Page 80 of While the Sun Shines

“Please don’t,” Drew says, and that doesn’t sound better at all, just as desperate and as rushed.

“Drew.” Travis glances behind himself, then steps out onto the porch and pulls the door shut. “I’m not trying to make your life harder, but look, I can’t take care of my mom and the house all the way from Manhattan. It’s too much, and you know her. She’s too stubborn, and it’s all the worse the older she gets.”

What the hell did Penny see in you? Drew wants to blurt out. Though he can guess. Travis would’ve made time for Penny. Cleared his entire schedule for the chance at half a shot with her. And the deeper Drew sank into the farm, the more time he spent working, Cooper and Whit wrapped up in each other…yeah. It hurts, but yeah, he can see how and why the two of them might’ve happened.

Sucks that it did. That it got to that point at all, Penny floundering for anyone to have the time for her.

Drew straightens and looks at Travis as steadily as he can. “We’ll take care of your mom.”

“That’s nice of you, but—”

“Your mom and the house. Is that the sticking point? Cooper’s already mowing her lawn this year, and we plow for her every winter, and you know we’ll cut her firewood—”

“The roof, man. And the chimneys, and the leak in the downstairs bathroom, and the house is going to need to be painted again in a couple years.”

“We can paint it,” Drew says. “I can. I paint my house. I know how.”

“C’mon, you know it’s not the same as taking care of a house you own.”

“What if I do own it?” Drew asks. A plan, he thinks again but fuck it, he’s talking now and there’s no stopping the words that tumble out. “What if I buy it? And no, I can’t pay what you’re probably going to put it on the market for, but I can rent it back to you, let your mom keep living here for as long as she wants to.”

Travis crosses his arms. “Are you serious?”

I have no idea, Drew should say. But instead he nods. “I know you don’t want to live up here. You’re happy in the city. But you can’t tell me you don’t care who ends up with your family’s house and land. We’d take good care of it, keep farming the land, and we’d take care of your mom too.”

Travis rubs his hand over his mouth. Looks at the front door, then off across the fields. “That’s a lot of money we’re talking about,” he says.

“Your mom would be happy,” Drew says. “You know she would.”

“Jesus, Drew, you don’t make this easy, do you?” Travis scrubs at his eyes. “Fine, let me talk to her.”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s admitting that at this point, it’d be less of a headache to just accept your offer than convince her to move.”

“Yeah?”

“She doesn’t want to go, so…” Travis throws his hand up. “So okay. It’s not a no.”

Drew claps him on the shoulder. “I’ll take it.”

Fuck yeah, he will.

He wipes his palms on his shirt as he walks back to his own place. If he cut down a handful of trees, the two farmhouses would be visible to each other, a span of fields and fences between them.

And suddenly, clearly, he can imagine the scene that would make: Whit and Cooper living where Caroline lives now, someday off in the future. And—he swallows. And him and Penny living in the farmhouse. Kids, maybe. Racing bikes across the fields, like he used to when he was little. Drew has to stop walking. He bends over, his hands on his thighs, and laughs. That’d be—God, that’d be so damn great.

Sadie’s lolling in the sunshine when he makes it back into the barnyard, a wide, stupid smile on his face. She rolls over, sticking her stubby legs in the air, and he bends down, scratches her belly, laughs again as she squirms, delighted.

“Cheese,” Drew whispers to Sadie. “What’re we doing about Brad’s cheese order?”

She kicks her back leg, and he keeps scratching her stomach, his face turned into his own shoulder as he thinks. The number of wheels on the shelves in the aging cage, the loss of today’s production with the milk pump down—

Well, he can do what he’s always done: put his head down, work until everything’s finished. Skip out on the bar tonight, and that’d be just the start of long days in the cheese room.

“I need to hire someone,” he says. “I need to tell Brad his order might be a day late but mostly, I need some help around here.”

Sadie thumps her tail.