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“I’m going to have to ask you to watch her. She can’t go out with me.”
“But I want to, Daddy. I’m a big girl, remember? I’m your best worker. I can do it!” Holly skipped back over to her dad and looked pleadingly up into his unsmiling face.
“You are, sweetie.” He patted her hair, but then he flattened his lips and shook his head. “But I can’t have you around the dangerous equipment that I need to be using in order to feed the cows here. Back home, it’s a little different.”
“Please?”
Miles didn’t say anything, he just raised his brows, and the little girl closed her mouth and her head dropped.
Norma Jean knew exactly how the little girl felt. She’d been told no so many times in her life, she started to think that was the only answer she would ever get. She couldn’t really remember her parents ever saying yes to anything.
“If you want to, you can help me,” she said, walking toward the little girl and then kneeling down in front of her.
“You mean it?” the little girl said, looking at Norma Jean from underneath her lashes.
“Really. I have so much work to do here, I don’t even know where to start. I haven’t even had coffee yet!”
“I can’t make coffee.” The little girl’s head hung down. Then her face brightened. “But I can make hot chocolate! Daddy says I make the best hot chocolate anywhere.”
“My goodness. It just so happens that we have hot chocolate right here, and you can be in charge of making it. That’s such a relief. Now I’ll be able to get so many other things done if you are in charge of the hot chocolate this morning.”
“Yay! I have a job!”
“I see that, honey,” Miles said, his expression inscrutable, as he looked at Norma Jean from underneath his ball cap.
“I bet your daddy will be ready for a hot chocolate when he comes back from feeding the cows. It’s cold outside this morning.”
“I’ll make the best hot chocolate ever,” Holly said in her peppy little girl voice.
“I’ll be expecting it when I get back. It will be an hour or so, maybe two if we have more cows out,” he said, and he gave Norma Jean another look that made her knees want to knock together. It was like he knew she was the one who had left the gate open.
“Oh, I hope not. And if they are, you’ll be careful, won’t you?”
“Daddy has Chester. If there are any problems, Chester will take care of them. He’s a great dog,” Holly said helpfully.
“He looked like a good dog. I saw him working yesterday, and I was really impressed. Someone has spent a lot of time training him.”
“Daddy did,” Holly said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Daddy and me go out in the yard every night, and we go through Chester’s commands. Sometimes Chester doesn’t want to listen, but Daddy never gets mad. He says that it’s important that Chester knows what you want. Because he wants to please him. He just has to understand.”
Norma Jean lifted her eyebrows a little at that big lecture, and she peeked out of the corner of her eyes at Miles who seemed to be trying not to smile, if the quivering of his lips was any indication.
Normally Norma Jean might get a little bit jealous that this little whippersnapper of a kid could make Miles smile and she couldn’t. But it seemed like she probably should want to be on the same side as Holly. Shouldn’t she?
She had to think about that. But it would probably be better for her to warm up to Holly, and have Holly like her, than it would be to try to compete against her.
When she had been a kid, sometimes her mother’s boyfriends had tried to use her to get to her mom, and then they tossed her aside. She didn’t want to be that kind of person. She hadn’t spent all the time climbing out of that pit just to jump back in as soon as she was around a little kid.
So, she had to do something different if she wanted things to change.
That little thread of jealousy had to go.
She tried to crush it out ruthlessly and figured that she needed to make sure that she watched her thoughts. That was where the jealousy started. She was going to love this little girl, whether Miles smiled at her or not. And that was that.
While she had been giving herself a lecture, Miles moved toward the door. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure,” Norma Jean said, looking at Miles just to make sure that he was actually talking to her and wasn’t asking his daughter.
“All right then. I’ll be back as soon as I can, but I’ll want to make sure everything is done right. I’m guessing that it’s going to be a little while before Peter is up to taking over again.”
