Getting Married Again. Melinda Curtis

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      After a moment, Jackson released his mom. “Is your advice in abridged form or a long-winded version?”

      “Need you ask?”

      “We better sit down.” Jackson led his mother back to the office.

      “I need a cup of coffee first,” she said, detouring into the kitchen. His mother was a coffee fanatic. “Want one?”

      “Sure.” If he could, he’d load up on caffeine and never sleep—or dream—again.

      A few minutes later, when his mom was settled in her chair, Jackson raised one eyebrow. “Well?”

      “I’m not sure where to begin.”

      That didn’t sound encouraging. Needing something to do with his hands, Jackson sipped his coffee.

      “Why on earth would Lexie take you back? I wouldn’t take you back if I were her.”

      Jackson very nearly sprayed coffee all over his mother. “This is your advice?” he asked when he could manage to speak.

      “I love you, dear, but sometimes I don’t understand you.”

      With deliberate movements, he set the coffee cup on the desk. “So you think I should just give up?”

      “Not at all.”

      Closing his eyes, Jackson sank back into the chair.

      “I know that you love Lexie. She’s wonderful. She did everything around the house. She cooked. She cleaned. She even mowed the lawn. You didn’t have a care in the world.”

      It was the same argument Lexie always made. Jackson used his standard defense. “I bring home a steady paycheck. I don’t drink too much, and I don’t beat my wife. Why does it always comes back to how much she did around the house? My job takes me away.” A job he was giving up. But Lexie still wasn’t going to give him a second chance.

      Jackson slumped farther into the chair. “Besides, you do everything around the Pony and the house.”

      “Yes, but I took on all those responsibilities after your father died because they wouldn’t have got done if I hadn’t. I see now that Theresa and I pampered you far too much.” Jackson’s father had died fighting a fire when Jackson was twelve, leaving Jackson as the man of a house where he was outnumbered by two females more than happy to take care of him.

      “I’m lazy. Is that it? She left me because I’m lazy?” This was the last thing he wanted to hear from his mother. His mother was supposed to be his strongest supporter. Suddenly Jackson couldn’t sit still any longer.

      “Well—” she began.

      “I’m a deadbeat Dad, like you see on those afternoon TV shows. That’s what you mean.”

      “That’s not—”

      “I’ve had enough advice for one night, Mom. See you in the morning.” Jackson ignored his mother’s pleas to return and raced out to the parking lot.

      “WE THOUGHT YOU WEREN’T COMING,” Marguerite announced upon opening the door to Birdie’s house, wearing a plunging, lacy dress Mary considered more appropriate for Madonna than for a plump, widowed retiree.

      “It’s not even eight-thirty.” Mary tried to keep her tone even as she stepped inside, although she longed to snap at someone. It wasn’t Marguerite’s fault that Mary was late to the group’s weekly bridge game.

      Mary wasn’t upset at Jackson for delaying her, although he hadn’t wanted to listen to the rest of what she had to say about his relationship with Lexie. Mary’s mood had more to do with her anxiety about her own love life. She had recently made a decision to return to dating.

      For nearly twenty years, Mary had avoided thinking about men as anything other than friends. She’d warmed her toes at night with her grandmother’s hot-water bottle while she kept her mind busy worrying about her kids and the business she’d started with Jeremy’s life insurance money. She had the Painted Pony to run, gray hair she’d earned every right not to color and an occasional whisker she plucked off her chin. She thought men, romance and sex were a thing of the past.

      That all changed a few months ago when Sirus Socrath, Jackson’s former Hot Shot superintendent, stopped to help Mary change a flat tire alongside the road. She’d been driving into Boise to pick up supplies, when a tire blew. While she was struggling to loosen the last lug nut, Sirus had pulled up.

      “Having trouble?”

      “I think this one lug is rusted on.” Mary gaped at Sirus’s long, lanky frame. From that angle, he looked like the cock-of-the-walk, as her mother used to say. Mary blinked, unused to thinking of Sirus as anything other than a hardworking man of the community and her friend. In that moment, she saw him for the first time as M-A-N as if she were W-O-M-A-N. Mary shook her head and dismissed the odd feeling. She was a grandmother, for heaven’s sake.

      Sirus knelt next to her on the road’s dirt shoulder and loosened the lug nut with ease. His hands were as long as the rest of him, his arms strong from years of fighting fires.

      “Not rusted. It just needed a man’s touch, you know?” Sirus’s faded blue eyes gazed directly into Mary’s and his lips turned up ever so slightly at the corners.

      Was Sirus Socrath flirting with her? Mary reminded herself that she was fifty-five, and Sirus was sixty if he was a day, and twice divorced to boot. But that didn’t stop her heart from pounding as it hadn’t for years.

      A few days after the flat tire incident, Sirus showed up at Birdie’s on bridge night even though he’d never been there before. He claimed to have come to replace Smiley, who could barely see the cards anymore, although Mary imagined Sirus joined them to spend more time with her. Still, nothing changed between them. Sirus didn’t seek Mary out or call her, try to hold her hand or kiss her. Sirus never gave Mary any reason to think he wanted her to be anything more than a friend. Yet, Mary was sure he did want more.

      Either that or she was going insane.

      Perhaps she’d swallowed too much river water, or maybe she was finally completing menopause. It didn’t matter what the cause was. Once Sirus lit the dormant spark within her, Mary couldn’t seem to put it out.

      The seed had been planted—she’d been alone too long.

      Mary stepped inside Birdie’s house, feet thumping on the hardwood floor as loudly as her heart pounded now in her ears. She could feel Sirus’s eyes upon her. He had kind eyes. Patient eyes. Eyes that let her know he’d wait for Mary to decide when she was ready for him.

      Ready for him? She’d been alone for nearly two decades. She could take care of the house, her car and her business. But she’d forgotten how to take care of a man.

      Mary had promised herself she’d work up the courage to ask Sirus back to her house for coffee tonight, the same as she’d been promising herself every Sunday night for the past month. They’d sit on the couch and talk. She’d ask him how he’d come by that scar on his forehead. Later, when she’d drunk some coffee that she planned to lace with a little confidence-building whiskey, maybe she’d work up the courage to kiss Sirus.

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