Kiss Me Hello (Sweetest Kisses)

by Grace Burrowes

  The kitchen door was thus closer to the mud—or something worse than mud. “I might have. We should still have some apricot.”

  Luis made a face, because apricot preserves had been classified in one of their frequent squabbles as girl food.

  “You’ve finished your first week here, Luis. Can you dance to it?”

  He was quiet as he assembled a triple-decker PBJ, then stepped away from the counter so Sid could get to work on fixing her own smaller sandwich.

  “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. The usual gang of idiots is missing the worst tier at the bottom. They talk about some of the kids being in gangs, or dealing, or into the cult-worship bullshit, but I get the sense it’s ninety-nine percent talk, which is a relief.”

  Luis wasn’t stupid. Not by any means. “They’re all junior plow jockeys and bake-sale queens?”

  “The whole spectrum is present—the jocks, the nerds, the preppies, the hoods, the lost—but the middle rungs are wider in each group, I guess. The feel of the school is still like a school, not like a juvie hall without uniforms. What’s for dinner?”

  “This is our house. A PBJ is dinner.”

  “It’s Friday, and even in our house, we’re allowed to celebrate the weekend.” Luis screwed the lid back onto the apricot jam, then did the same with the peanut butter, and put them away when Sid had finished making her sandwich. “I could go for a piece of that lime cheesecake.”

  Sid stared at the sandwich she’d made: peanut butter and apricot jam on stale whole wheat, and one slice was the heel, dammit.

  “If we got a dog,” she said, “I could feed him this sandwich, and he’d think it was the greatest treat he’d had all week.”

  “If we got a dog, you’d have to make sure it had all its shots, or DSS would impound him or some shit.”

  The mood in the kitchen went from end-of-week relaxed to sullen-anxious-teenager in a blink.

  “They haven’t called, Luis. I left the worker a message on Monday, according to Hoyle, and there hasn’t been a call back.”

  “Call them again. We’re supposed to go to a review hearing within thirty days of moving out here, and it’s been ten days already.”

  Technically, the workday wasn’t over for fifteen more minutes. Sid passed Luis her sandwich, and while he watched, dialed the number for DSS again. She got voice mail—she always got voice mail—but left the prescribed message and the house number for a return call.

  “Satisfied?” she said, hanging up.

  “I will be satisfied when they close my case and leave me in peace.”

  “There are two ways through that door, Luis. You can turn eighteen, which is more than two years off, or you can let me adopt you. I support either outcome, you know that.”

  He glared at the half of Sid’s sandwich he hadn’t eaten. “Do we have to talk about this now?”

  “We have to talk about it sometime,” she said gently. “You won’t go to counseling, and letting you drift along in foster care for another two years makes the state look bad come federal funding time.”

  “As if I give a rat’s crap how the state looks.”

  “As long as your case is open, Luis, they can come along and move you back to a group home. Bad grades, hooking school, a fender bender, a dirty urine, anything, and they can take you from me, and me from you. Your lawyer made that plain enough.”

  Such a helpful little SOB, that lawyer. Somewhere along the line he’d confused pontificating with zealous advocacy.

  “My lawyer, the social worker, the judge.” Luis scrubbed his hand through his hair, and gave her a look from old, sad eyes. “I’ll bring in the ponies, and then maybe you’ll be willing to spring for cheesecake.”

  He banged out of the kitchen, taking another bite of sandwich as he went, leaving a ringing silence behind.

  Why in the ever-loving hell had Sid started that riff about Luis being moved? He’d come home in a decent mood, his impression of the school surprisingly positive after the first week, and she had to go pissing on his parade with that talk about…

  The phone rang, interrupting her self-castigation.

  “Sid Lindstrom.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Lindstrom, I’m Amy Snyder, the caseworker assigned to Luis Martineau. How are you?”

  “Unpacking,” Sid said, not correcting the social worker’s choice of title, “but getting there. What can I do for you, Ms. Snyder?”

