“Sorry. But I witnessed that little exchange, and I couldn’t help but be curious.”
“You.You’recurious.”
“Just curious who it is.”
“His name is Jackson. He’s the son of The… I guess the former mayor? Carey is his last name. Jackson Carey.”
The name sounded sort of familiar to Zane, but he couldn’t be sure. It could just be that he’d heard the last name when he was in the military, or some cowboy on the rodeo circuit shared the name. He heard a lot of names, but didn’t get to know very many people, which meant that all of that could run together pretty easily.
“Well. Are you going to answer if he calls you?”
“I feel honor-bound to let him know the status of the inventory.”
“You know that’s not why he’s calling you.”
“Sure. I guess. So I didn’t pick that up right away. Not really used to men hitting on me. “
“You aren’t?”
That shocked him. He would’ve imagined that they were all over her all the time. She was sweet and feminine, knew how to bake. For a man who wanted to get married and have a wife who took care of his house, of his life, she’d be a real fantasy.
Not for a man like him, obviously.
“No. I lived in the same small town forever. I’m sure that Lila can speak to that, too. That’s the trouble. Everybody knows you. Everybody knows your brother. Though in my case, I don’t think they were intimidated by my brother. I just think I was weird. And more interested in reading and being inside than I was in hanging out. So it’s not like I was attracting a big social crowd.”
“See, I would assume that you did,” he said. “Because I would say that you’re friendly.”
“I’m friendly,” she said. “I just don’t go out very much. I always talked to people at the grocery store, people at the laundromat, people at the vet. Adults, basically. Because I would run errands for my mom, and that meant that I was doing… very mundane and grown-up errands from a very early age.”
He could see that it was supposed to be a negative, but the picture that she painted, of doing errands in a small town, things for her parents, her mom, that made his chest feel sore for some reason. Seems like something he might’ve liked.
If he’d had a family.
She shrugged and continued. “I was basically out of sight, out of mind. In my senior year, I actuallyfinished at home. Because my mom started needing a lot of help, and we couldn’t get in-home care. There wasn’t the personnel or the funding out where we were. It was tough.”
“What did your mom have?”
It wasn’t even seven in the morning, and he’d already asked a very blunt, personal question. He wasn’t the kind of person who asked questions like that, because they were all about getting to know somebody, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had gotten to know somebody.
“Dementia,” she said.
She offered up the answer easily enough, and he was kind of surprised that she did. Because it wasn’t like he had been all that nice to her. Still, she made him treats. Largely because he had done a bunch of work around the bakery for no money, so he imagined it was his repayment. Anytime she had an issue, she called him. That was what he’d told Cody to tell her. And so he fixed shelves and pipes and whatever else might need it at all hours, gratis. It was a working relationship. More or less.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said. Then she wrinkled her nose. “It’s really not okay. It’s terrible. But there was nothing anyone could do to stop it, nothing I could do to change it. It was just one of those things. It was hard, and it didn’t get easier. It only got harder. Though, at the end, I knew I could’ve taken her to a hospice facility… but at that point… I had been doing it for so long, it just felt like I needed to see it through, you know?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
If he had a family member to take care of, he would’ve done it too.
He could totally understand why she had done that. Could totally understand why she had given up so many years of her life to take care of the woman who had given birth to her.
He had met a lot of people who acted like their families were a burden. It was one thing that had drawn him to Cody.
Cody had always taken care of his siblings, even when it was difficult.
He respected that. There weren’t a whole lot of things that he respected. That was one of them.
