by Nella Tyler
“Just wait until high summer,” Tuck told me. “We may have to get those towels that help keep your neck cool, Dad.”
“Those are supposed to be good,” Bob agreed. “Autumn swears by ‘em.” As we approached the house, I saw that Autumn herself was out on the porch, taking a break.
“Look at this lazy creature,” Tuck said, mockingly clucking his tongue against his teeth. “Out on the porch like a sleeping cat.”
“I will have you know that among other things, I washed your drawers today, Tucker Nelson,” she replied tartly. “That in and of itself earned me a break.” Bob and Tuck laughed, and I joined in, though I kept my laughter quiet.
Somehow—I still wasn’t sure just how—Autumn managed to look more and more beautiful every time I saw her. I didn’t think she was changing anything about what she was doing in terms of makeup or clothes, but she just became magically prettier each time I ran into her or talked to her.
I’d seen her at the grocery store over the weekend before, and she’d had her hair down around her shoulders, a Sunday dress on, and I couldn’t think of any woman I’d ever met who was more lovely than Autumn Nelson. It’s a damned good thing I promised Bob I wouldn’t fall in love with her, I thought as we all stood around, trading small talk.
“I was going to ask you, Dad: do you think we could put a swing up in that old apple tree by the house?”
I perked at that. “What kind of swing were you thinking?”
Autumn shrugged. “Something I could put Addie into while I’m out here working,” she replied. “Then, of course, later on when she can actually hold onto something, a proper swing that she can play on.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard,” Bob said, nodding slowly. “I think it’s a good idea. That baby needs sunshine and fresh air—just like her mama did growing up.”
“I still say that she could work out on the field with us,” Tuck suggested with a little grin. “Can’t train ‘em up too soon.” I laughed.
“Addie can’t even walk yet,” Autumn countered. “At least, not with any kind of stability.”
“She’s managed a few words,” Tuck pointed out. “She could crawl along the rows, get some of the bugs out of there for us.”
“I’d still say we should wait another year or two before we take her out there,” Bob said, smacking some of the dust off of his pants. “I’m hungry for my dinner—what’d your mom make us?”
“We’ve got pot roast with potatoes, carrots, and peas, some rice, and a big cherry pie,” Autumn replied. I had to admit the sound of it made my mouth water.
“Final offer, Cade: want to hang around and get a bite to eat? We won’t hold you too late,” Bob told me.
“Nah, I’d better get home,” I declined, shaking my head. I could see the little flicker of disappointment in Autumn’s eyes, but she didn’t say anything. “I’m going to make it an early night, I think.”
I turned away from the Nelson family and walked out to my waiting truck, thinking about what I could do to fill some of my free weekend time. I’d go to church, of course—that was a given—but none of the few guy friends I had were interested in grabbing a drink anywhere.
As I climbed up into my truck, I thought about a girl who might be: Sherry Williams, who’d been in my tenth and eleventh grade math classes, who I had had a bit of a crush on in high school. She was still living in town, and as far as I knew, she was single; she might be worth calling up to see what was going on, maybe catch up a little.
But as I pulled off of the driveway and onto the road heading back for town, I thought that it would just be a dead end. If Sherry had wanted anything to do with me, then she would have made that clear—she would have stayed in touch.
In fact, I wasn’t really all that close with any of my exes, which I thought was probably about normal. I shook my head and turned the radio up as I headed back towards my house, wondering what I should do with myself for the night.
I hadn’t exactly been lying to Bob when I’d said I was bone-tired, but I also felt restless. I didn’t like the prospect of going straight home and going to bed, surrounded by my lonely, empty house.
It would be better by far to take a quick shower to clean up, make sure I didn’t have any pesticide residue on my hands, and go out to one of the bars in town. But I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be doing that, either.
I remembered that I’d run into Ashley Harris at the hardware store earlier in the week. She was apparently newly single—I had seen the tan line where her wedding ring used to be—and I had to admit that she’d looked cute enough. I’d known her from high school, where we’d had English together all four years.
Ashley had been more than happy to run into me. “You’re looking good these days, Cade,” she’d said, giving me the look I’d seen a few times in my life—the look of a woman appraising a man.
“I’ve been working out on the Nelsons’ farm,” I’d told her, shrugging off the idea of being any better-looking than I’d been the year before—but then, I reminded myself, Ashley was newly single. She was looking at every guy she ran into as a potential partner and sizing him up.
“It’s doing you a lot of good,” she had said, giving me that quick once-over look again. “Hey, are you doing anything Friday night?”
“I hadn’t planned anything,” I’d said. “But I might be too tired by the end of the week to do more than curl up in my bed.”
“Big, strapping guy like you?” She had put her hand on my arm and grinned at me. “I don’t believe it.”
“It’s hard work,” I’d pointed out. “But if I’m free and have the energy, I wouldn’t mind hanging out and catching up on all the news.”
“I’ll buy you a drink, if you do,” she had told me, almost fluttering her eyelashes.
I’d managed to finish up with her after a few more minutes, and more or less I’d put the invitation out of my mind; it wasn’t that Ashley wasn’t a beautiful woman—but I hadn’t had enough time to really be interested in her, not out of the blue like that.
