That’s no excuse for the decisions I’ve made, April thought as she watched the scrub oak trees and the mesquite thickets go by at seventy-five miles an hour. I didn’t have to mess up my life, but I did.
“You sure are quiet back there,” Flynn said.
“Just enjoying the cool air and the scenery,” April said.
“Maybe we should sleep in the SUV tonight,” Nessa suggested.
“I’ll take the sofa and a fan before I ever spend another night in a vehicle,” April said, “even if one is hot and the other is cool. And I call first dibs on the bathroom for a shower when we get home.”
She felt like the prodigal son in the Bible stories that she had learned in Sunday school as a child. Nanny Lucy had dragged her to church four times a week: Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday-night Bible study, and Friday-night choir practice. By the time she was a teenager, not even the social aspect of going to church was something she liked, but by damn, Nanny Lucy said she would go, and she did.
“Maybe we should all go to the waterfall and have a swim before we take our showers. If I’m remembering right, that part of the creek is spring fed, and the water is cool all year round,” Flynn said.
“Sounds good to me,” Nessa agreed.
April let her mind go back to the hours and hours she had spent at the falls when she was a teenager. A few times she’d even gone skinny-dipping and let the cold water wash over her naked body. Nanny Lucy would have picked a switch and given her ten licks with it if she’d caught her, but she’d gotten away with it every single time. Not once had she felt like she should drop down on her knees and repent for swimming in the nude.
The time that she had taken a deep breath, gone under, and let it out slowly came back to her mind. When her lungs had begun to burn, she had surfaced and wished that she’d had any mother in the world other than Rachel. Why did she have to die? Even though she was just a teenager, she might have loved April. April would have even taken super-religious Aunt Cora, but her favorite would have been her aunt Gabby. She had thought that Flynn was the luckiest boy in the whole world.
You have the chance to start over, the voice inside her head said. Now it’s up to you to make the most of it. Don’t ruin it like you’ve done in the past.
Nessa snagged a parking spot close to the door at Walmart and turned off the engine. “Flynn, do you want to go to Home Depot for what you need? We should be done in half an hour at the most.” She tossed him the keys.
“Yeah, right!” Flynn chuckled. “A woman in Walmart for only thirty minutes. That would be a miracle.”
“Maybe one of your women would take two hours, but Nessa and I have a list, and I don’t have money to blow on junk. What cash I’ve got has to last for a whole month while we finish a quilt.” April unfastened her seat belt and opened the back door of the SUV. “And then I have to look for a job.”
A job with no skills needed except waitressing, tending bar, or selling plants in a greenhouse, she thought as she stepped out of the cool vehicle and into the sweltering summer heat that seemed to suck the life out of a person.
Kind of like being stuck under a quilt frame in the middle of the hot summer, she thought.
“You can use Nanny Lucy’s car anytime you want,” Nessa said. “It belongs to all of us, so you’ve got as much right to it as we do.”
Flynn rounded the front of the SUV, slid in behind the wheel, and restarted the engine. “I’ll be right here waiting for you in thirty minutes. If you aren’t out in an hour, I’m going to steal your vehicle and go home.”
“I will track you down, and you’ll be sorry that you took something that belonged to me,” Nessa told him without cracking a smile.
Flynn chuckled as he put the vehicle in gear and left the two women standing beside the place where folks returned their carts.
“I guess we’d better hustle,” April said, “or he’ll never let us live it down.”
“He wouldn’t dare leave us.” Nessa started toward the entrance. “Hey, look, it says that Walmart is hiring. You want to work here?”
“Nope,” April answered. “My car barely made it to Blossom. I need a job that’s close enough to home that I can walk if I have to.”
“Girl, I told you that you can use Nanny Lucy’s car anytime you want. I wouldn’t trust the tires on your car to take you from the house to the highway. First time you hit a pothole, one of those tires is going to blow,” Nessa told her. “It’s not brand new by any means, but she kept it in good repair.”
“I don’t need or want handouts or charity,” April said. “I’m going to make my own way from now on, but I might use Nanny Lucy’s car since it’s part of the estate and not a pity gift from you or Flynn.”
“All right, then,” Nessa said.
“For a redhead with a temper, you sure don’t have a hard heart.” April grabbed a cart and handed Nessa the list. “Since you’re buying, you can decide on the good products or the generic. I’ll push the cart for you.”
“I’m a shrewd shopper,” Nessa said as she headed toward the dairy aisle.
“I’m a professional cart pusher,” April said. “Next week, you can shop for me since that’s my week to pay for the food. I’ll give you the money if you’re all that good at this job, and I’ll push the cart for you. When it’s Flynn’s turn, we’ll just hope that we get food for a week and not just ice cream and chocolate cupcakes.”
“You remembered.” Nessa grinned.
“If he didn’t outgrow it, he’s got a sweet tooth worse than anyone I’ve ever known.” April pushed the cart down the dairy aisle. “This week, please get two gallons of milk. I could drink half a gallon all by myself.”
“Then we’d better get three, because if he still drinks as much as he did when we were kids, Flynn will go through a gallon by himself,” Nessa said. “I remember Nanny Lucy saying that she needed a cow during the week or weeks we were in Blossom.”
“What do you think his problem is?” April asked.
Nessa put three gallons of milk, two pounds of butter, and four dozen eggs into the cart. “I think he might be sick, as in really sick and dying. After all the women he’s been with, he might have caught something from one of them.”
“God, I hope not,” April gasped. “He’s too damn pretty to die, and too young to die at thirty-one years old.”
“I don’t expect there would be many women who would disagree with you,” Nessa giggled, “but something is wrong with him for sure. Losing his mother and then having to live with Uncle Matthew, who’s always been a womanizer, kind of ruined him. There’s something going on with him, and I’m just as nosy as I am bossy, so I intend to figure it out.”
“Good luck with that. Underneath all the good looks and charm is a pretty stubborn guy,” April said. “Some people are blessed, some of us aren’t.”
“It’s not a blessing if he’s dying of some weird disease that he got from a one-night stand,” Nessa argued as they moved on to the produce aisle.
“What would we do if . . .” April couldn’t make herself say the words.