Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay

by Babette de Jongh

  Abby heard the bleat of goats in the distance, followed by the unmistakable sound of the entire herd coming this way at a fast clip. “Hurry up, Quinn.” Abby imagined the hullabaloo that would occur with a dozen animals milling around this operation. The goats’ heads and horns bobbed up over the hill’s horizon line, then the whole herd galloped into sight. “Shit. Here they all come.”

  Quinn pulled aside another section of wire, and with another couple of quick clips, he had entirely freed the donkey’s front legs. “One left.” He moved around to the still-ensnared back leg. “Pull him forward so he doesn’t have room to kick out. Then hold him still.”

  Goats had begun to nibble at the discarded wire. Gregory chewed at Abby’s shoelaces, and Esmeralda bit at Quinn’s jeans. “Georgia,” Abby said, “aren’t you supposed to be a herding dog?”

  Georgia looked up at Abby, then immediately chased the goats away, nipping at heels and expertly keeping stragglers from turning back. When the goats had all disappeared behind the hill, Georgia came back and sat, panting. Abby’s stress level dropped, and she relaxed her hold on the lead rope.

  “Okay,” Quinn said. “This is it.” He clipped the last wire holding Elijah’s leg and pulled the chunk of wire away.

  Elijah brayed with joy and plunged forward as if Abby wasn’t standing right in front of him. She landed on her butt. Cradling her rope-burned palms, Abby watched Elijah run over the hill with the lead rope flapping out behind him. “You’re welcome,” she snarked at the ungrateful equine’s backside.

  “You okay?” Quinn put out a hand. When she hesitated to put her still-burning hand in his, he grabbed her wrists and tugged to help her stand.

  She stood, keeping most of her weight on her right leg. When she shifted, her left ankle buckled, and a sharp, knife-edged pain shot from the sole of her foot to her knee. She sat abruptly. “Owww.”

  Quinn knelt down beside her and took her booted foot in his hand. “Owww,” she complained. “Don’t.”

  “Shit. That damn donkey has broken your fucking foot.”

  “Broken? No. It can’t be.” It hurt like holy hell, though.

  He looked her in the eye, his blue-jean-blue eyes serious. “You want to stand up and prove it to me?”

  The very thought of standing on that foot made adrenaline flare like a gas stove meeting a lit match.

  Chapter 10

  Quinn scooped Abby up and stood, holding her against his chest. “Please tell me you don’t have a field trip scheduled for today.”

  She wrapped her arms around his neck. “I don’t.” The hot breeze blew her hair across his face; the wavy strands smelled like flowers.

  “Good. I don’t have work, either, so we both get to spend the day in the ER.” He carried her toward the closed field gate, which they had both climbed over when the hysteria began.

  “Wait,” she said. “You’ve got to clean up all the wire first.”

  He held her tighter. “And leave you sitting in the dirt? I don’t think so.”

  “But…”

  He unlatched the gate. “Shush. First things first.” He carried her into the barn and put her on the UTV’s passenger seat. Georgia hopped in, too, then Quinn drove back into the field and loaded up the damaged wire. “Can you take that boot off? You probably should, in case your foot starts to swell.”

  She started working on the laces. “Ow, ow, ow… We should have done this in the first place.”

  “Done what?” He tossed the fence posts on top of the wire. “Broken your foot? Taken off your boot?”

  “No. I’m saying that we should have put all the discarded wire in the UTV before any of this happened.” A nice way of blaming him, he thought—saying we when she really meant him.

  “Live and learn.” As he recalled, he’d been too busy noticing her cute backside and can-do attitude to be thinking very hard about equine safety concerns. He climbed over the closed half-door of the UTV and wrestled the stick shift into reverse. “I’ve made an mistake I won’t repeat.”

  “I’m not blaming you,” she blurted out. “If anyone’s to blame, it’s me.”

  He ground the gears and the UTV shot forward. “Of course.”

  “No, really,” she insisted. “Aunt Reva told me to check the grazing field for hazards on a regular basis. I didn’t do it at all, or I’d have—”

  The UTV’s brakes squealed and gravel scattered when Quinn stomped on the brake, parking next to the farm truck. “Truck keys?”

