Page 58 of Love Wells Kept

Cecily leans back in her chair, pregnant belly rounded out under a tight-fitting T-shirt, flipping casually through a seed catalogue. She glances up at the window and her entire face scrunches. “I can’t wait for some nicer weather.”

“Trust me when I say the cool weather is a blessing during pregnancy. You don’t want to be massively pregnant in the middle of summer.” Blair tops up her coffee and leans against the counter, taking a long swig while simultaneously checking the video baby monitor set up in Rhett’s room, where her daughter’s taking a nap.

Her words pinch my heart. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to think about pregnancy or babies without feeling a touch of grief over everything I lost. I should be spending the summer pregnant and complaining about the heat while I sit with my swollen ankles in the cool river.

“I want to get the garden planted before I’m too pregnant to bend over,” Cecily says. “Was hoping the weather would cooperate so I could get things in the ground sometime in May.”

“There are a lot of kids around here who never pass up an opportunity to dig in the dirt,” Cassidy chimes in from her end of the dining table. She’s making a futile effort to keep Rhett and her toddler, Hazel, from mixing all the Play-Doh colors together—the sort of thing you give up on altogether after enough time as a parent.

Rhett’s head pops up. “Can we use exabators?”

“Toy ones,” I clarify.

Rhett shakes his head. “No, the big one. I know how to drive it.”

The other day, Red took him in the ranch’s mini excavator to help get him out of the house, and that’s all he’s been talking about ever since.

Cecily laughs. “You know, I’ve been asking Uncle Austin to make me a couple new garden plots. I’ll get you the keys now. Aus won’t mind at all, I’m sure.”

Rhett promptly drops his Play-Doh and swipes his hands across the front of his jeans as he hops off the chair.

My spoon clunks against the side of the pot. “She’s joking, buddy. No excavators for you until you’re older.”

“How old? Five?”

Blair juts her thumb upward, indicating he needs to pick a bigger number.

“Seben?” Rhett squints at his aunt. “Daddy lets Dessie drive it.”

“Lord help us all,” Beryl mutters with a snort. “That girl should not be permitted to operate heavy machinery.”

“We’ll talk about it when you’re seven,” I say. “Until then, go back to your Play-Doh.”

He rolls a ball of blue and red around on the tabletop for a second before looking at Hazel and asking if she wants to play with toy excavators in the living room.

“Be quiet—Daddy’s talking to somebody on the phone,” I remind Rhett.

The two take off at a run, bare feet slapping against the hardwood floors, while Cass gets to work meticulously trying to separate the Play-Doh. Again—futile.

A rare moment of silence in a kitchen that’s typically bustling with laughter and music and the whir of kitchen gadgets for the majority of the day. And I can hear Jackson’s sonorous voice stretching the length of the hallway, the rise and fall of his deep timbre. I can’t make out the words, even when I strain to hear them.

“I’m glad he’s talking to someone.” Beryl scrapes tiny onion pieces from the cutting board into a mixing bowl.

“Me too.” I give up on the chili stirring, setting my spoon down and popping the lid back onto the pot. I need to move farther from the kitchen entry. Farther from where I might catch part of his conversation, because I promised myself I wouldn’t eavesdrop. He’s been sharing a lot from his therapy sessions, and that’s trust I refuse to break, regardless of how desperate I am to know everything he’s feeling.

So I slip past Blair’s long, lean body and fill a cup with coffee. I’m tempted to go for something stronger, given the circumstances, but with half the women in here either pregnant or breastfeeding, I’ll stick with nonalcoholic options in solidarity.

Odessa charges in, pink cheeks and flyaway hair, holding her school water bottle with something suspiciously dark—and chunky—sloshing inside. She tosses her backpack to the ground with a lightened sigh.

The smooth roll of my wrist stirs cream through the dark liquid in my cup. “Hey, Dess. How was school? And what’s in the bottle?”

It’s definitely not the water she left here with this morning.

“Mom,” she says, urgent and serious. “The rain made a pond under the cattle guard at the end of the driveway. I found a tadpole and I want to grow it into a frog.”

She holds the pink water bottle up and squints at the cloudy liquid, twisting and turning the plastic bottle around in her hands, looking for the tadpole. Blair sets her mug down and strides toward her, then crouches to get a look at Odessa’s science experiment.

My brows pull together. “I don’t think you can grow a tadpole in a water bottle….”