  “Call me Amy. I wanted to touch base with you, see how you’re settling in, and let you know I’ll stop out next week some time during business hours to introduce myself to you and Luis. May I say hello to him now?”

  “He’s out with the livestock. If you like, I can have him call you back in a few minutes.”

  A slight pause, suggesting Sid had either given the wrong answer, or the woman was typing in her contact note as they spoke.

  “I’ll talk to him when I make my home visit. Do you have any questions about moving out here? You have Luis enrolled in school?”

  “I have. I did want to ask when the review hearing is. I understand we’re supposed to attend one in the next few weeks, and Luis is already anxious about it.”

  Another pause while the worker probably looked at the court order from Baltimore.

  “I’ll put one in the works when I come in on Monday, and the court will send out the hearing notice. Luis is encouraged to come because the judge is supposed to see the kids in the courtroom regularly.”

  “Luis knows the drill. We’ll look forward to meeting you in person next week.”

  They hung up, and in the pit of Sid’s stomach, in the place that never forgot she’d already lost a brother, and Luis wasn’t hers to keep yet, unease germinated and tried to set down roots.

  “Heaven help me, lime cheesecake sounds like just the antidote.”

  * * *

  What was a kid supposed to do with his weekends in the country?

  Sid put the question to herself as she climbed out of bed early Saturday morning—bedroom curtains weren’t in the budget yet, and the sun apparently rose earlier out here than it did in the city. She made pancakes, breakfast being her fave meal of the day, and sat down to consider which room she might focus on putting to rights.

  All of them, none of them. A straight week of laundry, unpacking, washing glassware, dusting corners, and trying to domesticate left her without motivation.

  “You cooked.” Luis scrubbed his hand over his eyes as he came down the kitchen steps. Even the guy’s sweats were nudging into high-water territory.

  “Alert the media. I left your plate in the microwave. Coffee’s hot.”

  Luis got to bottom of the steps and stretched. “I think I’ll have tea.”

  “When did you become a tea drinker?” And when had he developed such defined biceps?

  “I’ve always liked it. My mom used to fix us tea without the tea. Mostly hot milk and sugar. Where’s the syrup?”

  “Hell if I know,” Sid said, though maple syrup doubtless lurked in the cupboards somewhere. “You’ll have to rough it with butter and sugar.”

  “I like butter and sugar. You heard back from Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe about the estate yet?”

  It all comes, said Rabbit, from watching Rocky and Bullwinkle reruns. “I called Mr. Granger twice, and haven’t heard back, natch. What will you do with your day?”

  “Mac said he’d bring over some halters and show me a few things about handling the horses.”

  “Mac?” Sid knew damned good and well which Mac.

  “I called him this week and reminded him. Making do with braided baling twine isn’t going to cut it if my girls have a frisky day.”

  “Your girls?” Sid barely resisted the urge to cross her arms.

  “We’ve gone through the first bag of feed.” Luis put the kettle on the burner and turned the heat on high. “Pr
obably not a good idea to run out.”

  “Weese…”

  “I got a lead on a job,” he said, getting down a mug and tossing in a tea bag. “There’s a guy over the hill—Hiram Inskip—who farms a lot of our land, and he might need some help.”

  “I recall the name. What do you know about farming?”

  “I know you get to drive tractors and use a lot of equipment. I’m good at engines.”

  He was genius with engines, but big engines ate boys’ fingers for dinner. “You’re fifteen. Child labor isn’t legal, and machines are dangerous.”

  “I will be sixteen before school’s out, Sid, and we need the money.”

  “Water’s boiling.” She took a sip of her coffee rather than argue. They did need the money. When she’d taken a break from the house chores yesterday, she’d reread the addendum to the contract of sale Tony had signed for the farm.

  Or she’d tried to read it. Goddamn lawyers spoke in demon tongues and wrote in them too. Heretofore, wherefore, notwithstanding, except on the condition, insofar as, bullshit-of-the-first-part language.