  “In the ignition.”

  He picked up Georgia, who growled at him. “You can’t go,” he told her. “Where do I put this dog so she’ll stay put while we’re gone?”

  “You know, I really think this isn’t as bad as you think. Probably I just need to rest it.”

  Yeah, not really. He was pretty sure he’d heard a snap when that donkey ran over her. He lowered his eyebrows at her and looked down at the dog he held.

  “Close the doggy door in the laundry room and leave her in the house. And grab my purse from the… From wherever it is. It’s pink leather. Might be hanging on those hooks by the door. Or maybe…”

  He didn’t hear the rest of what she said because he’d gone inside and closed the door. He got the dog situated and found the purse, kicking himself the whole time. Who was gonna feed all these hollering animals when she was hobbling around on crutches?

  As if the universe delighted in answering his question, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror by the back door on his way out.

  * * *

  Quinn was such a gentleman! He carried her into the waiting room of the local ER, deposited her into one of the wheelchairs by the door, and then wheeled her to the sign-in desk. He hadn’t been very chatty; in fact, he’d been a little broody. He was probably worried about her.

  Within minutes, the efficient medical staff had taken over, passing her from a nurse who typed up the intake info to a fourteen-year-old X-ray technician to the elderly orthopedic doctor. He slapped a big sheet of film up on the light box on the wall. “Good thing you’ve got somebody to wait on you for the next few weeks.” He pointed out two clearly broken bones on the arched foot in the blurry image. “You’re gonna need it.”

  Abby’s heart sank low. Yes, her foot hurt like hell, but she’d been hoping for a mild sprain. “For how long?”

  “Six to eight weeks, I’d say. But you can tell your man anything you want. If you want to milk it for more than a cool two months, I won’t tell.”

  He put a cast on Abby’s foot that went all the way up to her knee. “In my opinion,” he said, “a cast is better than a boot.”

  “I feel all better, then,” Abby said, softening the snark with a smile. While the fiberglass cast dried and hardened, she chewed her fingernails and worried about what she’d tell Aunt Reva—and about when she’d tell Aunt Reva. Maybe she should call right now and ’fess up to the wire they’d left lying around, and the danger she’d put the donkeys in.

  Or maybe Abby shouldn’t tell Reva at all, because she knew her aunt would drop the internship and come back home. At only two weeks into her sabbatical, Reva might take Abby’s accident as a sign from the universe that she should abandon the idea and come back home. (Reva took pretty much everything as a sign from the universe.)

  As Abby pondered the wisdom of calling (or not calling) Reva, her phone pinged with an incoming text from her aunt. Is everything okay at the farm? For some reason, I can’t get you off my mind today.

  Abby made a few false starts, typing and then deleting what she’d written. She finally settled on an evasive truth. Everything’s fine at the farm! Don’t worry about us!

  Because Abby and her broken foot weren’t at the farm at the moment, so technically, everything at the farm was fine. She followed that text with another; a smiley-face emoji and Hope you’re having a good day.

  Better than good. A
dream come true day! This was followed by a photo of Reva bottle-feeding a bobcat cub. Her aunt was grinning like a teenager at the prom, and the cute studly guy from the cafeteria picture—the one with the buzz cut—had one arm around her while he held the phone out with the other, selfie-style. Blond guy is my lab partner. He’s about your age. Should I inquire?

  Seeing how much fun her aunt was having made Abby glad she had decided not to tell Reva after all. No need to worry her. Abby would manage. She responded to Reva’s text with a horrified-face emoji, and NO! Not interested in blond guy. You can keep him. Cute bobcat, though. Maybe you can bring him home.

  Abby knew she’d have to tell Reva about her broken foot sometime, just not right now. She could probably hobble around just fine and do all the chores. The next time Reva called, Abby could report that she had broken her foot, but everything was fine, and she was managing quite well. At the thought of putting off the inevitable, Abby’s stress level dropped significantly.

  Maybe sometimes, letting the bull wander off into the field was better than trying to take it by the horns.

