trying to pick up the dangling conversational thread.
“Rodeo Days are almost upon us,” Tara said brightly. Every Independence Day weekend since the beginning of time, Parable had hosted the county rodeo, fireworks and carnival. People came from miles around to eat barbecued pork and beef in the park, root for their favorite cowboys and barrel-racing cowgirls, and ride the Ferris wheel and the Whirly-Gig. “The cleanup committee is looking for volunteers. Shall I put your name down to help out, Hutch?”
The woman was wasted as a chicken rancher, Kendra thought, pretending to puzzle between the café’s famous corn-bread casserole and deep-fried catfish. Tara should have been selling ice to penguins.
“Sure,” she heard Hutch say.
Kendra settled on the corn-bread casserole, preferring to avoid deep-fried anything, slanted a glance at Tara and raised her voice a little to place the order with a waitress. “To go, please,” she added, perhaps a touch pointedly.
She heard Hutch chuckle, low and gruff.
What was funny?
Tara edged over to Kendra’s side, digging in her purse for money.
“My treat,” Kendra said, watching out of the corner of her eye as Madison tore herself out of Hutch’s orbit and joined the women in front of the cash register.
The food was packed for transport, handed over and paid for, all in due course. As they were leaving, Madison turned back to wave at Hutch.
“I like that cowboy man,” she announced, to all and sundry, her little voice ringing like a silver bell at Christmas.
An affectionate group chuckle rippled through the café and Kendra hid a sigh behind the smile she turned on her daughter. “Let’s go,” she said, taking Madison’s small and somewhat grubby hand in hers before they crossed the street to get to Kendra’s Volvo.
“Meet you at your place,” Tara called, unlocking her car door and then laughing as she wrestled the eager puppy back so she could slide into the driver’s seat and take the wheel.
Kendra nodded and, when the Walk sign flashed, she and Madison started across the street.
“Don’t you like the cowboy man, Mommy?” Madison asked, wrinkling her face against the bright dazzle of afternoon sunshine.
The question surprised Kendra so much that she nearly stopped right there in the middle of the road. “Now why on earth would you ask such a thing, Madison Rose Shepherd?” she asked, keeping her tone light, almost teasing.
“If he looks at you,” Madison observed, as they stepped up onto the sidewalk and started toward the Volvo, “you look away.”
Thinking it was uncanny, the things children not only noticed but could verbalize, Kendra turned up her inner-smile dial a notch and squeezed Madison’s hand gently. “Do I?” she countered, knowing full well that she did.
Madison nodded. “He looks at you a lot, too,” she added.
Mercifully they’d reached the car, and the next few minutes were taken up with settling Madison in her booster seat and placing the take-out bag carefully on the floor, so the food inside wouldn’t spill.
A four-year-old’s attention span being what it was, Kendra had reason to hope the subject would have changed by the time she’d buckled herself in behind the wheel and started the car with an unintended roar of the motor.
“Do you know if the cowboy man likes dogs?” Madison ventured, from her perch in the backseat.
Kendra calmly took her foot off the gas pedal, shifted into Drive and steered carefully into the nonexistent traffic. “Yes, I think so,” she replied, as matter-of-factly as she could.
“That’s good,” Madison said happily.
Kendra wasn’t about to pursue that observation. “Have you ever been to a rodeo?” she asked, a way of deflecting the topic away from dogs and Hutch Carmody.
“What’s a rodeo?” Madison asked.
Kendra took the short drive home to describe the phenomenon in words her small daughter might be expected to understand.
“Oh,” Madison said when Kendra was finished. “Will the cowboy man be there?”
* * *
LUCY THE GOLDEN retriever turned out to be a real charmer, with her butter-colored fur and those saintly brown eyes dancing with intermittent mischief.
After supper, served as planned at the metal table beside the rose garden, Madison and the pup ran madly around the yard, celebrating green grass and vivid colors and the cool breeze of a summer evening.
Watching them, Tara smiled. “I’m sorry if I put you on the spot before,” she said to Kendra, after taking a sip from her glass of iced tea. “About Lucy’s sister, I mean.”
“That was her birth mother’s name,” Kendra reflected, watching the child and the dog as they played in the gathering twilight.