  From what she’d been able to discern, Tony had become absolute owner of the property, but he’d agreed to honor the leases and agreements made by the previous owners regarding use of the land. He was under no obligation to renew those leases, but he had to let them run their courses.

  And this Inskip fellow was the guy responsible for leasing the land under cultivation. Another guy had the right to cut up the deadfall in the woods. There was some sort of rent owed by both, but not—had Abraham Lincoln himself drafted these contracts?—until crops had been sold in the fall.

  If only Tony—

  “You want some OJ?” Luis opened the fridge and stood eyeing the contents as only an adolescent who had never paid an electricity bill himself might do.

  “Still working on my coffee, thanks. Did Knightley say when he’s coming over?”

  “This afternoon. He’ll work at the riding school first, and that reminds me. Now that we live out here, can I move my lessons to midweek? That’s when the individual lessons are, and Adelia said I’m ready.”

  But the checkbook was not.

  “We can talk to her about it when we see her tomorrow,” Sid said. “You never did tell me what you’ll do with your Saturday.”

  “I have some homework, and I’ll make some more progress on the barn, maybe give the girls a grooming.”

  “They like that?”

  “Didn’t you used to like it when your mom brushed your hair?” He was regarding her with puzzlement, a boy with mostly good memories of a mother others would say did a bad job.

  “She was usually in a hurry. Leave the dishes. I’ll clean up after I get dressed.”

  She tousled Luis’s hair as she went by, needing the touch. Luis loved his mother, loved his little sisters, even though it had been months since he’d seen them. That didn’t threaten Sid, exactly, but she was aware she was a consolation prize in his mom sweepstakes.

  “Weese, Mother’s Day is coming up. You want to make a trip to Jessup?”

  “Nah.”

  “She’d like to see you.”

  “That’s not what her letters say, and she’d ask me about the girls.”

  Sid headed up the stairs. Luis’s younger sisters were a sore point, to say the least. Maybe Ms. Call-me-Amy Snyder could do something about that, because Sid’s efforts to arrange visits between Luis and his siblings had been a complete failure.

  Chapter 5

  Mac tried to tell himself he wasn’t looking forward to stopping by the home place again, wasn’t pleased to have an excuse to see what Sid Lindstrom was doing with the house—with his old bedroom—or how the mares were faring in Luis’s care.

  But self-deception had never been his strong suit, and he finished with Adelia’s school horses in record time. He also stopped by the Farmers’ Co-op and picked up a couple more bags of senior feed, a pair of leather lead shanks, a horsey first aid kit, and a few other odds and ends.

  All of which, he admitted to himself as he pulled into the driveway, constituted procrastination.

  “Mac!”

  Luis waved to him from the barn aisle, so Mac eased his truck into what had been the chicken yard.

  “Hullo!” Luis waved a muck fork like it was a lightsaber. “I’ve been working on the barn.” He had the diffident grin of a pleased adolescent, but he waited while Mac retrieved the halters and lead shanks from the backseat of the truck.

  “Greetings yourself, Luis. Your halters and some decent leather leads. How are the ladies?”

  “I think they’ve put on some weight, but, man, do they shed.”

  “They need to.” Mac walked beside Luis into the barn. “Big animals like that don’t dissipate heat as well as the little ones do. And, my heavens, you must have spent the whole week in here cleaning and mucking.” The place looked worlds better, not a cobweb in sight. “Did you pressure wash these stones?”

  “Scrubbed ’em,” Luis said, eyes on the cobbled flooring. “My knees aged a decade. Come see the tack room.”

  He led the way to the old dairy, which was as spruce and tidy as the rest of the understory. What few pieces of grooming equipment the place still boasted were neatly stowed on hooks and in buckets. Two big metal garbage cans stood to one side of the door.

  “I brought you a couple more bags of feed,” Mac said. “A housewarming, or barnwarming for the ladies.”

  The kid’s eyes shifted away, indicating gifts were a delicate issue with Luis’s pride, or perhaps with his foster mom’s.

  “Thank you.”

