Curvy Girls Can't Date Cowboys - Kelsie Stelting Page 0,16
the pen from between her lips. “Ginger, I’m going to need you to run some errands for me.”
I perked up. “What do you need?” Anything to get out of the house, out from under her and my dad’s watchful eyes.
She ran her pen over several lines and stopped on one, “I need you to get dog food from the Heywood co-op.”
I furrowed my brows. “What? Why? We’re not getting a dog, are we?”
From the next room over, the twins cried, “WE’RE GETTING A DOG?”
“No, no, no,” she said loud enough for them to hear and shook her head at me. “Aunt Rosie is refusing to let us pay her for babysitting you and Cori, so it’s the least I could do.”
“Can’t I get some from the store?”
She shrugged. “Rosie said he only likes a specific kind from this place.”
Cori stepped over some of the condiment bottles I had sitting on the floor and reached past me into the fridge. After she pulled out a tub of hummus and carrot sticks, she turned to Mom and said, “You know, we don’t need a babysitter.”
“Don’t waste your breath,” I muttered.
Still looking at her list, Mom touched her own nose.
Rolling her eyes, Cori walked out of the room to work on her scheduled chore.
“After you get the dog food, can you go by the store and pick up some snacks for our trip?”
“Isn’t Dad at the store right now?” I asked. “Can’t he get them?”
“I don’t want to trouble him with anything else.”
“Right, because I wouldn’t want to distract him from overwhelming Janet with an obnoxiously long list of tasks to take care of while he’s gone. You know she could practically run the store herself.”
A wry smile lifted her lips. “That’s between you and me.”
“And us,” the twins echoed from the other room.
I lowered my voice so only Mom could hear me. “If they test their eavesdropping skills, the twins are bound to get the role.”
She laughed, then stopped herself like she was embarrassed for doing so. “I can finish the fridge. You go ahead and shoo.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.” She took the rag from me and helped me up. “The co-op closes at eight, and I want you to have time to find the right brand.”
She scribbled it on the end of her list, tore off the corner, and handed it to me. After pulling my pants up by the belt loops—why were they always sliding down my butt?—I grabbed the keys and my coat from the hooks by the door and walked outside.
I was greeted by icy air. Ever since Christmas, it seemed like the chill was relentless. Even worse than other years. We hadn’t gotten snow for the holidays, but part of me was hoping for a snow day off school. We had a chance, considering people in California lost it any time there was so much as a slight dusting on the ground.
I got in my car, started it up, and hurried to type in the address to the co-op. When the estimated arrival time calculated on my screen, my mouth fell open. “Fifty-three minutes? Seriously?” My mom was sending me out to the boonies. They probably didn’t even have Wi-Fi out there.
I turned on a true crime podcast and started on my way. At least I’d miss out on a couple hours of cleaning—more by the time I checked out and picked up snacks for their trip. As I drove toward Heywood, the buildings got farther and farther apart. Closer to the co-op, I even saw houses with barns and horses. I’d grown up my whole life in Emerson, and I could hardly believe this existed only an hour away.
My phone guided me to a tin building with pickups parked around outside. I parked on the gravel lot between a muddy red truck and an old blue jeep. Instead of going in right away, I sat in my car for the last few minutes of the podcast. I had to find out how this crazy wife got away with using an empty seasoning jar to murder her husband...
Okay, so maybe redheads already had a stigma about being crazy, and maybe listening to morbid stories about murder mysteries wasn’t the best way to rep my hair color, but I liked it. Sue me.
I detached my phone from the aux cable, got out of my car and locked it. An older guy on his way in chuckled.
“What?” I asked, wondering if I had something stuck to my clothes or in my