Rory hummed, her gaze bouncing around as if looking for inspiration in the drab walls of the hospital. “Oh! Did y’all hear about how Earl found a dead squirrel under his bed, and he doesn’t know how it got there?”
Mac gasped, her eyes going wide, but she quickly slapped a hand over her mouth when everyone whipped their heads in her direction. She sat tucked into Hudson’s side, his arm over the back of her chair as he alternated playing mindlessly with her hair and rubbing the aching, tight muscles in her neck.
“What do you know?” Rory asked, eyes narrowed.
A single look at Gran—one of Edna’s best friends and her ride or die—had Mac rolling her lips between her teeth and biting back the information that was bubbling to spill out. Besides, all she had was circumstantial evidence and hearsay.
So Edna had explicitly told Mac she was going to do that. And, yeah, okay, she had an actual text with the woman confessing her plans to do so. So what?
“What do I know about a dead squirrel?” Mac waved her hand in front of her as if brushing aside the boring news. “Who cares? Earl’s dumber than a doorknob. The fool probably forgot he shot one in his backyard, and Macy hauled it in for him. Seems like every week, he has another story about something that dog’s dragged in.”
Gran lifted her eyebrows and dipped her chin in an impressed gesture. Look at Mac—earning back points in the eyes of her family through lies. She was just a winner all around, wasn’t she?
“Did y’all tell ’em about Ella?” Finn asked.
Will snapped her head toward her fiancé, her brows furrowed. “What about her? And why do you know about it and I don’t?”
“Relax, Willowtree.” He hooked an arm around her shoulders and tugged her to him to press a kiss against her head. “Nash just told us about it when we grabbed food for y’all.”
“What’d my little firecracker do now?” Momma asked, exhaustion seeping into her tone.
Rory’s eye roll said more than a thousand words, and she gestured to her boyfriend. “Go on… I know how much you love rehashin’ it.”
Nash’s grin split his face. “Ella punched little Tommy Boulger right in the nose. Popped him nice and good—made him bleed and everything.”
Mac had to bite back a laugh at the glee in Nash’s tone—a response that wouldn’t go unnoticed by the group, considering the rest of them. There was a chorus of reactions, ranging from gasps—Momma and Will—to hoots—Gran and Finn—to a low whistle and an impressed, “Damn, girl” from Nat.
Hudson chuckled low under his breath. Then in a voice meant only for her, he whispered in her ear, “She learn that from you?”
Mac elbowed him in the gut, her first true smile of the day coming out at his jolt and muttered, “Oof.”
“I don’t know why you get such a kick outta tellin’ this story,” Rory said.
“Um, maybe because she’s a little badass? She did exactly like I taught her and didn’t even blink.”
“Wait, this wasyourdoin’?” Mac asked, pointing at Nash.
Rory had come a long way from the epitome of perfection she used to be, but Mac couldn’t imagine her sister had been happy to sit down with Tommy’s parents in the principal’s office. Especially considering Tommy Junior picked up his ways courtesy of good old dad. And to know Rory was doing so thanks to her boyfriend probably meant a tense night—or several nights—in their house.
“Yep,” he said, completely without remorse. “And I’d do it again in a heartbeat. She told me the little shit—pardon my French—” he tipped his head toward Momma and Gran “—wouldn’t leave her alone at recess. Even after she’d told him to stop. Even after she’d mentioned it to the teacher.” He sat back, his legs outstretched in front of him, arms crossed over his chest, looking like he’d just won the world’s biggest pissing contest. “So, you’re damn right I taught her how to throw a punch. I’d do it again without hesitation.”
“Still can’t believe you did that,” Rory mumbled.
“Gonna teach Ava too,” he said with a definitive nod. “We’re not gonna have any of thisboys will be boysbullsh— ’scuse me, bullcrap in our house. Those girls are gonna know what to do if someone doesn’t heed the warnin’ when they say no.”
“You did the same thing for me, do you remember?” Nat turned to face him and tugged on his shirt sleeve. “When Jonah Loflin kept tryin’ to peek up my skirt in seventh grade?”
“Why don’t I remember that?” Momma asked, her brow furrowed.
“’Cause I never told you.” Nat shrugged in a way that said there was a whole lot of shit she kept from their momma, and it was best for everyone that she not venture down that path.
Her momma—no doubt well used to this sort of thing with her youngest child—simply exhaled a heavy sigh and shook her head.
“I’m not sorry about that either,” Nash said. “They both deserved to get some sense knocked into their brains.”
“You know one of them is a seven-year-old, right?” Rory said dryly, though there was no mistaking the fondness in her voice.
Nash shrugged. “I don’t care if he’s seven or sixty-seven—it’s never a bad time to remind a man how he should be treatin’ a lady.”
