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Wes once again found himself unsure how to respond.
Praise the heavens for his wonderful wife, because she said, “It sounds like we’d absolutely love him, honey. A man who’s turned his life around and is trying to do better every day? What’s not to like?”
“He has tattoos.”
“So does Uncle Cy,” Wes said. “I don’t care about that.”
“Uncle Ames has tattoos too,” Bree said.
“He’s only been divorced for two years,” Opal said next.
Wes looked at Bree as he opened her door for her. The kids started to get in the back while he had a silent conversation with his wife. He rounded the truck and got behind the wheel, getting the ignition going so the air conditioner would start to stave off some of the summer heat.
“Baby,” he said to Opal, who now rode where Mike had been. “It sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself that you like him, not us.”
“I—” Opal set her jaw. “Maybe I’m unsure.”
“Maybe you are,” Wes said.
“Wes,” Bree said quietly. He glanced at her, and then closed his mouth. He hadn’t said anything wrong, but in situations like this, Opal needed the silence to think and absorb, process and then come to a conclusion. She always had, and he sometimes forgot.
He switched on the radio and turned the truck toward a restaurant he hadn’t frequented in a long time: Salvadoro’s. Mike could eat after the surgery, and he loved their chorizo and mushroom pizza.
Wes drove while the country music played. No one said anything, and he tried to listen to his gut. To the spirit of the Lord. He didn’t feel the antsy, jittery feeling he sometimes did when things weren’t right, and he looked over to Bree.
“He’s going to be okay,” he said quietly.
She nodded, her dark hair streaked with silver. She was as gorgeous as ever, and Wes thanked the Lord every night for his wife. “I think so too.” She wrapped her hand around Wes’s and smiled with a slightly shaky bottom lip. “He’s going to need so much help, Wes. I don’t know how we’re going to go north with Gray and Elise next week.”
Wes pressed his teeth together. He wasn’t sure either. Opal would be gone by then. Easton was planning to stay for a couple of weeks, but part of that would be up in Coral Canyon with them.
Gray and Elise normally summered in the mountains in Wyoming, where Wes and Bree lived full-time. It was cooler, and they had their Fourth of July traditions up there.
“He’ll come with us,” Wes said.
Bree shook her head. “I don’t think he will, baby.”
Wes didn’t think so either, and that was due to a beautiful blonde who’d always drawn Mike to Ivory Peaks. “It’s going to work out,” he said. After living on this earth for eighty years, if there was one thing Wes knew, it was that things always worked out.
He didn’t know how, or what would take place to allow him and Bree to drive away from their son only ten days after a major surgery, but he knew God had a plan. Wes trusted in that plan, even if he didn’t know what it was, and he’d taught his children to do the same.
“I’m going to go out with Miles again when I get back,” Opal announced, breaking into Wes’s thoughts. “See how I feel then. Maybe it’s just because…I don’t know why I feel a little unsettled about him right now.”
“Maybe it’s still too new,” Bree said, turning to give Opal a smile.
“Maybe.” Opal frowned at her phone and said, “Daddy, you missed the turn for Salvadoro’s. Now you’re going to have to go all the way down to Thirteenth, because this next street is a one-way.”
Wes nearly rolled his eyes at her backseat driving advice, but he caught himself. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Sorry, I was thinkin’ about something else.”
11
Jane Hammond got up from the sewing machine. “I can’t sit inside anymore,” she said to her mother.
Aunt Annie looked up from the table, where she’d been ironing. “Are you going to go horseback riding?”
“Yes.” Jane decided on the spot, but neither of the other women in the farmhouse needed to know that.
Her mom looked up at her, her needle slowing. “Get someone to help you with the tack, Jane. Last time, you nearly separated your shoulder trying to lift it onto the horse’s back.”
