“It’s true,” she says nonchalantly. “When a cowboy wants to stake his claim, he puts his hat on it.”
I roll my eyes while wiping my mouth. “He didn’t put his hatonme. He left it here by accident.”
“He left it after dropping off some completely unnecessary Thanksgiving decorations. After multiple days of checking up on you.”
“Because he saved me after a nasty spill in my bathroom. Are you forgetting that part?”
“Are you forgetting that he didn’t have to keep checking on you? Especially since he knew you weren’t alone because I was here?”
“Or he was just being neighborly.” I point at her, shaking my finger. “That’s the problem with your generation now. No one knows how to be neighbors anymore.
“Joel is from a different generation, a different school of thought. Where people who live next to one another help each other out.”
“Oh, there are some things he wants to help himself to, alright.”
I throw my cloth napkin at her. “Meghan Renee, I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap.”
She dodges the napkin while her body shakes from her guffaws.
I narrowly miss clutching her as I lunge across the table, but she jumps just out of my grasp to stand with her empty plate to the sink.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I grumble when she comes over to retrieve my plate. “Youdon’t even know what you’re talking about,” I continue to fuss while she remains snickering even as she washes the dishes at the sink.
“And you better not have those nasty ideas in your head up there in New York either. Keep your head in those books!” I insist.
“Your father and I pay a lot of money to that damn school for your education in the law. Not to be worried about nobody staking a claim anywhere.”
Meghan casually walks over to me with a plate of sliced coconut cake on a plate. It’s leftover from yesterday’s dessert.
“Are you done?”
I snatch the plate and fork away from her. “Are you done?” I mimic.
She bends down to kiss my cheek. “I have to finish packing before the car gets here. Enjoy your cake.”
I swat her on the butt as she rushes out of the dining area.
“Don’t know what she’s talking about,” I mumble while chewing on my first bite of cake.
Even as I deny it out loud, though, my eyes roam over to the hat silently resting on the chair, as if it’s calling my attention.
“What are you looking at?” I ask the damn hat.
CHAPTER 11
Joel
“Ya see, I knew this would happen,” I gripe into the speaker phone while standing in my garage. The one I don’t even use to park my truck, but for storage instead. Namely the storage of my holiday decorations.
“What happened?” Ace, my middle son, asks, his voice filling the entire garage.
“All of the damn lights got tangled up and some aren’t working. Now I have to go through them to see which ones work and which need to be replaced. This is what I get for letting you kids put away my decorations last year.”
“Weren’t you the one who put away the lights last year?” he asks.
I stand erect. “Is that the point, huh? Does it matter who put the damn things away? The problem is now they need to be arranged all over again. This is going to postpone when I can do the decorating.”
Since Aiden couldn’t make it into town, and Gabe, Lena, and their kids had to leave town early this morning, I chose to put off decorating the house. But I still came out to check over everything to make sure it’s all functioning correctly.
