“Flint Jackson,” he says.
I make a noise that probably resembles something a dying cow would say.
This?
Thisis Flint Jackson? The man who rents the gatehouse and who’s been managing the ranch since my uncle died? The man who’s sent regular updates for the past few months about what’s broken, what’s been fixed, and what I owe him for his services?
The man whose emails suggest that he has the personality of a brick wall and likes to complain thatthose whippersnappers need to get off my lawn?
He doesn’t say anything else.
“Seriously, Mom?” Junie mutters as she slides off my back.
“Mr.Jackson.” I’m stuttering. On top of working as a handywoman since I was a teenager, always surrounded by men from all walks of life, I spent the past six years filming a television show and delivering lines and improvising as the comic relief under nearly every circumstance you can encounter when filming a home-repair show—except finding a bear eating a dead cow on set, that’s definitely new—and I have never stuttered the way I’m stuttering now. “I thought you were much older.”
I thought you were much older?
Someone please take my mouth away from me before it says something else stupid.
“He looks plenty old to me,” Junie says. She tilts her head, reaches into the window jamb, and pulls out an eighteen-inch-long one-by-two that’s propping the window up.
The pane slides shut on its own, landing with a thud hard enough to rattle the glass.
“Oh,” I say softly.
“Yeah.” The scorn in Junie’s voice says it all.
That’s the first thing I should’ve checked when the window wouldn’t move.
I knew to check that.
And Flint Jackson is standing on the other side of the window that might or might not have protected us from the bear, staring in at us like we won’t last four days here.
I pry the window back open, which takes more effort than it should, considering how easily it fell. There’s some baggage to unpack in this window.
Or possibly I’m sabotaging my own window-opening skills because I’m so mortified by all this.
“Sorry,” I say to Flint on a grunt as I hold the window open. “We’re still learning our way around, but don’t worry. Next time, we’ll be more prepared for the bear. We’ve been studying how to live out here. Intellectual knowledge and practical knowledge are two different skill sets. We’ll get there.”
“I’m moving in with Grandma,” Junie mutters.
“You can’t move in with Grandma, and you know it,” I mutter back.
“You know this isn’t the main house?” he says.
“Oh, yes. We know. We’re looking around. Seeing what needs to be taken out, what can be upgraded. Taking stock. As you do.”
His cheek twitches. “Taken out and upgraded,” he repeats flatly.
His doubt that I can handle thisshouldalleviate this unwelcome attraction to his testosterone.
It does not.
Doesn’t matter,I remind myself.You are in control of your hormones, not the other way around.
I think.
I hope.
