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“And they’re real rusty.”
I shook my head at her. “Daisy, it doesn’t matter what I thought I should do—the only thing that would have stopped me was a word. I’m glad you didn’t speak it.”
Again, she paused. “It had been a long time, Keaton. A very long time.”
“For me too. Since Mandy.”
“I gotcha beat.”
“Since Drew?”
She nodded as if in acknowledgement of a simple fact, the touch of sadness maybe more about the timeline and less about him. “Between the pact my sisters and I had not to date until Mama does and half the town thinking we’re cursed, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity.”
“I don’t know about that. I’ve watched the Jenkens twins slobber after you for years.”
She sighed. “They send me and Poppy flowers weekly. But would you sleep with them?”
I made a face. “Good point.”
“I’d say I’m surprised you haven’t seen anyone, but the town’s barely seen you in a handful of years. I was starting to think you were an urban legend.”
“It’s hard, being around them. They ask questions I don’t want to answer, give condolences out with their pity. Even now, years later, that pity’s still in their eyes when they see me. Easier to stay away.”
“Even your old friends?”
“Especially my old friends. Those people knew me and Mandy as a unit, and after she was gone …” I paused. “You know how one person is always the glue?”
She nodded.
“I think Mandy was our glue. I didn’t have it in me to hold us together. I didn’t even have it in me to hold myself together.”
“I know how you feel. I see my old friends at church and on Main Street. I ask them about their kids. They ask me about my sisters and the farm. We smile and wave and promise to get together, but we never do.”
“Do you want to?”
“Not particularly. It makes me look backward too much. And I think…” Her face quirked. “I think they feel guilty for having the life I didn’t.”
“Well, those lives they have don’t always work out either, do they? Half of them are divorced, a portion of those cheating on each other with … well, each other. Trust me—they don’t have it all.”
“No, that they don’t.” She shook her head, took a sip of her wine. Smiled. “Tell me what you’ve been making lately. I know you’ve got something in the works.”
A switch flipped in my chest at the mention of it. I stood, extending a hand. “Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
With a light in her eyes, she slipped her long fingers into mine, and I towed her through the house and out the back to our workshop.
Once upon a time, the shop was a wide carriage house with a tall ceiling and stalls for horses. But my grandfather had converted it to a woodworking shop, using it to teach my father all he knew. In turn, he taught me and my brothers. Cole had taught Sophie a little, I’d taught her a little more. I’d always hoped to teach my children here too. But I’d resigned myself to living my days as nothing more than a fun uncle years ago.
A tiny, premature spark flared at the thought of having that future for my own. Not that it was Daisy, not exactly. It was the glimpse of possibility she’d brought with her, a glimmer of hope that I could feel something again. That I could want someone again.
When we entered, I flipped on the lights and walked to the old radio that was my grandfather’s, turning it on out of habit as Daisy wandered around behind me. Doves cooed in the lofty rafters—we’d given up trying to keep them out a generation ago—the light shining down on long tables in golden shafts, forming glowing islands that faded away, disappearing into dark corners. Another set of lights would have illuminated the counters that ran along the walls, but I left them off. I wasn’t here to work.
Randy Travis sang about forever and ever, amen, and I watched Daisy as she made her way around the shop, occasionally touching something she saw—a vice, the counter, a smattering of wood shavings that she gathered only to let them fall between her fingers. When she came to my current project, which was deconstructed and laying in pieces on the table, she stopped, her head tilting to decipher what it was.
I strode to her, standing at her back, peering over her shoulder. The feel of her against my chest sparked heat, my hand touching the beginnings of something that I’d picked up and put down too many times over the last five years.
“This was once a crib, older than living memory. If the stories are true, my great-grandfather made it before my grandfather was born. Do you see the hand painting here?” I brushed the faded filigree. “The rockers had come off, some of the wood rotten from neglect. I don’t even know where Dad found it, but he took it apart, planned on making a bed for Sophie. It was what he was working on when he died.”
