Before anybody could speak again, the sound of a truck slowing as it went past the house caught their attention. Sure enough, it turned into the campground. Another seasonal had arrived.
“Rob’s turn,” Danny said.
Of course he got a turn in the office now because they were eating and didn’t want to get up. He downed the last of his coffee and pushed back his chair.
“Tell them you want to search the camper for axes and dead bodies,” Joey said.
“Half of them probably have axes,” Brian said. “For firewood, dumbass.”
They were still arguing about the difference between axes and hatchets when Rob walked out.
As afternoon started tipping towardlateafternoon, Hannah thought about the lack of food in the camper—other than the granola bars, of course—and the fact she still hadn’t scoped out grocery store options.
Option one was to walk down to the store and ask whoever was in there for recommendations. But as she’d been in and out of her camper, putting the finishing touches on her home for the summer, she’d seen several campers pull in and everybody seemed busy.
Option two was a second restaurant meal in one day. It wasn’t so much the money—she had a comfortable savings if she kept to burgers and not fillets—as it was the camping experience. Her dad always thought restaurant meals were cheating, but her mother loved a night out. Somewhere along the way, Jenn had taken her mother’s side and Hannah was a daddy’s girl, and even in adulthood, doing it Dad’s way had stuck.
If she went to the restaurant, though, she could sit in the parking lot and have a quick video chat with her parents before having supper. And after, she could run to the overpriced gas station convenience store that wasn’t too far past the restaurant to get milk for her coffee in the morning. And ice cream, too, if they had it. A good book and some chocolate ice cream would be a good way to end her first day at Birch Brook Campground.
But when she walked around her truck to put her cooler in the space where the passenger-side back seat was folded up, she found two boys on the ground next to it. They were twins from the look of it, and the one in a red T-shirt was stretched out on his stomach in the dirt.
“Hi,” she said.
“Our ball went under your truck,” the one in the blue T-shirt said. “Sorry.”
“Boys!” A woman appeared at the end of the site slightly up the hill, and Hannah realized they were her neighbors. “Are they bothering you? I’m so sorry.”
“Not at all. My truck ate their ball, I guess.”
The woman sighed and crossed the distance between them. “I’m Melissa Scott.”
“Hannah Shelby,” she said, shaking the hand the woman offered.
“That’s my husband, Scottie, over there,” she said, and a man waved from the site. “His name’s actually Jim, but everybody calls him Scottie because...well, Scott, obviously. And these guys are Jackson, in the red, and Jayden, in the blue. They’re ten and they can be rambunctious, but if you snap your fingers at them, they’ll take it down a notch.”
“You can call us Red and Blue, if you want,” Jackson said. “Everybody does. Our nicknames match our shirts.”
Melissa gave her a chagrined look. “It’s a long story that involves us bringing them home from the hospital, cutting their ID bracelets off, and then within three days, me having a total emotional breakdown because I’d lost track of which was which.”
“I can imagine,” Hannah said. “They’re very identical.”
“I have a freckle on my—”
“Jayden!” Melissa shook her head. “My mom remembered Jayden has a tiny birthmark freckle, so we got them sorted, but we knew they’d reach an age where having to drop their drawers to know which kid was which would get awkward, so Jackson always wore red and Jayden got blue. It stuck and they like it, so...”
“And you have a purple shirt,” Hannah pointed out. “Red and blue.”
“Mom always wears purple,” Red told her.
“Oh.” The woman looked down at her shirt. “That’s funny, but yeah. I wear a lot of purple.”
“Got it,” Blue declared, crawling out from under the truck with an orange Nerf ball. Being ten, he didn’t bother to dust himself off.
“Okay, off we go. I just wanted to introduce us and let you know to boot them back to me if they get out of hand.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Hannah said, and she thought about how it wasn’t really a lie as she put the cooler in the truck. They seemed like a nice family, and she knew from years of camping with her parents that wasn’t always the case. You didn’t get to pick your neighbors in campgrounds.
She waved to Brian on her way out, but she didn’t see Rob anywhere. Not that she was looking for him—okay, maybe she was.
