Mad About Max. Penny McCusker

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СКАЧАТЬ she stopped behind him, even before he caught a faint whiff of her perfume. “Where are you off to—” he paused to launch the sack off his shoulder and into the truck “—in such a hurry that you can’t even say hi to a friend?”

      “Groceries,” she said. “It was either the diner or the market, and at least at the market I can stock up so I won’t have to eat out. Or shop again for a while.”

      Anything to stay out of town until the hubbub blew over, Max interpreted, and had to hide his grin before he turned to face her. It was good to hear her sounding like her old self again. “You could always go out on the range and catch yourself a steer.”

      She shook her head, the corners of her mouth curving up into a reluctant grin. “As long as they stay out of town, they’re safe from me.”

      “Now that’s not strictly true, Sara. Remember the time old man Winston’s cows got out and wandered into the road? It’s a good thing I was fixing his fence when you happened by. If you hadn’t seen me waving my red flag of a shirt and shouting like a lunatic, you would’ve driven head-on into the middle of them.”

      “Lucky for me you were there, Max, and that you happened to have your shirt off at the time so you could use it to catch my attention.”

      “It was lucky, all right. You didn’t get hurt, and the cows started giving milk again after about a week or so.”

      “If you’re trying to cheer me up, you can stop now.”

      Max laughed, finally understanding her sarcasm. “I’m almost done here,” he said. “If you wait a few minutes, the human stomach and I will go to the market with you. We must be out of something the way Joey eats.”

      Sara’s smile dimmed. “Thanks, Max, but I think…it might be better if I go alone. I mean, after the glue and all, you know…” She looked at the floor, her even white teeth worrying at her bottom lip before she met his eyes again. “I wouldn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea. About you and me.”

      “I think we can risk being seen together in public without anyone getting the wrong idea.”

      “Yeah,” Sara said on a heavy sigh, the thought of braving the teasing of her friends and neighbors obviously pulling her mood down again.

      Max could have kicked himself for bringing it up after he’d worked so hard to make her smile, but he didn’t have to rack his brain for a way to cheer her up again. Joey did it for him. He ran up just then, two mixed-breed kittens clinging precariously to his jacket by their needle-sharp claws and mewing pitifully. “Mr. Landry says I can have them both.”

      As grateful as he was for the return of Sara’s company, Max wasn’t about to reward his son with a pair of kittens. “They’re not even weaned yet, Joey.”

      “They must be, Dad. The mom cat is gone and there’s a dog in there with them.”

      “I know. Mr. Landry told me…I’m afraid the kittens’ mother died, son. It just so happened that Mr. Landry’s dog had weaned a litter of pups not long before, so he brought her in to see if she’d adopt the kittens and she did. It happens sometimes.”

      Joey thought for a second, then shrugged as if it were an everyday occurrence for a dog to adopt a bunch of newborn kittens. Of course in his world, Max reflected sadly, mothers went away and life carried on.

      “Can I have them when they’re weaned?” Joey asked, his one-track mind barely making a detour.

      “Who’s going to take care of them all day while you’re at school?”

      “Sara will let me bring them to school, won’t you, Sara? They can be…” Joey’s face scrunched up, but in the end he puffed out his breath in defeat. “What’s it called when they belong to the whole class?”

      “Mascots?” Sara supplied.

      “That’s it! They can be mascots to the third grade. We can all take turns bringing them home on the weekends.”

      “I doubt Mrs. Erskine-Lippert will agree to that,” Sara said.

      Joey snorted. “Ooh, the principal. I heard Mr. Jamison, the sixth-grade teacher, call her Mrs. Irksome. I was gonna look it up in the dictionary, but I figured it meant, you know, trouble. And I couldn’t spell it,” he added as an afterthought.

      “You shouldn’t repeat things like that,” Max admonished. He managed to hide his smile, but his eyes, when he lifted them to meet Sara’s, were shining with amusement.

      She couldn’t help smiling back, her sadness lifting as she watched father and son bicker good-naturedly over the kittens. She might not have Max’s love, let alone his ring on her finger, and she might not have a paper labeling her Joey’s mother, but she still got moments like this, precious pearls strung between the humdrum, lonely hours that made up the greater part of her life. And who, she asked herself, could ask for more than that?

      “I’ll make you a deal,” Max said to his son, resorting to bribery when reason didn’t work. “If you leave the kittens here, I’ll take you to the diner and you can have anything you want.”

      Joey stopped in midobjection. “Anything I want?”

      “Yep, and we’ll take Sara with us and feed her some pie—just as soon as I’m finished.” He had to yell the last part because Joey was already running across the feed store to return the kittens to their cardboard home. “And then we’ll take you to the market afterward,” Max said to Sara.

      “It’s nice of you to invite me, but—”

      “No buts. It’s been two weeks since…you know,” he finished, bending to heft another sack and muscle it into the truck bed. “You can’t hide away forever.”

      No, she couldn’t hide away forever, and even if she could, Sara thought, the people of Erskine would still be waiting to rub her nose in what had happened at the Open House. It wasn’t just that, however; she didn’t think she could bear to spend the next few hours with Max. For two weeks she’d been trying to forget those few seconds she’d spent plastered against him. Her memory was just too darned vivid; all she had to do was close her eyes and she was back there again, fighting a real battle with spontaneous combustion.

      Watching him work only fanned the flames. He bent, lifted, twisted and dropped each sack, the slide and bunch of muscle beneath worn denim and plaid making her heart pound and her breath shorten until her head began to spin. She couldn’t have taken a steady step if her life depended on it; going to the diner with him would be sheer foolishness. Worse than tempting fate, she would be daring fate to make a fool of her again.

      “Really, Max, I’d rather just go home and open a can of soup,” she said, her voice growing stronger when she pulled her gaze off his backside. “I have a lot of papers to grade tonight, anyway.”

      “What papers?” Joey asked as he rejoined them. “You let us grade each other’s papers today.”

      “And I still have to check them over,” she said to Joey, tweaking the hair that was growing past his collar. “Maybe your dad should take you to get a haircut, instead, and I’ll bake you a whole pie of your own this weekend. Cherry.”

      Cherry pie was one of the basic food groups to Joey, but he didn’t СКАЧАТЬ