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“I can take the couch.”
“It would no doubt eat you in the night. It has attitude issues. You take my bed.” It does funny things to my body to think about her sleeping there in the house. In my bed. And under my roof. Never mind the nap she already had. The mere thought of it did enough damage to my male region and a funny spot in my chest that I thought was done feeling things for life. “I’ll sleep with the sheep in the barn.”
It might be old-fashioned and dramatic, but sheep are safe companions, and they give really, really good cheese. Also, sheep won’t cheat on you, humiliate you in front of your whole family, and break your heart.
CHAPTER 7
Thaddius
Funk it all, Thaddius. Why on god’s green earth are you sleeping in the barn when you have a perfectly good bed with a beautiful woman keeping it warm for you inside the house?”
Out of all the ways I’d choose to be rudely pulled from one of the shittiest sleep of my life—straw piles and animals rustling around, bleating, eating, and farting all night aren’t the best bedfellows in the world and don’t make for a night of sound sleep—I wouldn’t choose this way.
My grandma and my mom are standing together right beside the big heap of hay that I made into a circle and curled up on with a blanket. They both have their hands on their hips and identical expressions of worry. They already look sorelatedbut when they do this—twinning in their matching pink velour tracksuits, it makes them look more like sisters, not mother and daughter. Even their haircuts are the same. The only difference is that my grandma’s hair is totally grey, and her tracksuit jacket is christened on the breast with a patch that says,Grambutt.
I don’t know who got the bowl haircut first, whether it was my granny or my mom, but now they both have one. They call them bobs, but they’re too short to be bobs. They are most assuredly nineties bowl cuts. They curl the ends under too, which only makes them look more like a bowl.
And the Grambutt thing…they’re compliments of my cousins. My grandma was always and forever walking around and telling us what a pain we were in her butt. Not the butt.Herbutt. I can’t even remember which cousin started calling her pain-in-the-grandma-butt, but eventually, it got shortened to Grambutt, and then all of us were using it, and when she found out, she wasn’t pissed. She thought it was hilarious and proudly started getting patches made for her clothing, sewing and ironing them all on.
I shake myself fully awake, then shake myself again to get the hay out of my hair.
Gerald—my biggest sheep and the only one with a black face—walks by, bleating at all of us. The others are all huddled on the far side of the barn. They have the right idea. My mom and grandma can be pretty scary separately, but together, they’re like a one-two punch of sweat-inducing intimidation.
It’s summer, and the animals can pretty much come and go as they please. If Herman Merman were in the barn right now, he’d have something to say about strangers on his turf. He’d be braying up a storm right about now. I kind of wish he’d blasted my mom and granny, but I doubt that would have been enough to deter them. Worse than the warpath, they’re on the betrothed path.
“How did you find out?” I rub sleep out of my eyes. “That she’s here.”
“How do you think?” Wanda Wonderduck refused to take my dad’s name when she got married. She then gave me her last name because the Wonderduck name had to live on. Either my dad didn’t care, or it wasn’t worth picking a fight over. My mom can be kind of…stubborn. Right now, she’s giving me a whole lot of that. She crosses her arms and shakes her head. “Her parents called us yesterday morning. They weren’t sure where she went but wanted us to let them know if she showed up.”
“How do you know she’s here?” I repeat. I’m not going to play the world’s worst guessing game. “Christ. Tell me you haven’t bugged the house.”
My mother has this thing where I can call her mom, but ever since I legally became an adult and moved out of the house, she started preferring me to use her given name. She’s not a cold, strange woman by any means. Some people just don’t want to be called Mom in whiny tones by their grown-ass children forever. Well, some do, and that’s okay too.
My mom and granny turn ten shades of guilty. They give each other the silent, raised eyebrows, which they do all the time. It’s like a form of advanced communication. They don’t need words for it, and they always seem to understand what the other is saying.
“No. No, you didn’t. Youdidnotbug my house.”
“Someone had to make sure you’re safe out here,” Granny says and sniffs. “We had to make sure you weren’t off your rocker, coming out here and milking sheep and whatnot. We’re your family. We’re always going to keep an eye out for you.”
“There are normal ways to do that,” I growl. I’m twenty-seven years old. This is not okay. It hasn’t been okay since I outgrew baby monitors.
“Sweetheart, please,” Wanda, my Mom, begs. “Don’t be angry with us. We just wanted to protect you. We were worried about you. You took off and retreated from the world. You don’t talk to anyone regularly, and half the time, your phone is off. At least, this way, we know you’re alive.”
“And the conversations you have with your chickens are quite….”
“Don’t forget the donkey,” Mom adds.
“Ha,” Granny chortles. “Just ha. The curses you use every time he breaks out of his pen, and it seems to be often enough that one might question what you’re doing with your fencing out here, gets more inventive. Makes my day.”
“Mine too,” Mom admits. “She always plays it back for me.”
“Sometimes we watch the footage over dinner.”
My mouth drops open. “You didn’t just bug my house? You putcamerasup?” This is how I’m going to go. Death by crazily elevated blood pressure.
“To keep you safe,” Granny reiterates. If anyone ever called her Elmira, who was related to her, there would be hell to pay, but right now, I’m tempted to use her name just to see what happens.
“You invaded my privacy,” I hiss. It’s hard to try to be dignified with hella bedhead and straw in said bedhead, all while smelling like sheep. “That is not okay. Getting me engaged to someone I don’t even know or love isn’t okay, either. She came here because her family finally saw fit to tell her what she was in for, and she drove across the whole country to break it off. Not that I’m interested in keeping on with it. So we’re doing that. Together.” I realize I’m walking straight into the trap I was trying so hard to avoid yesterday. Suddenly, a lawyer getting involved seems like a good idea.
