The Mechanics of Mistletoe - Liz Isaacson Page 0,44

call her what I want, and I mostly call her Sammy. But she’s my mom. She takes care of me, and loves me, and makes sure I wash before dinner and get my homework done. That’s what moms do, right?”

Bear smiled at him, noting the wide-eyed anxiety on Lincoln’s face. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what moms do.”

“What do dads do?” Lincoln asked, turning back to his stall.

“A lot,” Bear said automatically. “They watch over their families. They help people. They sometimes have to pay the bills and do the dirty work no one else wants to do.”

“Sammy said last night that she wished she had someone to wash all the dirty dishes. Like that?”

Bear chuckled. “Yeah, kind of.”

“She’s not married.”

“No,” Bear said. “She’s not.”

“I think I’d like a dad,” Lincoln said. “My friends’ dads play baseball with them, and Davy’s dad taught him how to build a fire. He makes him empty the dishwasher too, so dads must make their kids do chores.”

“That they do,” Bear said. “My father was the ultimate taskmaster. He had to be. We have six kids in our family.”

“Wow,” Lincoln said. “Six kids?”

“Five boys and one girl,” Bear said, thinking of his brothers and sister.

“What kind of chores did you have to do?”

“So many,” Bear said. “I fed cattle before school, as well as after. I fed chickens before school. I had to walk this lame horse every afternoon. I ran the tractor when I turned twelve. I had to help Mother in the garden with the weeds. I hate weeding.”

“Sammy makes me clean my room,” Lincoln said. “She’s kind of like my mom and my dad.”

“Yes,” Bear said. “She works really hard, Link. You should do whatever she asks, and maybe clean your room before she has to ask you.”

“Okay,” Lincoln said.

They reached the end of the row house, and relief filled Bear. He took Lincoln’s hand again and faced the homestead. Sure enough, several long tables had been set up, and he watched as a couple of cowboys and Miss Kelly came down the steps from the deck and started loading them with food.

“Bear?” Lincoln asked. “Are you going to marry Sammy?”

Surprise moved through Bear. “I don’t know, Link.” He hadn’t even managed to take her out alone yet.

Tomorrow night, he thought. He’d been holding on to that thought for a while now—over a week—because he didn’t want to leave Link with his grandparents while he took Sammy to dinner. That had been problem one, and the other had been having a decent restaurant to take her to.

The town was mostly put back together now, though, and when Bear drove through it, the only reason he knew there’d been any wind damage was because of the huge, decorative water tower that sat in the downtown park. It still needed to be repainted, but there was a bit of a debate going on in town about the design of it.

Bear had no opinion on the matter, though he did wish they’d get rid of that ridiculous statue near the bus station. For every person he mentioned it to, though, he found someone who liked the young, pioneer woman waving to some long-lost lover. She’d been stranded in Three Rivers, supposedly while her cowboy had ridden away from her. Jilted, she’d set out to make her own way in the world, right there in Three Rivers.

Bear supposed it was a good story of overcoming the blows life dealt, but he didn’t like the way women went to the statue as if she’d have some sway over their love lives.

“Let’s go down one more row,” he said when he didn’t see anyone congregating on the lawn. “They don’t look quite ready yet.” He nudged Link down the next row instead of continuing toward the food, even though he was starving too.

He distracted himself from the hungry growls of his stomach by thinking about Sammy and their date the following evening. He’d been praying every chance he got that it would be a complete one-eighty from the only other date they’d been on together, and he added a mental plea to that collection as he checked another stall.

Please, Lord, he thought. Bless us to have good conversation and a fun time. When he picked Lincoln up in the morning, they chatted for a few minutes, and it wasn’t awkward. When she came up to Shiloh Ridge to get her son, she stayed and flirted with Bear for ten or twenty minutes. They texted, and Bear had called