Page 20 of Pumpkin Spice Promises

“Friday?”

“I’ll call around, but that’s the realistic estimate.”

I looked down at my hands.

Four days without the truck meant four days of depending on Meme’s Camry for ranch errands it wasn’t equipped to handle. It meant finding another way to deliver milk if we were lucky enough to replace what already spoiled. It meant another expense added to a list I could barely manage.

“How much?” I asked.

Beau hesitated.

I disliked that more than if he had immediately named an outrageous number.

“I need to price the parts before I give you an exact estimate.”

“A rough estimate, then.”

“Carson—”

My gaze snapped to him. “You know my name?”

Jax lifted the registration he was holding. “Carson Rome.”

The room seemed to shift. Beau looked at me differently—not with pity or recognition from the accident, but as though my surname had placed me inside a memory.

“James Rome’s granddaughter?” he asked. My throat tightened at the sound of Pops’s name.

“Yes.”

“You livin’ at Marigold Ranch?”

I nodded.

For several seconds, Beau said nothing.

Then he looked toward the wall behind me, where an old photograph had been pinned beside the calendar. I hadn’t noticed it earlier. Walter Jones stood in the center of a group of men outside the garage, younger but unmistakable. Pops was beside him, with one hand resting on the hood of the black truck currently sitting broken in their garage lot.

I stood before I realized I was moving.

The sudden pressure through my prosthetic sent a sharp ache up my thigh, but I ignored it and crossed to the photograph.

“That was taken the year Dad opened the garage,” Jax explained behind me.

Pops looked younger than I remembered him. His hair was still mostly dark, his mustache hadn’t turned completely gray, and a cigar sat between two fingers near his waist.

He was smiling.

Not the tired smile he wore during the last few months of his life, when helping me relearn how to walk took more out of him than he admitted. This was the broad, careless grin from my childhood. The one that made him look like he had never experienced a difficult day.

“I’ve never seen this,” I said.

“Dad has boxes of pictures like it,” Beau replied. “He and your Pops were pretty close.”

“I remember.”

“They used to fish together every spring,” Jax added. “Or claim they were fishing. Pretty sure they mostly sat in a boat drinking beer and complaining about us.”

A quiet laugh escaped me before grief could stop it. “That sounds like Pops.”