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Timothy smiled, big and wide, and then dug into his cheesecake.
Aunt Carol gave Silas a piece, then she walked over to the swing, handing James his. “How’s the foot?”
“Starting to hurt. You’re going to tell Mabel I stayed off it all afternoon while she was gone, right?”
“You know, I was going to tattle on you if you even so much as came into the kitchen for a taste of the batter, but because you didn’t, I’ll have a good report to give to your fiancée.” Aunt Carol winked.
She’d sat out on the porch with James for a while after Mabel had left. He’d told her everything, or at least most of it, and she’d been tickled pink.
He hadn’t realized him getting engaged would make Aunt Carol so happy.
But looking back, she had said something about the pistol helping him, and it had almost seemed a romantic type of thing, or something along those lines, and he wondered if she hadn’t had something like this planned all along. Just, she hadn’t had a chance to implement any of her plans, because the gun had gone off, and apparently Mabel had been planning on asking him to marry her all along.
It seemed like nothing had happened for years, and then everything descended at once pointing him toward Mabel.
Whatever it was, he wasn’t complaining.
They ate their brownie cheesecake, Aunt Carol chatting with them for a bit before she went back inside, fanning her face and saying that it was getting awfully warm for a lady of her advanced years.
It wasn’t even eighty degrees, but James supposed when a person lived in North Dakota, seventy felt downright balmy.
Silas chatted a bit about the things he wanted to do with the truck and asked for James’s opinion. James had to admit that he knew less than nothing about trucks and would appreciate some guidance in the direction they should go.
Silas promised to send links later, showing him pictures and things that he had in mind. James promised to look at them, then Silas and Timothy knocked on the door, gave their plates to Aunt Carol, and walked around the house.
James could hear them working, but he told Silas that he’d promised Mabel he wasn’t moving, and he was going to do everything he could to keep his promise. Not just because it was Mabel, although that did add a new dimension to things, but because he always tried to honor his promises. There had been a few times in his life when he’d been forced to break a promise, and he’d hated every second of that. The experience had made him more cautious, and he tried hard not to make promises he couldn’t keep.
Just before Silas and Timothy left with the old Ford on the rollback, James watched as Billy moseyed across the front yard.
He’d completely forgotten about Billy.
Billy was supposed to be a matchmaking steer, but he hadn’t thought... Surely not. It couldn’t be Billy, couldn’t be the gun, it had to be things that had been set in motion years prior, at least since last winter, when Mabel had fallen in love with the girls.
The fact that he was engaged to the girl of his dreams couldn’t have anything to do with any other type of manipulation.
Right?
