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plucked a single dandelion, one of a few that had bloomed so far, and he asked to borrow her fish knife. He cut a slit in the dandelion stem near the flower’s head, looped the bottom of the stem through it, and pulled it tight around her finger, so her hand had a big yellow flower on top.
“We used to make these!” Margo said, delighted. “My aunt Joanna showed me how.”
“Do you want a church wedding?” He clasped her hand. “I guess I know the answer to that. We’ll have riverside wedding.”
She was feeling overwhelmed. She kept looking at the dandelion on her hand.
“We’ll keep it small, just us and a few friends and family. Maybe your mom will show her face.”
They kissed at the river’s edge with the quaking aspen fluttering its new silvery leaves above them. The breeze picked up coolness from the thawed ground and blew it past them into the warm air.
“Should we wait until you’re eighteen? Until the end of November? That’s seven months from now.”
She nodded. Michael sat down cross-legged in the grass and tugged her down beside him. “I’m sorry about the way I yelled at you earlier,” he said, and took both her hands in his. “I freak out sometimes.”
• Chapter Twelve •
Margo sat across the table from Michael, eating lunch dis-tractedly, keeping an eye on the activity upstream and across the river. Paul had been at the cabin since midmorning with Charlie and Johnny, and Margo planned to stay inside until they pulled away in the pontoon boat. Usually they were at the cabin just long enough to fill glass jugs from the blue drum buried behind the house, but Charlie was sweeping the cabin’s screen porch, and that made Margo worry that one of them might be planning on staying. She took some comfort in the fact that Paul’s eyesight was poor and that Michael’s house was set back from the river’s edge.
“It’s a hot one,” Michael said and took a bite of his grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich.
“Maybe King and I will fish downstream today,” Margo said, bringing her attention back to Michael and their lunch. Wednesdays were his late day, when he went in to work at noon and got home by eight-thirty or nine at night. “Do you want to have brown trout tonight? Maybe I can get a couple with night crawlers in the evening.”
“Don’t you ever want to do anything more than fish and shoot?” Michael said hesitantly.
“You know, Grandpa taught me to skin rabbits and muskrats. He said it was a skill that would benefit a girl. And you know I can cook.”
Michael laughed. “Your grandpa probably imagined you would have other skills as well, like math and history, on top of skinning animals.”
“He only went to school through the eighth grade. Annie Oakley only went through the fourth grade.”
“It was a different time. Now you need education to get anywhere.”
“I could be a trick shooter,” Margo said.
“Says here in the newspaper Murray Metal Fabricating is laying off another eighteen people. Tough times for manufacturing. Are you sure you don’t want to go visit the Murrays? I’ll go with you. It says here, Cal Murray has been in a wheelchair since he was attacked in that bar last year.”
“I told you, we don’t get along,” she said. “Not since my grandpa died.”
“Well, I wish I had met your grandpa. I mean, he was a man of the wild, but a businessman, too.”
“His father started the company. Grandpa never really wanted to be president, he said. But he made the company grow.”
“Sometimes people have to do things they don’t want in life.”
“Do you want me to make money?” Margo asked. According to the book Michael had gotten her, Annie Oakley supported her family through hunting and trapping. She killed animals and birds to eat and sell in town. Only later did she make her shooting a show.
“That’s not it. I want you to have the joy of learning new things. And sometimes it’s even worth it to tolerate what you don’t like in order to achieve your goals. You don’t have to graduate high school. I think you can get a GED and go to community college. You could get a two-year degree in biology or something like that. Maybe you could get a job working outside.”
“You said I didn’t have to go to school to learn. I could read books.”
“You don’t like any of the books I’ve gotten you other than the Annie Oakley book. Tell