Page 58 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
Thomas pushed back from the table and stood. “The stretch behind the coop, you said? I know the spot. Good ground. We could get the first till done this afternoon if we start now.”
“You?” Logan raised an eyebrow. “Volunteerin’ for manual labor? Without bein’ asked?”
“Don’t make a thing of it.”
“I’m just sayin’, this—”
“Isaiddon’t make a thing of it.” Thomas grabbed his hat off the hook by the door. “You comin’, Mason? Jonah? Let’s go look at the ground before Logan assigns us chores we actuallydon’twant to do.”
Mason jumped up so fast, his chair rocked on its back legs. Jonah followed, cramming the stolen cornbread into his mouth whole, and the three of them jostled through the kitchen door in a tangle of shoulders and elbows.
“Don’t forget to—”
The front door slammed.
“—feed the horses.” Rafe sighed and looked at Grace. Then at Logan. Then at the door. Then at the ceiling. “Every time. Everysingletime they leave this house in a group, they forget the horses. You’d think I raised a pack of dogs instead of boys.”
Logan stood and collected his plate. “I’ll remind ’em when I go out.”
He paused behind Grace’s chair on his way to the basin, and his hand landed on her shoulder for a beat. Just a beat. His palm pressed through the cotton of her dress and into the muscle beneath it, and his thumb brushed the spot where her neck met her shoulder. Light enough to be accidental. Deliberate enough to send a current straight down her spine.
Then he lifted his hand, crossed to the basin, and set his plate in the water Grace had heated that morning.
“I’ll get the till fork from the shed.” He grabbed his hat. “Have a look at what you want to grow, and we’ll talk seeds at supper.”
The door opened and closed behind him.
Tomatoes.
The big ones, not the sad little marbles she’d nursed along on the fire escape in New York, butrealtomatoes; the kind that split the skin when they ripened and stained your hands red when you picked them.
Squash, the yellow crookneck variety, her mother had grown in the old country. Pole beans climbing a trellis. Cucumbers. Carrots, maybe. Beets, if the altitude allowed it.
Pumpkins, come fall, the big round kind she could set on the porch for decoration, assuming Miriam didn’t try to eat them first, which, based on the baby’s current approach to anything within arm’s reach, ranked as a near certainty.
Ma would’ve loved this.
Her mother, who’d packed seeds in cloth pouches for the crossing from Scandinavia. Who’d kept a garden in every place they’d lived, even the hut, even when the soil amounted to nothing but a strip of dirt between the back wall and the alley where the neighbors dumped wash water.
Ma had knelt in that strip every spring and coaxed green out of gray, and Grace had sat beside her, pressing seeds into the ground with fingers too small to do much but trying anyway.
Twelve years since then. Twelve years, and the feel of dirt under her nails still carried the shape of her mother’s hands guiding hers.
Her own garden.
A real, proper, in-the-ground garden with space to spread out and sun to soak up and soil deep enough to put down roots.
Roots.
Funny word to snag on. But it snagged all the same, pulling something loose in her chest that she’d cinched tight since childhood. Because roots meant staying. Roots meant the ground you stood on planned to keep you, and the people on it planned to keep you, and you could dig your fingers into the dirt and trust it to hold.
Miriam slammed the spoon against the tray one final time and let out a squeal that could’ve cracked glass.
“All right, little bird.” Grace lifted her out of the high chair and settled her on one hip. “Let’s go see about our garden.”
Then, she grabbed the flier off the table, folded it into her apron pocket, right next to the handkerchief that still smelled faintly of brandy from last week, and made her way outside.
Two keepsakes now.
