I left them to their conversation and trotted up the stairs, where I could hear a movie running quietly. Darryl sat on one side of the couch nearest to the TV and Jesse on the other.
I sat down in the middle. “So,” I said to Darryl, “do you think Korra is going to be as good an avatar as Aang?”
“Who’s Aang?” he asked.
“You started him with Korra?” I accused Jesse. “That’s not okay. It’s like reading the last chapter of the book first.”
“Honey doesn’t haveThe Last Airbenderseries,” Jesse said in a low voice. “It was Korra or bust.”
“I think I should check on the cooks,” Darryl said. He left with cowardly haste.
I reached over and turned up the volume of the show until I was pretty sure we had privacy.
“I like Korra,” Jesse told me in a melancholy voice. “She’s not perfect, but she tries hard.”
“Like your mom,” I said.
She nodded. “I love her.”
“And she loves you back,” I said.
She nodded. “She does. She’s not perfect, but she’s my mom, you know?”
“You’ve met my mother,” I told her, and she laughed. I loved my mom, too, but I was very glad she lived in Portland.
“I’m glad I have you and Dad,” she said. “That way, it’s okay that Mom is...”
Flaky? Selfish? Horrible?
“Mom,” she concluded.
We watched Korra for a while longer. Darryl rejoined us as soon as we turned the volume back down.
“I am not wanted in the kitchen,” he said. Darryl loved to cook. “Christy says that men can’t cook.”
“You’re a great cook,” Jesse told him.
He smiled at her, a gentle smile he saved for Auriele and Jesse. “I know. I’m better than any of them, but they won’t listen to me.”
“I think I like Korra better than Aang,” I said after we’d watched another five minutes. “She gets to go do things instead of waiting around for other people.”
“I hear you,” agreed Darryl.
“I think I’m going to go check on Medea,” I said.
________
WITH LUCIA’S BIG DOG IN THE HOUSE, WE’D SHUTMedea in the tack room out in the stables. The horses in the pasture whinnied at me when I walked by. I threw them a couple of flakes of alfalfa hay, though there was plenty of grass in the pasture. A couple of extra flakes wouldn’t hurt them.
Medea greeted me with frantic purrs. I sat down on the wooden floor next to her and petted her, trying not to think.
There were two Western saddles bedecked with silver on wooden saddle racks and another pair that were more everyday trail saddles. Blue ribbons and big, oversized awards plastered one wall. Everything was covered with dust, as if, like the horses, they had not been used since Peter died.
Eventually, Darryl came out to talk.
“Hey, girl,” he said from the doorway.
“Hey.”
