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“Was she . . . did she say anything about me taking in my siblings for the next several months?”
“Just that you were. That’s why you were moving—although she thought, obviously, that you meant you were moving to Chicago. She thought you were . . . giving up on her.”
Bennett’s end of the conversation sagged.
The silence stirred a touch of panic in Hunter. “Bennett, don’t give up on her.”
“I’m not. It’s just . . .”
“I know. Weird. I get it.”
Another beat of unsure silence went by. “I’m not giving up.”
“Good.” The measure of relief Hunter felt in that was shocking. It also proved to be motivating.
Bennett was going to keep fighting for love. Maybe Hunter needed to pick up his wounded and frustrated heart, take a deep breath, and keep going.
Seven
Janiereachedintothesink full of bobbing apples, soaking in vinegar-tinged water, grabbed a deep-red Jonathan that filled her whole palm, and shook the water off. With her paring knife, she peeled it with the sort of gusto one might see in a contest.
“Are you going for a time record?” Mama asked, humor in her voice.
“No.” Janie kept her head down, her eyes trained on that apple. The single, continuous strip curled around her knuckles. “Why?”
Mama stopped turning the apple-peeler-corer—the only one between the two of them—and turned to face Janie. “Maybe I should put a stopwatch on you. You might make theGuiness Book.” This time humor wasn’t the only thing threaded in her tone. A hint of prying emerged rather strongly.
Janie ignored it.
“Want to tell me what’s fueling your bonfire?”
“No bonfires. Just peeling apples.” Janie nodded toward the five-gallon buckets filling every area of the small house. She and Mama had brought them back from the U-pick farm they loved near Bozeman. Lovely variations of red, gold, and green filled the buckets—Jonathans, Honeycrisps, Ida Reds, and Ginger Golds. When they were done stocking the pantry with canned pie filling, they’d continue with steam juicing and sauce making. “We have a lot of work left to do.”
“I’ve been peeling apples with you since you were probably too young to be wielding that sharp knife.” Mama set her own tool down on her old Formica countertop. Then she covered Janie’s busy hands. “I know a bonfire in my daughter’s heart when I see one. What’s going on?”
Shoulders slumping, Janie sighed. It was futile to deny Mama when she pried—which wasn’t all that often. But when she did, she was all bulldog about it. Hence her nickname—Mama Bulldog. Well, that and the fact that if provoked, Mama would take on a bear and not quit until she or the beast was dead.
She could be that fierce. But that was an overflow of love. Sometimes in random moments such as this, Janie wondered how it was possible for a man to have walked away from Mama’s resilient, beautiful heart.
Men were mysterious creatures. Dumb ones, at that.
“Janie girl. Talk to your mother.”
She nodded. “You know that new park ranger who is renting Jeremy’s ally house for the winter?”
“I do. Met him last week when he first came into town.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
In the dangling silence, Mama raised her brow. “And . . .”
“And I might have flirted with him.”
Mama continued to look at her, a silentcontinuebeckoning in her silence. When Janie did nothing more than blush, Mama leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms. “It’s not a crime to flirt with an eligible man.”
“I know.” She tried hard to extinguish the heat in her cheeks. Why was she acting like a schoolgirl who had been caught cheating on a test? She wanted to claim that her reaction was because she hadn’t a whole lot of experience “flirting with an eligible man.” Men who were on the market to flirt with didn’t frequent Luna all that often. And Janie didn’t frequent anywhere else they might be.
But that excuse rang hollow in her conscience. It wasnotthe real reason she felt out of sorts.
