“Is that supposed to be an apology?”
“That’s a compliment about your squash.”
May laughed even while she was annoyed — I’d learn that’s her tell. I paid her double what the plants were worth. She fought me on it, lost, and that evening showed up at my door with a paper bag of surviving squash.
“Didn’t want you thinking your cow has better taste than you do,” she said. And smiled — not the polite store-smile, the real one. The one that hit me somewhere I didn’t have a name for yet.
After that, my excuses got thinner and thinner. Returning pliers she “forgot” on my fence post. Asking about farmers market hours that were literally posted on a sign at the end of her driveway. Showing up uninvited to stake her tomatoes before a storm.
She never called me on it. Just handed me sweet tea, warm cornbread, and let me stay a little longer every time.
We talked about everything and nothing. The hay. The creek. Her dad. The quiet that moves into a house after someone dies and never quite leaves. I told her the quiet gets loud if you let it. I didn’t tell her I leave a radio on at night for the same reason she does.
Even the town noticed before I did.
At the feed store, Martha — who’s basically the unofficial mayor of gossip — watched me load cattle cubes into my truck and said, not unkindly, “You’ve been spending a lot of time at the Whitfield place, Jack.”
“Fence needed work.”
