She tugged the pole again, and the fish swung wide.
Right into Louisa’s face.
She ducked too late. “Oh, gross! Get it off! Get it away! Gross gross gross!Ew!” She scrubbed at her face, shrieking.
“Ohmigod!” Anna gasped. “I’m so sorry.”
Jackson’s eyes flared wide. “Okay, Lou-Lou?”
Anna floundered to snatch the fish. She unhooked him and tossed him back. Kaci and Lance trotted over.
Louisa was in the midst of a fit that would’ve made Kaci’s momma proud. “How could you do that?” she wailed. “A fish touched me. On myface. Ew, ew,ew!”
“Gonna live, Lou-Lou,” Jackson said. He pulled off his T-shirt and handed it to her.
She swiped it over her fish-slime-infested skin. “God, I can’t smell anything but fish.” She gave Anna the stink-eye. “Thisis why you let the menfolk do man-things. So weladiesdon’t get smacked in the face with a fish.”
Anna’s face burned, but worse, her chest felt as if it had been rolled in fishing line and was now being tugged tighter and tighter, as if she were the one dangling naked on a hook for all her friends to see.
She hadn’t done anything wrong. Not on purpose.
A roar of displeasure erupted in her veins, and she felt her nose flare. “You’ll go hunting. You’ll shoot an animal. But you can’t touch a fish?”
Louisa channeled an air of Southern belle outrage even while scrubbing her nostrils. “Touching’s for boys.”
The line around her chest squeezed tighter, cutting into her breathing space. She quaked with an energy she hadn’t expected and didn’t understand. “Seriously?”
“And dead squirrels and deer don’t smack me right in the kisser like Moby Fish.”
Anna’s jaw ached. “It’s just river water.”
“It’s justgross, and I shouldn’t have to touch dead things.”
“Sugar, down here, our mommas teach us the value of being helpless sometimes,” Kaci said to Anna.
“Sometimes.” Anna gripped the handle of the fishing pole so hard, she was probably leaving dents in the hard plastic. “When doessometimesturn into a complete inability to take responsibility for yourself and your actions? When doessometimescripple your chances at being able to hold a real job and pay your own bills and survive on your own?”
Louisa’s eyes snapped. “Honey, that’s why we go fishing for men.”
Jackson stepped between them, wariness and something else Anna had never seen darkening his eyes. “Pipe down, Louisa. Think you’re gonna make it.”
“I—”
Kaci cut Louisa off. “Anna, I’m pickled out with this fishing stuff. You got a book I could borrow?”
But Anna wasn’t looking at her. She was too busy having a staring contest with Jackson, and she didn’t like thequit picking on my sistermessage.
Sure, she would’ve expected the same from Beth, but Anna wasn’t the spoiled rotten brat Louisa was.
Jackson’s eyebrows knit closer together.You better quit talking nowcame silently from his pursed lips, like he didn’t appreciate her assessment of his sister.
“Itiswhat men are for,” Louisa said. “Russ won’t give me a job, so I’ll just get married and have babies and let my husband take care of me. Nothing wrong with that. It’s what Momma did and what her momma did before her, and it’s what I’ll do.”
Anna’s heart ached. It ached for Louisa’s ignorance, it ached for the wedge splintering her good thing with Jackson, but mostly, it ached for herself. “Yeah, works great, right up until it’s over.”
Kaci tugged Anna’s arm, and this time, Anna looked away from Jackson.
“She’s young,” Kaci said. She steered Anna backto the campsite. “Give her time.”
