All three of them had gone off and gotten degrees at A&M—Carson in engineering, Cade as an architect, and Cole in construction management, though he was a jack-of-all, trained to do everything from plumbing to electrical to custom trim. I’d stayed back, working under Dad while they lived the college experience.
When lined up, I somehow looked nothing like them. The three of them floated lively through life, largely charmed and charming. Which was how I liked it, preferring to do the hard things so they didn’t have to. Carry the burden to leave them free to be happy.
“How about you leave Millie alone and pick on somebody your own size?” I asked as I approached.
“If you find somebody, let me know,” Carson popped.
“You’d better turn on something with twang before Mr. Cooper comes in or you might give the old coot a heart attack,” I warned.
Cole rolled his eyes. “He’s old as dirt so—ow!”
Millie scowled at him and shook the finger she’d just pinched him with, but her eyes twinkled. “Now, you know he’s my uncle, Cole Meyer. Don’t you speak ill of a man who could go toe up any minute.”
“There she is,” Cole said, laughing and sneaking a quick peck on Millie’s cheek, then turning to run, narrowly escaping Millie’s open palm.
She shook her head, adjusting her glasses. “I don’t know how I’m expected to get any work done around here with y’all horsin’ around like you do. I don’t know how any of you get any work done either.”
“We don’t,” Carson noted. “Keaton does it all for us.”
“And some thanks I get,” I said, heading for my office. “Millie, got a new guy in the locker room. Can you get him all set up with paperwork and whatnot?”
“Sure. Who is he?”
“Name’s Jimmy, a homeless guy from town that Doug Windley made a scene over this mornin’. Pastor Colburn said we could use the church’s address and phone number for anybody needing a job, so if you could make sure he has that, I’d appreciate it.”
“Of course, Keaton.”
My brothers followed, but I kicked the door shut behind me, figuring there was a chance it’d slow them down.
Cole opened it with a flat look on his face. “That almost hit me.”
“Good,” I answered, flipping through a few papers on my desk before sitting down.
“So, a new guy, huh?” Cade flopped into one of the chairs on the other side of my desk, raking a hand through his dark, shaggy hair.
“Mhmm.”
“Wish I could say I’m surprised Doug Windbag was a dick,” Carson noted, sitting next to Cade.
“Town’s a mess, and not for the vagrants,” I said. “Coleburn’s trying to help, and I know Bettie and Abuela have taken some people in to work at their restaurants. The Blum sisters too. They were passing out sandwiches when the whole thing went down.”
Cole sighed happily. “Ahh, the Blum sisters. Boy, I wouldn’t mind passing out sandwiches with them.”
“If that’s a euphemism, you should get out more,” Cole said.
Carson chuckled. “Passing out sandwiches with the Blum sisters could end with getting a piano dropped on you smack in the middle of Main Street.”
Cole waved him off. “The curse isn’t real.”
The rest of us gave him a look.
“What? It isn’t,” Cole insisted. “Didn’t peg y’all for superstitious. Just because they’ve had bad luck in love doesn’t mean dating them is a death wish.”
“Almost every man who’s ever fallen in love with them has died. That can’t be a coincidence,” Carson noted.
For a second, we were silent.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said after a second, turning back to the invoices on my desk and the dread beneath them.
“How come?”
“None of them will go out with you anyway.”
Cade and Carson laughed, but Cole propped his boots on my desk like an asshole.
I glared at him. He didn’t remove them.
“Says you,” Cole noted. “Jo went off and found herself a boyfriend. Maybe they’ve broken their sacred vow not to date.”
“Not to date until their mother dates,” Cade clarified.
“Quick—somebody find Dottie a boyfriend.”
“As if every other straight, single guy in the tri-county hasn’t already tried,” Carson said.
“Always had a soft spot for Jo,” Cole mused. “I admire a woman who can talk shit that respectably.”
“I dunno,” Carson considered. “I’m more of a Poppy kind of guy. She’s the goldilocks of the three—Jo’s the hellcat, Daisy’s the good girl, and Poppy’s a bit of both.”
“I wouldn’t mind the good girl,” Cade noted. “She’s the cutest anyway.”
Something in my chest stirred. Probably because I still had the vision of her as I’d just seen her, with a smile on rosy lips, her heart-shaped face lit up until Doug nearly got his mug beaten in. All three sisters had inky black hair and electric blue eyes, but I thought Daisy was the prettiest of the three. I felt a curious urge to dump Cade out of his chair for thinking so too.
My expression must have been damning because Cade’s smile widened. “Looks like Keaton agrees.”
I offered him a bored look and went back to the invoices I wasn’t actually looking at. “I have work to do, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Did she look cute today when you saw her?” Cade asked. “What’d she have on?”
“The hell does it matter what she was wearing?” I answered.
“Was her hair up or down?” he prodded.
“You should really get on whatever dating app people use these days,” I suggested.
“Look at him. His jaw’s locked shut,” Carson said with his dimple showing.
“Keaton has a crush,” Cole sang.
“Why, because I won’t tell you what she was wearing? You act like I pay attention to shit like that,” I said, and normally, I didn’t. But I knew exactly what Daisy had worn—a cornflower blue sundress the color of her eyes, her pale shoulders cutting through spills of raven hair. Anybody who’d seen a woman like that would have remembered every detail, assuming they weren’t blind.
“Ask her out,” Carson nagged.
“You ask her out.”
But his voice softened, losing the teasing edge. “It’s been near five years. Are you ever gonna date, or are you gonna marry work instead?”
“Somebody’s got to.”
“And you’ve decided that someone is you,” he said.
“Who else?”
“I don’t know if you’ve counted recently,” Carson started, “but there are four of us.”
“Y’all don’t want to do it, and I do. So how about you go find yourselves dates and get out of my ass?”
Cade jumped out of his seat and ran back into the entry. “Marry me, Millie. Make me the happiest man on earth.”
She squealed, flustered and swatting at him as he spun her chair around in circles, and my other brothers laughed too, filing out of my office.
But Carson paused with his hand on my doorknob, turning back to me with a heavy brow. “There’re more to life than this. We just want you to be happy, that’s all.”