  “There’s something I haven’t quite found a way to tell Sid.” Mac studied the window, noting that even the corners were clean. “My dad is the guy who bred Daisy and Buttercup. I consider I owe them.” He chanced a glance at Luis, then went back to a visual inventory of all the work the kid had done.

  Luis left off working the buckles of one of the new halters, the stiffness of the leather making for a tough fit between straps and hardware.

  “Owe them, how?”

  “Draft horses have become something of a rarity. They take special care, and they can’t exactly be passed around from one little girl to the next like a show pony. When you bring an animal like that into the world, you have to be prepared to take responsibility for it.”

  Luis held up the halter, probably inspecting it for a price, which he would not find. “You sold both mares, right?”

  “We did, but I think it’s like being a parent, Luis. Just because your darling girl marries the man of her dreams, she doesn’t stop being your daughter.”

  “You have kids?”

  The question, so prosaic, so commonplace, cut to the bone. Again.

  “I do not, which is probably why finding Daisy and Buttercup here sits so poorly with me. If they’ve had to shift for themselves, it’s my fault, and I’m in your debt.”

  As were Trent and James, though Mac hadn’t put it to either brother in that light.

  Luis opened one of the metal trash cans and peered inside as the rich scent of rice bran and molasses wafted across the tack room.

  “Sid hasn’t said anything about getting rid of the horses, but she isn’t exactly running out to stock up on feed, either.”

  Could she even lift a feed bag by herself? “She needs to get to know them. I never met the lady who wasn’t smitten by horses.”

  The lid went back on the trash can with a hollow clank. “Sid’s not prone to being smitten. Not so it shows.”

  “You know her pretty well.” Mac was not going to interrogate this kid, not about his foster mother, in any case.

  “She knows me just as well.” Luis’s smile was bashful, but it made him look older. “I gave her hell and a half the first few months I was with her, but she hung on, and hung on, until one day, I realized it matt
ered to me whether I hurt her feelings.”

  What a hell of a thing, that a kid needed months to admit a capacity for empathy.

  “Riding out the bucks is half of getting any relationship under way,” Mac replied. “I’d say she loves you.”

  “She says it too.” Luis’s smile became rueful. “At the strangest times and places.”

  “Women.”

  They shared the kind of look Mac usually reserved for his brothers, and then a shout cut through the air.

  “Weese! I’m back!”

  “Groceries.” Luis trotted off, male bonding clearly taking a backseat to foraging through shopping bags. He turned and took a few steps backward. “Come on, or she’ll get the best stuff put away before you even know it’s in the house. Dibs on the nachos.”

  Teenage boys would never change in some biological fundamentals, no matter what else did. Mac took one last glance around the barn, pleased in his bones to see it so improved.

  He approached Sid’s little red car as she hefted grocery bags out of the trunk.

  “Let me help with those.” He tried to scoop a bag out of her grip. She wrestled him for it but gave up eventually. “Pass me another.”

  “How will you get the kitchen door open, Mr. Knightley?”

  “You’ll hold it for me,” he said, taking his burden up the porch steps. “Then you’ll start putting this stuff away while I bring in the rest.”

  “But Luis…” She trailed after him and held the door open.

  “Luis is inventorying the spoils.” Mac leaned closer to lower his voice. “Or doing some quality assurance on the nachos.”

  Luis sat on the counter, the nachos in hand, orange-crumb dust already accumulating on his fingers.

  “I skipped lunch.” Luis held out the bag. “Or I’m having nachos for lunch.”

  Mac stood just behind Sid, admiring the view, taking in her scent, willing to hold her groceries all day. From this angle, the blouse she’d tucked into her jeans allowed him a hint of a peek of cleavage, and while peeking might not be exactly gentlemanly, it wasn’t illegal either.

  “You should be ashamed, Luis, and get off the counter. We have company.” Sid walked across the kitchen, sexy little cowgirl boot heels thumping, the fringe on her open jacket dancing with each step. She snatched the nachos out of his hand and smacked him with the bag.