Page 16 of Charmed by the Obsessive Boss

"It's very ferocious."

"Mom said you did my spelling. I'm going to get a hundred on separate." She squints at me. "You carried me to the car. Mom said."

"I did."

"I'm not a baby."

"No. You're seventy pounds."

"I'm not heavy, I'm just sleepy, it's different." She sniffs, scuffs one sneaker in the straw. "I'm sleeping at my grandma's tonight. We're making cinnamon rolls. She lets me put the icing on."

"That sounds like a very good night."

"It is." She nods, pleased, then glances toward the ring toss on the far side of the Green. "Mom's the best at ring toss. She's never lost. She wins the felt pumpkin every year. Wanna see?"

I should say I have a plan to save a company. I say, "Lead the way."

Rosemary is already standing at the rope with six wooden rings in her hands and a small crowd gathering, because apparently this is a thing. I watch her line up the shot, one boot back, her shoulders square, and the sun catches the freckles across her collarbone through the open neck of the flannel.

The shirt pulls tight across her chest when she breathes in. She's got a full, soft, round body that she carries as though it's a language she was born speaking. I've thought of little else since Friday.

"Rosemary."

"Don't talk. I'm concentrating."

"I was only going to say you could stand a little closer."

"It doesn't help."

"I hear it improves aim."

"You hear that from where?"

"From a man who spent three hours thinking about the back of your neck in a hay maze." I say it low, only for her. "It's possible I'm biased."

Her ring goes wide. It sails past the pumpkin stem, bounces off a bale, and rolls into the grass. A silence falls over the crowd.

"You missed," says Charlotte, scandalized.

And Rosey laughs. She doesn't mean to, I can see her trying to stop it, and it comes out of her anyway, loud and total, the laugh I'd only heard fragments of through a glass wall. She puts a hand over her mouth and it shakes her shoulders, her chest, her stomach, until she has to bend over with her palms on her knees. Her face is scarlet to the roots of her hair. "I haven't missed in fourteen years," she gasps.

"You were distracted."

"I was not."

"Your ears are red."

"I hate you."

"No you don't." I pick up the second-to-last ring and weigh it in my palm. The crowd has become a circle. "Shall I show you how a man loses with dignity?"

I lose twice, magnificently. On the third try Charlotte, from somewhere around my hip, says, "You have to flick it, not throw it, you're throwing like a dad," and I flick it and it drops over the stem so cleanly the crowd erupts. I turn and Rosey is standing three feet away with her hand over her heart.

The felt pumpkin goes to Charlotte, who holds it against her tiger cheek with both hands.

"Mom never misses," she says.

"She did today."