Big Sky River. Linda Miller Lael
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a glimpse of herself in the wide-range rearview mirror. She couldn’t seem to stop grinning.
Erin sat with her head tilted slightly forward so her short hair curtained her face, working the virtual keyboard on her phone with all the deft expertise of any contemporary child. Presently, she gave a little whoop of delight and announced, most likely for her sister’s benefit, “Savannah got her ears pierced!”
“No way,” Elle said. “Her mom told her she had to wait until she was fifteen. I was there when she said it.”
“Savannah’s not with her mom,” Erin answered airily. “She’s with her dad and her stepmom at their place on Cape Cod and her stepmom took her to some place at the mall. It stings a little, she says, but she has gold posts and looks at least five years older than she did fifteen minutes ago.”
Amused, Tara marveled at the perfection of her own happiness as she drove away from the airport, headed in the direction of Parable. The twins’ front-seat/backseat conversation might have seemed pretty mundane to anybody else, but she’d been starved for the small things, like the way the twins bantered.
“Maybe we could get our ears pierced,” Elle ventured.
Duh, Tara thought, finally picking up on the stepmom correlation. She wondered if the text exchange with Savannah had been a ruse. It was possible that the sisters had rehearsed this entire scenario on the flight out, or even before that, hoping Tara would fall in with their plan. “Not without express permission from your father, you can’t,” she said.
Both girls groaned tragically.
“He’ll never let us,” Erin said. “Not even when we’re fifteen. He says it’s too ‘come-hither,’ whatever that means.”
“His call,” Tara said, with bright finality, busy thinking of ways to skirt the probable next question, which would be something along the lines of, What does come-hither mean, anyway? “Are you hungry?”
“Why do grown-ups always ask that?” Erin reflected.
“We were in first class,” Elle added. “Every time the flight attendants came down the aisle, they shoved food at us. I may explode.”
“Okay,” Tara said. “Well, then. We’ll just head straight for home.”
“I want to meet your dog,” Erin said, sounding both solemn and formal. “Dad won’t let us have one in the penthouse. He says the rugs are too expensive for wholesale ruination.”
“For the time being,” Tara replied, watching the highway ahead as it unrolled like a gray ribbon, twisting toward the mountain-spiked blue horizon, “you can share mine.”
“Like Dad ever bought anything wholesale,” Elle scoffed quietly.
Erin rolled her eyes at Tara, but allowed the remark to pass unchallenged. Then, looking more serious, she smiled over at Tara. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s nice of you, offering to let your dog be ours, too, at least for a little while.” She considered. “What about horses? Do you have any of those?”
“Just chickens,” Tara replied. “Sorry.”
“Chickens?” Elle asked, interested.
Tara had told her about the hens and roosters via email, but a conversational opening was a conversational opening.
“How many?”
“Dozens,” Tara answered. Since she’d never been able to bring herself to kill one for the stew pot or the frying pan, the birds were proliferating.
“That’s a lot of eggs,” Elle said.
“And drumsticks,” Erin added. “Yum.”
“Southern fried,” Elle dreamed aloud. “With mashed potatoes and gravy.”
Tara bit her lower lip, and both girls instantly picked up on her hesitation.
“What?” they asked in chorus.
Tara merely shook her head, signaling to change lanes. She liked fried chicken as well as the next person, but when she indulged, which wasn’t often, she generally bought a few choice pieces from the deli section at the supermarket or ordered it at the Butter Biscuit Café. She was basically an impostor, since she lied by omission and let people think she was a country type like them. If Boone Taylor ever found out about this fraud, God forbid, he’d smirk and make snide comments.
Something about city slickers trying to go country, probably.
“They have names,” she explained lamely, after a few moments of fast thinking. “The chickens, I mean. They’re like—pets.” To her mind, the Tuesday night special at the Butter Biscuit was one thing, and plunging a fork into Doris or Harriet or Clementine was quite another. She had considered serving Boris up with dumplings a time or two when she’d wanted to sleep in past sunrise and he’d crowed anyway, but nothing had ever come of the idea.
The girls were quiet for a while. Then they burst out giggling.
Tara thought she caught a note of relief in their amusement, though, and she relaxed.
After that, everybody lapsed into benign silence—Erin continued to text, chuckling to herself every once in a while, and Elle plugged a pair of earbuds into her phone and settled back to listen to music.
Eventually, both girls fell asleep—they’d gotten up early to catch their flight and changed planes not once but twice along the way, after all, and who knew how much rest they’d gotten the night before. They would have been excited about the trip ahead then, but now they didn’t have to rush.
It wasn’t until Tara had driven through Parable proper and turned onto the bumpy dirt road that led to her farm that Elle and Erin awakened, blinking and sleepy and curious.
Chickens scattered everywhere as Tara parked the SUV, and even over the squawking and flapping of wings she could hear Lucy barking a welcome from just inside the front door.
She smiled.
“Let’s get the bags later,” she said as the girls leaped out of the vehicle and turned in circles, looking around them, taking in everything in great, visual gulps. “Lucy might turn inside out if she has to stay shut up alone for another minute.”
Erin hurried through the gate in the white picket fence surrounding Tara’s front yard, partly to get away from the chickens, Tara figured, and Elle followed.
Reaching the porch, Tara opened the screen door, turned her key in the lock and cautiously stepped back, grinning a warning at the twins, who were still on the walk.
“Heads up,” she warned. “Here comes Lucy!”
Lucy shot through the opening like a fur-covered missile, paused only briefly to nuzzle Tara in one knee, and bounded toward the girls before Tara could catch hold of her collar and gently restrain her.
“She won’t hurt you,” she said, but the assurance proved unnecessary, because Elle and Erin were as pleased to make Lucy’s acquaintance as she was theirs. The three of them went into a rollicking huddle, like long-lost friends finally reunited.
Lucy yipped and yelped exuberantly and broke away to run in circles around the now-crouching twins, her ears tucked back in that funny way, simply unable to contain herself in the face of such joy.
Elle and Erin laughed at her antics, rising back to their feet, dusting bits of lawn grass off their jeans. Glancing warily back, in tandem, to make sure the chickens were still on the far side of the picket fence.
“I think it’s safe to say Lucy likes you,” Tara observed.
“Silly dog,” Erin said, with such fondness that Tara’s throat constricted. “Silly, wonderful dog.”
Inside, Tara gave the twins a quick tour of the downstairs, Lucy following everywhere they went, panting with the lingering excitement of having guests—these humans were just full of delightful surprises,