on in. I’ve made the engagement cake and it’s cooling. Arty is going to grill steaks for us and make baked potatoes. My bread dough is rising, and I’m right with you, girl, on this excitement thing.” Filly talked as she worked. “I want to really surprise Sophie and Teddy with this party. Of course, they’ve had all kinds of fancy things in Europe.”
“This is family and home,” Emma said. “I can almost hear her squealing when she drives up and sees everything.”
“I hope so, but now I’d like to know what happened last night with you and Josh,” Filly said. “Are we going to have another engagement sometime in the future?”
Emma blushed. “I guess we never know what the future holds, but right now I’m still hunting for me. I did figure out that I’m sneaking up on it pretty good, though. Last night we wound up sleeping together for the second night, but that’s all we did.” Her cheeks turned red a second time. “But he did kiss me on the forehead before we went to clean up.”
“I was hoping to hear something a lot more romantic than that,” Filly said.
“In my world, that was very romantic,” Emma said. “Even falling down the hill and landing in the mud puddle was romantic.” She giggled. “Words can’t describe the look on Arty’s face when that happened or on your face when you saw us.”
Arty came through the back door and chuckled. “I heard that last bit there about Filly’s face, and it’s the God’s honest truth. I don’t think I was even as shocked as she was, but then, I saw the fall from where I was standing. Lord, I’m glad I didn’t have to start up that slippery slope to find you kids. That could have been me slippin’ and slidin’ like I was a greased pig.”
“You would have been rolling like a basketball,” Filly teased.
Arty cocked his head to one side and gave her a long sideways look. “I guess that’s the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it?”
In the blink of an eye, Filly rolled up a tea towel and snapped it right over Arty’s head. “Next time you call me fat, that’s going to pop your arm—or your butt, if you’ve got the good sense to run.”
“Oh, honey, I can outrun you any day of the week.” Arty stepped back closer to the door.
This was what Emma wanted in a relationship—fun and bantering as well as all the rest.
“Josh is hanging the lights from a couple of tree limbs, and he wants to know if you have any more.”
“Oh. My. Goodness,” Emma said. “You really are going all out.”
“Of course we are. You finish stirring this frosting while I locate the lights.” She started back down the hallway. “Sophie is like our granddaughter, and, honey, you and Josh are like our grandkids, too. Besides, we love a party.”
Filly returned in a few minutes with a box and carried it out to the porch. When she came back inside, she put a small amount of the frosting into a bowl, added a few drops of blue food coloring, and motioned toward two dozen sugar cookies. “You can put a thin layer of icing on each of those. Something old is the hanging lights. Something new is the cake. Something blue is the cookies, and something borrowed is Arty’s fancy tablecloth that we normally only use on Christmas Day.”
“But this is an engagement party, not a wedding,” Emma said.
“Oh, honey, we’ll have something even bigger at the commitment ceremony. Arty and I will both cook for a week, and this park will look like a wedding chapel,” Filly giggled, “with a broom in the middle, of course, and we’ll send them off with fireworks.”
“I love this place,” Emma said with a long sigh, “and I love every one of you all.”
Filly patted her on the shoulder. “And we love you, too, girl, and you’ve made us so happy by talkin’ about stayin’ on with us. We need you. Josh gets lonely with just us old people, and me and Arty get cranky in the summer without a few more folks around us.”
We need you.
Those words kept going around in circles in Emma’s head. She’d never had anyone tell her that they needed her. She had always been picked last.
“Thank you,” Emma whispered.
“Nope, darlin’ girl, it’s us thanking you.” Filly stopped and gave her a side hug and then went right back to work on the cake.