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“Okay, up, and at ’em, Lucas. You wearing that?” Ellen’s husband Billy strolled into the kitchen dressed in work boots and jeans he must have brought from home.
“No. I’ll change. Give me a sec.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Your father asked me to help cut up an old tree.” Lucas headed toward the basement steps.
“What? Daddy!” I stormed into the other room, where Dad was putting on his steel-toe boots. “What’s goin’ on?”
“I asked the boys to help me. They said they would. I figured you girls would get into something. We’re all kept busy this way, and I get help with that tree.”
I stalked back into the kitchen and right up to Billy’s face. I smelled a rat.
“We want to see how he handles himself around chain saws,” Billy said with an extra gleam in his eye.
This was silly. Lucas and I were not engaged or planning to be. There was no reason to be hazing mybeaulike it was the 1800s.
“Billy, I swear, if you hurt him, you will never father another child or even practice trying. You know I can wield a knife.”
He leaned in. “Now, Sammy Jo, you wouldn’t do that to your sister.”
“I swear to all that is holy.”
Billy patted my head with a mile-wide grin. “Settle down, short stuff. No one is hurting anyone on purpose.”
“Sammy Jo, you’re gonna pop a vein.” Scott joined the fray, also dressed in work clothes from home and sporting a new drool spot on his T-shirt, compliments of my nephew Mason. “You think Ellen and Lo wouldn’t have something to say to Billy and me if we let anything happen to pretty boy. Come on, give us some credit. We gotta do this now because when he does pop the question, we’ll be too far away to haze him.”
“You’re losing it. We’ve been together like four months.” I called after him as he stomped out of the house.
Loretta strolled in with a freshly changed baby boy, fed and ready for some playtime before his nap. “Love knows no time, Jo.”
“Stop looking out the window.You’re gonna hurt your neck. I’m sure he’s fine.” Mom said while she stirred the cake batter by hand.
“I don’t trust them. At least they gave him an ax so he can defend himself.”
“Billy and Scott are all talk,” Ellen said, holding Haylie in her lap and helping her color a picture of Princess Elsa.
“Here, Jo, open the oven for me,” Mom said.
I pulled open the heavy door, and Mom slid in her famous chocolate Bundt cake.
“At least they didn’t tell him he had to shoot his own squirrel and then cook it.” Lo handed her sleepy bundle to me, and instinctively, I began the sway with his little head falling on my shoulder.
She poured a tall glass of iced tea. “Scott’s cousins are idiots. Fortunately, Billy and Scott talked them into a coffee can shooting contest instead. Good Lord.”
While my mother and sisters traded hazing stories in the kitchen, I crept back down the hall to the bedroom with the crib and sat to rock the warm little body snuggling me. Mom kept the house outfitted for her grandbabies. The rest of us could probably sleep outside for all she cared, but those babies each had their own bed at Granny’s.
The last thirty-six hours were catching up to me in the quiet of the sun-dappled room. Too many revelations about dreams and wants and love to think about having a baby, but that didn’t stop me from inhaling Mason’s sweet scent and dreaming about having one of my own.
“Thank you, Princess Elsa.”Billy bent to accept a slice of cake from his little girl, dressed in last year’s Halloween costume, stretched to the limit. Pleased with herself, she skipped across the porch and back inside the house.
“Hey man, can you take him a sec?” Scott handed Lucas his son, recently up from his nap. They looked at each other for a moment, then Lucas pulled the little guy to his shoulder, and my ovaries exploded.
Scott took a piece of cake from me and dug in.
“Scott, you gave Lucas your baby, so you could eat his cake?”
“Oh, look at that, I guess I did.” He and Billy bumped elbows because neither was putting down their forks.