  * * *

  Quinn took Abby to the pharmacy and the medical supply store. He picked up fast food so she could take her pain medication on a full stomach. He held her elbow while she maneuvered on crutches and made it inside the house. He unfolded the knee scooter and set it by the back door.

  While he did all these things, he surrendered to the fact that he was about to pay, and pay dearly, for his stupid decision to help with the fence-building project and then leave a roll of fence wire lying in the neighbor’s grazing field. His father had always said, “No good deed ever goes unpunished.” Quinn was beginning to see the wisdom in that viewpoint.

  “Thanks for taking such good care of me.” Abby leaned against the doorframe, balancing uneasily on the new crutches she had already managed to drop or trip over at least a dozen times.

  Georgia came out of the bedroom and shot out the open door into the darkness, barking at nothing. The donkeys brayed, the goats baaed, and a general sense of unrest settled like a smelly old blanket over the farm. “What can I do to shut these hollering animals up?” he asked. “I know they’re expecting to be fed, and there must be chores…?”

  Abby shook her head. “I couldn’t possibly ask you to do my chores. We’ll be fine. I’m just gonna use the scooter and—”

  “You’re just going to sit on that couch with your foot elevated, while I do what needs to be done around here.” She’d better not be a reluctant patient; he didn’t have time to do all her work and argue about it, too.

  “But you won’t know what to do unless I show you.” She leaned the crutches against the wall and held on to the doorframe, hopping on one foot to make tiny, incremental progress through the doorway toward the knee scooter.

  “What are you doing?” He grabbed her arm. She stumbled over the threshold, and he held her up. “You trying to kill yourself?”

  “I’m going to feed critters.” She grabbed the handlebars of the scooter and put her knee on the cushion, then pushed the scooter forward and hopped behind it. “You can come, too, if you want.”

  “Where are you going?” He put a hand on her back; she didn’t look too steady, and she was hopping in the exact opposite direction from the barn. “You’re going to fall and break your other foot if you’re not careful.”

  “I’m trying to get to the barn.”

  “Oh, really? Well, you’re going the wrong way.”

  “I know that.” Hopping sideways, she wrestled the handlebars and almost tipped the damn thing over. “How does this thing turn around?”

  “You have to make a wide circle, I think. Push it forward and then circle back.”

  She shoved the scooter out in front of her and hopped to keep up with it. “Damn fucker,” she mumbled when the wheels stuck. Then she looked over her shoulder at Quinn. “Push it forward,” she mimicked. “Circle back around. That’s exactly what I was doing when you yelled at me.”

  “I didn’t yell,” he yelled. “I never yell.”

  She snorted, then laughed. “Thanks for letting me know what a pussycat I’m dealing with. I had no idea.”

  Together, they struggled toward the barn, step by hopping step. Scooters and flagstone pavers across a grassy lawn didn’t mix well. But Abby had proved herself to be even more incompetent on crutches.

  Georgia tried to urge Abby on at first, dancing around and yapping at the wheels of the scooter. Finally, she gave up and hopped onto the padded seat next to Abby’s knee. She looked forward, ears up, eyes bright, tongue hanging out. In the barn, she hopped down and rushed to the first food bin, doing her own version of Vanna White. Her wagging tail was just as expressive as Vanna’s graceful wrist flick. If Georgia could speak, she’d be saying, “This one’s first; that one’s next.”

  Quinn felt like he’d landed back in kindergarten when he encountered the color-coded buckets and bins and scoops arranged in a line below the color-coded instructions written in wide-tipped Vis-à-Vis markers on the big whiteboard.

  “First, you put the buckets on the floor next to the same-colored bins,” Abby instructed. “Then, you use the same-colored scoops to dish up the food.”

  “No shit. How ingenious.” Because yes, Reva’s instructions had left nothing to chance, unless the person doing the work was color-blind.

  “Yeah, I know, right?” Abby chirped. “My aunt Reva is really good at breaking things down into small, doable chunks.”

