In Love with a Single Farmer-Daddy novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Machine Shed

I held out my hand.

"Give me the key, Kendra."

She closed her fist around it and swung her feet down off my dashboard.

"Finders keepers," she said. "Ask Grandma. That's how you got rich."

She slid out of the truck and sauntered across the lot to Mavis's Buick, sipping her coffee.

Posy was standing beside me with her backpack straps in both fists.

She'd watched the whole thing.

"That's my sister," I told her. "She's a lot."

Posy looked at the Buick and then up at me.

She tapped her own temple and made a little spinning motion with her finger.

I laughed so hard I had to lean on the truck.

Posy's mouth twitched at the corner.

It was almost a smile.

That afternoon Roscoe drove to the hardware store in the county seat and changed every lock on the house.

"New keys," he said, and put one in my hand. "There's two. One's yours. One's in my pocket. Nobody else."

At five I was running Posy's bath and Roscoe was out in the machine shed working on the planter.

I went out to call him for supper.

There was a car parked behind the shed where you couldn't see it from the house.

A little white hatchback with a pink steering-wheel cover.

I heard my sister's laugh before I reached the door.

The machine shed was big and cold and smelled like grease and diesel.

Roscoe was standing by the workbench with a wrench in his hand.

Kendra was standing much too close to him in a short denim skirt and cowboy boots that had never touched a cow.

She had one hand flat on his chest and the other hooked into his belt buckle.

"Come on," she was saying. "She's a charity case. Everybody knows it. You paid for the wrong sister."

Roscoe took hold of her wrist and took her hand off his belt.

He did it.

"Kendra," he said, "get off my farm."

"You don't mean that."

"I've meant everything I've said today. Get off my farm."

Then he saw me in the doorway.

His face didn't change.

He didn't look guilty.

He looked relieved.

"There's my wife," he said. "Your sister was just leaving."

Kendra spun around.

For one second she looked scared.

Then she fixed her hair and smiled at me.

"Don't be mad, Bets. He was showing me the shed."

"I've seen it," I said. "It's just a shed."

I walked over to her.

I didn't hit her, though I wanted to so badly my palm itched.

I took her by the elbow, the way Mavis used to take us, and I walked her out of the machine shed and across the gravel to her little white car.

She tried to dig her heels in.

Her boots slid in the gravel.

"You're hurting me."

"No, I'm not," I said. "I know exactly what hurting feels like. This is walking."

I opened her car door and put her in it.

She rolled the window down.

"He'll get tired of you," she said. "Everybody does. Grandma did. Mom and Dad left you."

"Mom and Dad died, Kendra. They left you too."

That shut her up for about two seconds.

"Bonnie says you'll break," she said. "She says she knows how to break things that don't talk back."

She gunned the engine and fishtailed down the lane.

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