“Shay! Guess what?” Gennie asked.
Noah’s fingers loosened on my bicep, one after the other, and then immediately tightened again. “Gen, we’ll tell Shay all about it inside. We need to get her some water before she expires.”
“What is expire?” she asked.
“My shoe slipped,” I told him. “That’s all. Nothing to get excited about.”
“It means Shay forgot to fill up that big water bottle of hers today and it’s very hot, so we need to get her a drink,” he said. “Probably some solid food too.”
“Really, you don’t have to—”
“Come with me,” Gennie said, taking my free hand. “I’ll make some pirate juice.”
“What’s pirate juice?” I glanced between Gennie and Noah as they led me into the house.
He chuckled. “You’ll see.”
“Noah cooked some new jam last night. You can have a jam snack. Sometimes I dip my pretzels into jam.”
“And that’s why you have your own jar,” Noah said.
“What kind of new jam?” I asked. Noah pushed open the door and a wall of cool air greeted me. It was a gorgeous relief. So much that I groaned out loud. “Oh, that’s nice.”
He pulled a chair from the kitchen table, deposited me in it. He shook his head like I was more problem than he’d bargained for. “Tomato.”
“Tomato?” I echoed.
He dropped both hands to my shoulders and gave me a firm squeeze. “The new jam.”
“That’s…a jam?”
He set my bag on the counter and leaned back against the island, crossed his arms over his chest. Gennie disappeared into the pantry, soon emerging with a step stool.
“Savory jams are niche but increasingly popular. We can charge twice as much as what we would for strawberry jam and move them at greater volume, especially in restaurant and other wholesale settings,” he said. “Where did you go today?”
“The elementary school. A parental leave sub position came up.”
Gennie opened the freezer and started scooping ice into a cup. Noah watched her. “Shake a leg on that juice, Gen.”
“I’m going, I’m going,” she said, selecting ice by the individual cube.
Soon, she hustled to the table carrying a green soda bottle, a mason jar packed with something purpley-red, and the mug filled with hand-selected ice.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
She tapped a finger to each item. “Cherries, rocks, rum.”
“Rum?”
“Pirates love rum,” Noah said with a nod to the green bottle. The label had been ripped off, and in its place,RUMwas printed in thick black marker. “Uncles don’t like rum nearly as much as they enjoy keeping their sanity.”
Gennie glanced at him over her shoulder. “How many cherries?”
“Three should do it.”
Gennie spooned each cherry into the mug with a chemist’s precision. If only she brought that kind of focus to writing complete sentences.
After she’d finished with the fruit, I studied the jar. It didn’t have any labels. Didn’t look store-bought. “Do you preserve your own cherries too?”
