AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She hated asking twenty questions and getting one-word answers for all of them. In her experience, he’d start talking to her when he felt like it. Sometimes it was in the evening when they did the dishes together or before bed. She missed the days when he came home talking a mile a minute, and she couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
She always listened to him then, because she figured the day would come when he wasn’t quite as eager to talk.
She hoped he had gotten it in his head that no matter what he was saying, she was interested. That had been her goal anyway.
That, along with being both mom and dad so he wouldn’t feel like he was missing out.
Still, sometimes just having someone sit with him, being quiet, was all he wanted.
So she closed her book carefully, set it on the small table she had sitting beside the chair, and just sat with him.
She didn’t stare at him, because she didn’t want him to think that she was waiting on him, since that was one thing she hated when people tried to make her talk and the words just weren’t coming.
She supposed not everyone had that problem, but sometimes she just truly didn’t have any words in her head.
Today, though, Owen didn’t talk. He sat there for probably five minutes before he shifted, grabbing his bag.
“I’m going to change my clothes. Do you have time to throw a ball with me?” he asked.
She could leave her store. It was Sweet Water, quiet and safe, and she’d left it plenty of times before.
“Sure,” she said easily, standing and stretching.
Owen went upstairs, and she walked to the back of the kitchen where they had a small room to keep their coats and boots and shoes.
It was chilly out, and she put on a coat. Her hands would be cold, because she couldn’t throw with gloves on. They only had one mitt, and Owen would use it.
She supposed this was part of being both mom and dad. Since he didn’t have a dad to throw a ball with him, she got to do that too.
By the time he came back downstairs in old clothes, she had a sign made out to put on the door:Text me if you need mewith her phone number on it.
Taping it on the door, she didn’t bother to take the money out of the drawer. There wasn’t that much in it anyway, and if someone needed it worse than she did, bad enough to come into a little bookstore and steal it, then she supposed she wasn’t so hard up that she couldn’t let them have it.
Owen and she went out the back door and walked down to the empty lot behind the store.
She had pitched to him and allowed him to hit it a few times out of the back lot, but they had to be careful, because while there weren’t many houses around them, there were houses beside and behind, and she didn’t want to break anyone’s window. So, usually they just tossed it back and forth between them.
They started with not too much space between them until they got warmed up. He could throw much further than she could. It wasn’t really a challenge for him to throw with her, but maybe his friends that he normally played with were busy.
“Baseball practice starts next week,” he announced after they’d been throwing for a while.
“You’re sure that’s what you want to do?” He’d signed up for it and had gotten the physical. It was a community thing, so everyone had a team. Last summer, he’d been enraptured with horses and ecstatic when a local rancher, Coleman, had agreed to give him horseback riding lessons.
They’d quit for the winter, but Coleman had said he’d be perfectly willing to start back up in the spring if Owen wanted to.
“Have you decided no horseback riding lessons? Or were you going to try to do both?” she asked.
Last year, the riding lessons had been on Mondays, and Mondays had been so slow for her, she ended up closing for the day. Her book club met on Mondays in the store.
“I don’t know. I’ve just really been interested in baseball lately.”
Every spare second, he’d been throwing the ball. On Saturdays, all the town kids went to the park on the edge of town and played pickup games.
Funny how a kid got a sport in his head, and all he wanted to do was play it and get as good as he could.
Owen had even taken to jogging, although he hadn’t been as dedicated to that as he had been to playing the pickup games. Which made sense. Games were more fun.
“I think you’re pretty good at it,” she said, supposing that was the mother in her speaking, although she felt her son was naturally coordinated. Which he didn’t get from her, she thought ruefully as she missed the ball yet again and jogged off to pick it up.