  “Color-coding makes everything better.” Lord God, he thought. Just let him finish this, throw down these color-coded buckets, and get out of here. He wanted nothing more right now than to be sitting in front of the TV in his pool house, drinking a beer and watching a WWE match. Spurting blood and the smell of hops might soothe his battered spirit right about now. “Brilliance must run in your family.”

  Abby scooted closer to the bins and held one open for him. “Reva is definitely smarter than the average bear. I’m not so sure about myself.”

  I’m not so sure about you, either, he thought, until she leaned forward to hand him the next feed scoop, and he got a clear view down the front of her tank top. At that point, his brain stopped working altogether, and he wasn’t sure about anything.

  * * *

  Abby’s foot throbbed. She looked out the bedroom window at the lights blazing in Quinn’s pool house. He had offered to spend the night on the couch in case she needed help. Of course, she had declined. She could have fed the critters this evening; the knee scooter allowed her that much freedom. But unfortunately, she wouldn’t have been able to shovel poop or empty and refill water buckets.

  But she had managed to get ready for bed by herself without incident. Quinn had insisted on waiting in Reva’s living room in case she ran into trouble, but she hadn’t.

  Now that she was in bed, she realized that the pain meds didn’t dull the pain; they just made her head so fuzzy that she didn’t care how bad her foot hurt. Hoping the meds would kick in with a little more oomph soon, Abby checked her phone and found a text message from Reva.

  Someone brought in an injured mama deer today. She had been hit by a car. Her injuries will mend, but I know that she had babies who are waiting for her to return. She told me where she’d hidden them, but no one with access to a vehicle would help me look for them. Everybody thinks I’m crazy. I can’t stop crying right now. Maybe I should just come home.

  Abby didn’t know how to reply. She settled for a sad-face emoji.

  She tried to think of something more eloquent or helpful to write, but couldn’t. With a sigh, she plugged the phone into the charger and set it facedown on the bedside table, then turned out the lamp.

  Georgia stretched out against Abby’s good leg and groaned. Abby tried to relax, but something still left undone niggled at the edges of her consciousness.

  Quinn had done everything; sh
e could relax.

  She tried a progressive-relaxation technique, going from toes to ankles to knees, then moving upward, on and on to the top of her head, systematically relaxing each part and parcel of her body, bit by bit. She got as far as the heart chakra when she remembered.

  She hadn’t given fresh food and water to the stray wolf dog across the street. She sat up in bed. “Georgia, why didn’t you remind me?”

  Georgia wagged her tail and lowered her chin. I tried, but you weren’t listening.

  Abby imagined the words of Georgia’s response and knew that even though she couldn’t communicate with animals as well as her aunt did, her impression in this instant must be the truth. Georgia had formed a bond with that stray dog. She would have chosen to feed him, and lacking that ability, she would have tried to get someone else—Abby—to do it. The fact that it hadn’t been done meant that Georgia had tried to tell Abby, but Abby hadn’t listened. Maybe it was time for her to really start trying instead of doubting herself all the time.

  “I don’t think I should chance us going outside right now,” Abby said.

  Georgia whined and looked toward the bedroom door. Are you sure? He’s hungry, and that water bucket is almost empty.

  “I can put a pan of food and a bowl of water on the back patio,” Abby promised. “But you’ll have to tell him to come.”

  Georgia leaped down from the bed and ran into the kitchen as if to acknowledge the pact they’d just made. Maybe there was something to this animal communication thing after all.

  Abby dished up a bowl of dog kibble and set it on the back porch, then filled a stockpot with water and put it out, too. The whole operation should’ve taken less than five minutes. But now that she had to push herself around with the scooter, the task took a half hour and left the kitchen floor splattered with splashes of water. Thank God she’d gotten the knee scooter with the handy basket between the handlebars.

  Back in bed, Abby felt better, more complete. She’d done what was most important to do today. She imagined the stray wolf dog cowering in the forest across the street, and tried to send welcoming vibes to lure him in. Then, while her foot throbbed and the pain medication made her head float several feet above the bed, she dropped into a deep sleep, the descent marked only by a jerking-awake sensation that pulled her up for an instant before she fell even deeper into the abyss.