As I got closer to home, I thought about it. I could call her up and go have a drink with her at the bar. We’d talk about a few things, catch up on each other’s lives, and I’d go home by myself—I had made it a policy years before not to go home with a woman after a bar date.
I could do it, but when I thought about it, I decided I didn’t want to. More than anything, what I wanted was to relax at home, decompress, and watch TV. It was probably incredibly boring of me to want that, but I didn’t really care right then.
The memory of the sight of Autumn sitting on the porch popped into my head and my hands almost slipped on the wheel. She’d been so beautiful, sitting there, and I could just see myself sitting next to her. Maybe having a cup of coffee in the morning, reading the paper, talking about the town gossip.
I shook my head as I pulled in at my driveway. That wasn’t a picture I should be entertaining in my mind and I knew it. I’d promised Bob Nelson that I wouldn’t fall in love with his daughter and that I wouldn’t get distracted by her if I worked for him—I needed to honor that promise.
I climbed out of the cab of my truck and could feel the fatigue in all my muscles. I’d gotten over the flu, but I was still not up to 100%. I definitely shouldn’t be taking the first excuse to go out and party it up that presented itself to me.
As I unlocked my front door and went into the kitchen to heat up something for dinner, I thought about how kind it had been of Autumn to come by and make sure that I was okay—and the soup she’d made had done just the trick.
You need to find a way to get that jar back to her—clean. I couldn’t just hand it over to her in front of everyone. I’d seen Tuck teasing Autumn about having a crush on me, and I definitely didn’t want to pour fuel on that particular fire.
I decided that I was going to spend the weekend getting my house in order. If I wanted to see Ashley—or any woman—it wouldn’t do to have a messy, bachelor-type place to bring them back to if it ca
me to that.
I heated up a frozen dinner and grabbed myself a beer and thought about how lonely I’d been the past few months. When I’d been working construction, that hadn’t been so much of an issue—I’d had the crew at the job site to talk to and I’d gone out a couple of times, which hadn’t been as good as I’d wanted it to be, but had been enough to tide me over.
But I was starting to think that I really wanted something more than that—not just a girlfriend, but someone to start a real life with.
I put the TV on and wondered what that would look like, while carefully keeping any image of any particular woman out of my mind. I wanted someone I could come home to at the end of the day and make dinner with. Steady sex would be a plus, but I’d long since learned that I didn’t need sex every day to be happy.
I looked around my living room. It wasn’t a bad place, and I usually kept it mostly neat, but having a woman living with me would—I knew from experience—make things that much better. I finished up my meal and my beer and headed for the shower to get cleaned up, trying to think of how I would go about meeting such a woman without having to get involved with the bar scene.
I sighed and shook my head; there were only two women I saw on a normal basis who weren’t at the bars, and one of them—Mrs. Nelson—was married, and too old for me. The other was off-limits.
I decided to make it an early night so I could get started on cleaning as soon as I got up the next morning, but I couldn’t quite get rid of the thought of Autumn in my head.
Chapter Eleven
Autumn
After the initial hustle of getting the new fields cleared and everything planted, things began to slow down. Obviously, there’s never a situation where there’s nothing at all to do on a farm, but Dad, Tuck, and Cade could ease up a bit on the fields about a month into the growing season and get to work on other things.
Dad told me more than once that he hadn’t realized just how much having an extra pair of hands around the place would make things easier. The three guys managed to knock down the old perimeter fence where it divided the new fields from the old ones and smooth out the territory between the two pieces of land on the property. They built a new hen house for the chickens and broke down the old one—which was really getting neglected-looking after a harsh winter.
I had my own chores to work on, of course, and I tried to keep my mind on them as best as I could. There was always something to do around the house, and of course Adelyn, at about ten months of age, still needed constant attention and supervision.
She was starting to figure out how to get up onto her feet, but she couldn’t walk more than a couple of steps before her legs gave out and she started to crawl again. She was also less and less content with merely hanging out in her playpen and playing with her toys. I was definitely going to need to find solutions for her to have space to play without being in danger.
With work out in the fields slowing down a bit as Dad, Tuck, and Cade let nature more or less take its course with the plantings, I saw Cade more and more. I ran into him going out to the old henhouse while they built the new one to collect the day’s eggs or recruited his help moving big bags of fertilizer around so that I could dose the vegetable garden.
Tuck and Dad had never had as much to do with the kitchen garden as Mom and I did, but once or twice Tuck and Cade helped me weed—and especially as the weather intensified with summer, the weeds seemed to spring up almost overnight. Cade helped me to tie the bean plants to their little trellises, and he found me a new hoe when the head broke off of the body of my old one.
I found myself watching Cade work the few times I had the excuse to see him around the farm. As the spring heated up and grew more sweltering, heading towards summer, it was hard not to notice that Cade tended to wear lighter, brighter clothes, and that when he sweat through his shirt, I could see every line and plane of his muscled body underneath.
