I Slept With a Stranger at the Wedding, and Monday He Was My Boss novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Pfluger and Kneupper
I painted the sign myself, on a Sunday, with a can of white barn paint and a brush Marlene found in the pump house.
It was a plank of cedar two feet long.
Dane had cut it and sanded it and hung it from the porch beam on two chains.
Then he stood back with his arms folded and said it was crooked.
It was not crooked.
I had measured it twice.
Across the top, in the old letters his grandfather had used on the barn, it said KNEUPPER.
Under it, in my own square hand, I had painted PFLUGER.
The two names sat one above the other.
I had done the last letter at noon, with Lottie holding the paint can and the rabbit supervising from the porch rail.
"That's the Hill Country way of saying a woman lives here," I said.
"It's the Pfluger way of saying it," Dane said.
"I'm told we're stubborn."
"You're something," I said.
He put his arm around my shoulders.
We stood together in the heat looking at it.
The peaches were coming on in the rows behind us, and the smell of the first ripe ones drifted up from the sheds.
The harvest had started on Monday.
Eighty men from the warehouse had come out to pick on their days off, for the pleasure of it.
It was the first year they could.
Lottie came out of the house in her yellow sundress with a peach in her hand.
She held it out to me.
"It's ready," she said.
"It smells like the dance."
I took it.
It was warm and heavy and fuzzed with gold.
I bit into it standing on the porch, and the juice ran down my wrist.
It was the best peach I had ever tasted.
"Do you want some?" I said.
"I don't like peaches," Lottie said.
"I know," I said.
"But I like how you eat them," she said.
She took a very small bite out of the side of mine.
Her face screwed up, and then, slowly, it relaxed.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Slept With a Stranger at the Wedding, and Monday He Was My Boss are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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