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“I agree.”
She answered the phone, and thoughts of her mom faded away as she talked to the person on the other end. They were very accommodating, and they actually even sounded excited about the project. Plus, they were the most local group, having their home base in Blueberry Beach. When they had been talking about which companies to use, this was the company she most wanted.
By the time she got off the phone, she was hoping and praying that this was the company that they would end up going with. Since she had the phone on speaker, Mark had heard the entire conversation, and he didn’t have to say anything for her to look at his sparkling eyes and know that he felt the exact same way that she did.
Maybe it was an unconventional wedding day, but they didn’t have a problem finding things to talk about, ideas to share, and even the specter of her mother visiting the next day didn’t discourage them.
Maybe they hadn’t had a big wedding, but she couldn’t have imagined a better wedding day.
Chapter 9
“What’s wrong?” Pam asked as she walked into Mark’s kitchen.
Through the years, they’d developed a routine. In the winter, he did most of the cooking, since she taught school and she was always knee-deep in correcting homework and directing plays and whatever else she managed to get herself involved in. And in the summer, she did most of the cooking since that’s when his job as landscaper was the most busy. Sometimes he left before dark and came home after, and considering how long the Michigan summer days were, that was a lot of time away.
In the summer and fall, they seemed to play it by ear. Whoever got up first did breakfast. Sometimes they planned it and even talked about it, and sometimes it was just whoever got up or whoever managed to cook.
Today, Pam had gotten up and moseyed over to Mark’s house, but while he was usually relaxed and pretty chill, today he was rushing around his kitchen, grabbing some things and throwing them in his lunch box and looking rather frazzled.
“I bid on a job a month ago, and I kind of forgot about it. I way overbid it because I didn’t really need the work, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting to get it.”
“But you got it,” she deduced.
He stopped, thermos in one hand, coffeepot in the other. “Exactly. I’m sorry.”
Her eyes widened. “It’s okay.”
“Well, I know our marriage wasn’t real or anything, but it was just yesterday, and... I don’t know, I feel like I’m rushing out the door today, and maybe you were expecting to... I don’t know.”
“Have a honeymoon?” she asked, laughter making the sides of her mouth turn up.
“No. I guess not. I just... I just feel a little bit bad.”
“Don’t feel bad. What are you doing, exactly? I’ve helped you before.”
He had poured the coffee into the thermos, and now he set the thermos down on the counter slowly like he was thinking. “Really? Because you could. It’s a tree-planting job about ten miles up the beach. They are trying to reforest an area that was timbered off this past winter.”