I had to be careful not to be too obvious in my staring. Tuck was always looking for some way to tease me, and if he thought I was truly interested in Cade, he’d never let me live it down.
It just so happened that I would find myself working on one of my own projects not too far from where the guys were working on something else or that I would have a chance to take a break and play with Adelyn right at the same time that they were taking a break to gulp down water or eat something.
I was at least a little clever in my attempts to get close to the guys. I knew Tuck was hungry more or less constantly, so a few times a week, I’d manage to find twenty minutes or more to whip something up as a snack to take out to them—chips, sandwiches, or cut-up fruit, little things that would help pass the time and keep them fueled throughout the day.
Since Dad was working with Tuck and Cade often enough, I could pretend I’d been thinking of him or my brother when I made the snacks, instead of the farmhand.
I walked out of the kitchen with Addie on my back, held in the body-wrap that one of my friends had gotten me for my baby shower. I had some cheese cubes and some of last year’s pickles—bread and butter, along with some of the last jar of dill pickles—and some crackers, along with a thermos of iced tea. They had water out along the fence line where they were slowly doing repairs, but I knew that both Tuck and Cade would appreciate the change in beverage.
I took the short route out to the perimeter fence, breathing in the fresh, clean air and listening to Addie burble and occasionally let out sounds I’m sure she thought were proper words as we walked.
There was actually a breeze, which was a blessing. There were no clouds at all in the sky, and if there hadn’t been some cool air flowing around us, it would have been unbearably hot. Even the short route out to the fence wasn’t that short—it was just the easiest method of getting there, instead of walking through the growing corn and soybean rows.
“Hey, fellas,” I called out as I got closer to the fence where they were working. “Thought you might like a little snack.”
“You’re always so thoughtful,” Dad said, looking up as I approached. “What have you got for us, girl?” I shrugged, setting the basket I’d been carrying down carefully.
“Just some cheese and crackers and pickles, along with a bottle of iced tea. It’s not much, but I figured it’d go down pretty well.”
Cade looked up from his work and I tried not to stare at how gorgeous he looked. He hadn’t cut his hair—but it was pulled back into a ponytail at the base of his skull, little strands of it sticking to his face and neck where they’d escaped from the elastic. He was wearing a tee shirt and jeans, his jacket tossed over the already-mended part of the fence when it got too hot. He looked absolutely delicious, and I had to turn my attention onto my dad to keep from staring.
“What kind of pickles?” Tuck set his tools down and wiped his hands on the front of his overalls.
“Bread and butter, and some of last year’s dills,” I told him. “We need to clear out the pantry anyway—the vegetables in the kitchen garden are about to start coming in, and we need the space to put stuff away.”
“I love bread and butter pickles,” Cade said, beginning to set down his tools. “Thanks for this.”
“It’s nothing,” I said with a shrug. I carefully shifted Addie around from my back to my front, holding her just above my hip. She was getting big enough that I was going to be grateful when she was able to mostly move around on her own—even though I was sure that she’d also be going a mile a minute, running everywhere as soon as she could. “Just figured you guys would appreciate it.”
“And, you wanted an excuse to get out of the house,” Tuck suggested. He began rummaging around in the basket I’d brought, pulling out the cups and the thermos of tea. Dad grabbed one of the containers of cheese and Cade wiped his hands on his jeans before going for the Tupperware with the bread and butter pickles.
“I figured some fresh air would do Addie some good,” I said. As if on cue, Adelyn began to squirm in my arms and I looked around to make sure there
wasn’t anything that could get her in the grass along the fence line before I put her down to crawl and toddle.
“These are amazing,” Cade told me around a mouthful of pickle. I grinned.
“Mom’s special recipe,” I explained. “I don’t even know it—she won’t let me watch her the whole time. There always seems to be something she needs me to go look for and get for her right in the middle of making up the brine.”
“She’ll have to pass it along to you eventually,” Dad pointed out. “She won’t be around to make ‘em forever, and that woman won’t let herself die until she’s sure her best ideas get passed down.”
I laughed. “She might tell Addie and not me, though,” I countered. “I’ll have to beg my own daughter for my mom’s recipe.”
“The one you really need to get out of her is the chocolate cake recipe,” Tuck said. “That is heaven on a plate.”
I stood around and chatted with them for a few minutes, milking the time I could take away from the house. I tried to make sure that I talked to Tuck and Dad as much as or more than I talked to Cade, but I couldn’t be sure that I was keeping to that—it was too easy to fall out of focus around the muscled, gorgeous man.
I went back to the house with Addie in tow, asking the guys to bring the basket and containers back when them when they finished up for the day.
I’d been thinking of Cade more and more as the days went by. I knew that I couldn’t do anything with him—Dad had even told me that he’d made Cade promise not to fall in love with me as a condition of getting hired—but I’d been lonely for a while. It was hard not to want to be with someone.
I’d told myself over and over again that I had to wait since it wasn’t fair to Addie for me to date around, trying to find someone I could be with long-term. I had to be pretty sure that whoever I dated or got serious with was going to stick around. I had also pretty much come to the conclusion that it would be a couple of years before I would even really have a chance to get to know anyone well enough to date.