Big Sky River. Linda Miller Lael

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СКАЧАТЬ spotted Elle and Erin in the flow of incoming passengers—and opened the hatch on the SUV with a button on her key fob.

      This time, there was no cowboy to step up and load the baggage into the back of the rig, but working together, they jostled the luggage inside. Then the twins flipped a coin to see who would sit in front with Tara and who would sit in back.

      Erin won the toss, crowed a little and climbed in across the console from Tara.

      “I thought you had a dog,” Elle remarked from the back as she buckled herself in for the ride home.

      “Lucy’s waiting impatiently back at the farm,” Tara told the girls, starting the engine, preparing to back out of her parking space. “She likes to ride in cars, but she’s still a puppy, really, and I think this trip would have been a little too long for her.”

      “What happened to the red car?” Erin wanted to know. “The one you sent us pictures of?”

      Tara might have sighed in memory of her zippy little convertible, if she’d been alone, or in a less ebullient mood. “I traded it in,” she replied.

      “We wouldn’t all fit in a sports car, goon-face,” Elle pointed out, affably disdainful.

      “I know that, ding-dong,” Erin answered, without a trace of hostility.

      “No name-calling,” Tara said lightly. The way the girls said “goon-face” and “ding-dong” sounded almost affectionate, but it was the principle of the thing.

      Erin bent to lift her backpack off the floorboard and ferret through it for her own phone, an exact duplicate of Elle’s, except for the case. “You texted Dad that we got here okay, right?” she asked Elle without looking back.

      “He’d be the paternal unit I mentioned, goon—” Elle paused, and her tone took on a note of mischievous acquiescence. “I mean, Erin,” she said sweetly.

      Tara concentrated on maneuvering the SUV through the exit lane and onto the road, still smiling. Talk about a goon-face, she thought, having caught 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 СКАЧАТЬ