Tennessee Rescue by Carolyn McSparren

Author:Carolyn McSparren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2018-01-31T20:09:55+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EMMA HAD TO admit nobody so much as mentioned the fire at lunch. Not even Earl Jr. and Carl. Earl must’ve warned his sons to keep their mouths shut. Their eyes were wide, and they circled Emma as if to be certain she wasn’t a cinder, but they waited quietly—well, quietly for them—for their hot dogs, then went over by the tree with the swing, hunkered down in the shade and ate. And ate.

Emma was glad she’d bought as much food as she had. After they washed the dirt off from building the kennel, the crew consumed massive amounts of hot dogs, hamburgers and iced tea while they congratulated themselves on the brilliance of their construction.

Emma sat on the porch steps with Barbara, and left the porch swing to Janeen.

Even the boys were winding down. The mid-May temperature was in the eighties, and everyone was ready for a nap. Emma certainly was.

She wasn’t used to parties dividing themselves by sex. Maybe it was a country thing. The men were talking baseball, while the women automatically removed the remains of lunch, filled the tiny dishwasher for the first load and rinsed and stacked everything else for the next. They didn’t ask whether they could help clean up; they simply organized themselves and did it.

They worked smoothly together as women almost always did when they handled logistics. They were trying to include her, but Emma felt she was on the edge of the group, not quite part of them. They moved around each other casually, never getting in one another’s way, even in the tiny kitchen, while Emma found herself relegated to refolding the tablecloths and loading the dirty napkins in the washing machine.

“Momma!” came a boy’s voice. “Momma, come see what we found.”

Emma froze. What now? A six-foot rattlesnake?

Carl grabbed his mother’s hand, dragged her through the living room, onto the front porch, down the steps and around the far side of the house. The other women followed.

Around the corner of the house, the men and the two boys clustered around something large on the ground.

“Lookee what we found!” Earl Jr. said.

“I found him, not you,” Carl protested. “Can we keep him?”

“He’s a big one, all right,” Earl said. “And no, we can’t keep him. Watch your fingers. He’s fast when he wants to be.”

Looking like an irate grandfather awakened from his afternoon nap, a snapping turtle the size of Earl’s hubcap glared at the crowd around him.

“Aw, Daddy, we could keep him in our pond.”

“We both found him,” Earl Jr. said. He pulled a large poke sallet leaf and held it out to the turtle. Instantly, he withdrew his head into his shell, but a moment later he reached out, took the leaf delicately and began to munch with what probably passed for turtle gastronomic ecstasy.

“I said, watch your fingers,” Earl told the boys.

“I forgot I said we might have time to move some turtles from Emma’s pond this afternoon.” Seth looked around. “But at this point, I

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