she was sitting with a thermos full of tea. “You can hear that noise in the parking lot.”
“I imagine you can, dear.” She sipped tea out of the little silver lid. “Mabel has lost her marbles.”
“I didn’t know she had any,” Kinsley remarked. “Is that a coat?”
“Mm.” Grandma Rosie’s eyes narrowed with disapproval as she surveyed the scene in front of us. “She’s going to break a hip trying to dress those ducks.”
“But why is she trying to dress the ducks?” I questioned.
“I have no clue, dear,” Grandma replied, then finished the last of her tea. “I’m bored. I’m going inside to watch The Price is Right. Are you coming?”
“Uh…”
“Oh, God, what is he doing?” Kinsley stomped off toward the pond.
I glanced at my grandmother. “You go on,” I said. “I’m just gonna help Kinsley. Oh, and if you take my purse, you’ll find your book in there.”
Grandma didn’t need telling twice. She’d been waiting for eight months for the next book in the regency romance series she’d been reading, and it didn’t even release for another few days.
This was me in her good books.
“You’re such a good granddaughter. Better than your sister,” she mused.
“She just had a baby,” I reminded her. “She can barely pee comfortably, never mind anything else.”
“That’s too much information, Holley.”
“Welcome to my world,” I muttered as Ivy’s text from this morning flashed in my mind.
“No, thank you.” Grandma stood and took my purse from me. “I’ll pass on that. Help Kinsley sort those lunatics out then come in and tell me all about your new boyfriend.”
I froze. “My new boyfriend?”
She raised one heavily penciled eyebrow over the top of her glasses. “Yes, Holley. Your new boyfriend. Sebastian.” She said his name slowly, over-pronouncing every syllable and finishing with a real drawn out ‘n’ sound.
Well, at least I had an answer to my question now.
“Right. Of course.” I laughed nervously and reached under my scarf to scratch the back of my neck. “I’ll just—yeah. Go.”
I left her to take my purse inside, thanking God I’d already put my phone in my pocket, and turned toward the commotion.
But not before I pulled out said phone, removed my glove with my teeth, and fired off a very awkward, one-handed text to Sebastian.ME: Mu grsndma tjinks were dstungClose enough.
I quickly put it back into my pocket and put my glove back on before my fingers froze and fell off and joined Kinsley.
“Mabel, you can’t put coats on the ducks!” Kinsley said, I assumed not for the first time. “They don’t need coats, and you’re going to fall and break a bone trying to put one on them.”
“I tried telling her that,” Randy, her grandpa, grumbled, crunching some snow with the bottom of his cane. “But she won’t come inside, and I can’t leave her out here.”
“Why isn’t a nurse out here? This weather is awful,” I said.
“Because I’m a grown woman and I can do what I want!” Mabel protested, brandishing one little houndstooth coat at us. “I pay them!”
Well, technically, her daughter paid them, but whatever.
I wasn’t going to correct her with the mood she was in.
Her cheeks were flushed red, and her scarf was all but covering her nose, making her passionate protests somewhat muffled and a little hard to understand, actually.
She sounded a bit like a drunken drill sergeant…
“I got one, Mabel!” Amos bumbled over with his cane rapping against the path and a duck tucked under his arm. “He almost got away!”
“That’s Cheese,” I muttered. “Where’s Quackers?”
