In Love with a Single Farmer-Daddy novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Blue Lips

Betsy walks in and takes Posy home, Bonnie calls Roscoe first, and the fight on the porch nearly ends in a kiss before Betsy sees the bruises inside Posy's arms.

The mudroom door wasn't locked.

I opened it and the cold hit me.

Posy didn't turn around.

She pressed herself tighter into the corner.

"Posy," I said. "It's Betsy. We're going home."

I took off my denim jacket and wrapped it around her from behind.

Her skin was ice under my hands.

She went stiff as a fence post.

Then the kitchen door opened, and Bonnie stood there in her cardigan with a dish towel over her shoulder.

Behind her the kitchen was warm and smelled like coffee.

"What do you think you're doing in my house?"

"Taking my stepdaughter home."

"She's in quiet time." Bonnie's voice stayed soft, the church voice. "She hummed at the table. We don't reward noise in this house. Her speech practice depends on it."

"Her speech practice depends on her freezing?"

"Children need structure, dear. You wouldn't know. You've had her one day."

I picked Posy up.

She weighed nothing.

Her boots knocked against my legs, and she didn't hold on to me at all.

"She can hum in my truck," I said. "She can hum all the way home."

Bonnie stepped into the doorway.

For a second I thought she'd try to stop me.

She looked at Posy, not at me.

"Posy," she said quietly. "Remember what we talked about."

Posy's whole body went still against my chest.

I walked out.

I put her in the truck with the heater on high and my jacket around her and her coat on top of that.

She sat with her hands between her knees and stared at the glove box.

I was shaking worse than she was.

By the time we pulled into our yard, Roscoe's truck was already sliding to a stop by the porch.

He got out with his cap in his fist.

"Bonnie called," he said. "She said you walked into her house and grabbed Posy out of her arms."

"I walked into her mudroom and picked Posy up off the floor."

"Betsy." He came around to my window. "You've been here two days. She's family. She's Posy's mama's aunt."

"Then her family can explain why Posy was standing in a cold room facing the wall in a T-shirt."

His jaw tightened.

"It's a time-out. Bonnie taught second grade for thirty years."

"Roscoe, I could see my breath."

He opened Posy's door.

She climbed out on her own, walked past both of us without looking up, and went inside.

The screen door banged.

She flinched at the bang.

Roscoe watched her go.

Then he rounded on me, and his voice went low.

"You don't come into my house and in two days tell me the one person who held it together was hurting my girl."

"I'm not telling you anything. I'm telling you what I saw."

"You saw a time-out."

"I saw a kid with blue lips who didn't even look up when I came in, because she didn't think anybody was coming."

We were standing too close on the porch steps.

I could smell hay and diesel on him.

He was breathing hard, and so was I.

He looked down at my mouth.

For one second neither of us moved.

His hand came up and stopped an inch from my jaw.

I didn't step back.

I wanted him to finish it, which made me even angrier.

"Don't," I said.

"I wasn't."

"You were."

"Fine," he said roughly. "I was."

He dropped his hand and walked into the house.

I stood there with my face burning in the cold.

Supper was Bonnie's leftover meatloaf, and nobody ate much of it.

Roscoe talked to Posy in his quiet farm voice about a heifer that got her head stuck in the feed bunk.

Posy didn't look at either of us.

When he went out to check the calving lot, I ran Posy a cup of warm cocoa and set it by her drawing pad.

She didn't touch it.

At seven-fifteen I took her up to brush her teeth.

She stood on her stool at the bathroom sink.

The faucet was stiff.

She pushed up her sweatshirt sleeves to wash her hands.

The skin on the inside of her upper arms was covered in bruises.

Four on the left arm in a row.

Four on the right.

Small and round as fingertips, some purple, some gone yellow at the edges.

And on each arm, one bigger, darker mark on the other side, where a thumb would go.

I stopped breathing.

Posy saw my face in the mirror.

She yanked both sleeves down to her wrists so fast she knocked the toothpaste into the sink.

She shook her head at me, hard, over and over.

Then she turned her face to the bathroom window.

Up the road, half a mile away, Bonnie's yard light was burning in the dark.

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