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He was still grinning as he did what she’d requested. “I’m almost done. Just two left.”
“You’re flying,” she said sarcastically. “This is going to be hot, hot.”
“Hot, hot,” he said. “Is that what you say to TJ so he knows it’ll be really hot?”
“Yes, you big meanie.” She poured the apples into the colander in the sink and set the pot on the large, gray towel next to the sink.
“Talk to me as you work,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“I just drained the cooked apples,” she said, inhaling the tart and sweet scent of them. With the cinnamon stick, her whole house would smell like Christmas for a week or so. “Now I’m putting them back into the pan, where I’m going to puree them with my immersion blender.”
She measured out a cup of the cooking liquid she’d caught with a big bowl beneath the colander and poured it into the pot. “I add the cooking liquid, and this is a batch of sweetened applesauce, so I’m adding brown sugar and a touch of butter.”
“Butter in applesauce,” he said. “Fascinating. How did you learn to do this?”
“My grandmother,” she said. “My mother died when I was only twelve, and my grandmother came to live with us for a while.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know your mother had passed away.”
“Yes,” Beth said, trying to search back twenty-five years for the right memories. “It was a long time ago, but I remember her as a fun, vibrant woman who loved to dye her hair.” She smiled at the memory. “She was a brunette like me, but she was always trying to go blonde.”
Trey grinned at her and chopped another apple. “Done.” He dropped the chunks into the pot. “Lid on this?”
“Yes, please,” she said, checking the timer on the stove. The apples would finish about the same time as the jars—again.
“Anyway, while my grandmother lived with us, she taught Sally and me all kinds of things. How to cook. How to do laundry. How to mow the lawn. Everything.”
“Your dad’s mom or your mother’s?”
“Funnily enough, my mother’s,” Beth said. “She still lives just on the other side of the Harvest Bridge.”
“Oh, so she’s close,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “She’s quite old now, but I’ll take her a few jars of the sweetened stuff and spend an hour with her. She’ll tell me stories of my mother and of us as kids, and I’ll wish I could stay longer and hug her harder.”
Beth stopped talking, because the conversation had suddenly sparked her emotions.
“How long did she live with you?” Trey asked. He turned toward the island and emptied the trash can, letting the full bag rest against the cabinets while he put another bag in and started cleaning up the mess.
“A year or so,” Beth said, glad her voice was semi-normal again. “Daddy just needed help. Hugh was only nine, and he played football and lacrosse. Granny helped get us where we needed to go until Sally turned sixteen and could drive.”
“What did you do as a kid?” he asked.
“I took ballet and did art lessons,” she said. “For a year when I was a sophomore, I thought I’d dance on Broadway, so I took voice lessons too.”
“No Broadway?”
“I didn’t even try,” she said, a hint of sadness tugging at her mouth. “I went to college to study forensics, of all things.”
“I think you said you didn’t finish that,” Trey said.
“Right,” she said, ready to talk about something else. Anything, really. “What about you? College? Or have you been working at the ranch since birth?”
“About that last thing,” he said. “We went out on the ranch with our father very early. I’m the third of eight boys, and by then, my dad would say, ‘Let’s go, boys,’ and if I could get my boots on fast enough, I got to go.”
“You wanted to go out and work on the ranch?”
“Of course,” Trey said. “Spur was going. Cayden too. They were my older brothers, and they got to wear a hat like my daddy’s and hold ropes and pet the horses.” He smiled at Beth. “It wasn’t for a few more years that I realized how hard the work was on the ranch.”
