My Cowboy Husband Neglected Me Ignored Our Baby for Another Woman's novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Feed Store

The county talks. Lottie is warm and helpful. Hattie invites the whole county to Daisy's redo party, Lottie included.

By Monday morning I had read Jesse's text on his phone four hundred times in my head. Did she find it yet. Find what, and who was D?

I had not told him I'd seen it. I had not told anyone about Dean's letter either.

By then the whole county had seen the photo, and half of it had seen me walk out of that kitchen.

I knew because the woman at the feed store counter would not look at me.

"Fifty-pound sack of sweet feed and two of the oats," I said. "Put it on the Odom account."

"Not the Tillman account?"

"The Odom account."

She wrote it down slowly.

Behind me in line, two men from the cattle auction stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.

I had lived in Sweetgrass County all my life.

I knew exactly what was being said, because three years ago I would have said it too, about somebody else.

I took Daisy's hand and went out to the loading dock to wait.

Daisy sat on an overturned bucket and swung her boots.

"Is Daddy mad at us?" she asked.

"No, baby. Daddy's not mad."

"Then why are we at Grandpa's house?"

"Because Mama needs some time to think."

She considered that very seriously and nodded.

"I think better when I have a snack," she said.

I dug a granola bar out of my coat, and that was when I heard the truck.

It pulled in beside mine, and Lottie Spears climbed out with Birdie on her hip.

My whole body went tight.

Lottie was dressed in clean jeans and a yellow cardigan, with her hair pinned back, and she looked so sorry that I almost felt bad for her.

"Hattie," she said. "I hoped I'd see you. I've been sick about Saturday."

"Have you."

"I should never have posted that. I wasn't thinking.

"Birdie had her first real party, and I got carried away. I didn't think how it would look to you."

She set Birdie down.

The little girl stood close against her mother's leg, holding the palomino horse by its front hooves.

"I just want you to know there's nothing between me and Jesse," Lottie said. "He's family to us, that's all. He's the only man who ever showed up."

"Where's her father?"

"Gone." She said it quickly. "He doesn't even know she exists."

The feed store clerk came out with a hand truck and my three sacks.

Before I could reach for the first one, Lottie had both arms around it.

"Let me," she said. "You've got your hands full."

She hauled the sack up into the bed of my truck, and then the second, and then the third, grunting a little.

A couple of the men watching from the doorway looked at each other.

It would have been easier if she'd been rude.

She dusted her palms and smiled.

"I'm free on Wednesdays, if you ever need somebody to watch Daisy. You've been through so much. I'd be glad to."

"No, thank you."

"I mean it. Any time."

"I know you do," I said.

Daisy had slid off her bucket.

She and Birdie were looking at each other across the gap between the trucks, in no hurry at all.

"I like your horse," Daisy said.

"He's old," Birdie said. "He's from my daddy."

"What happened to his ear?"

"It fell off. Somebody sewed it."

I looked at the ear.

It was sewn on with thick red thread, in a neat cross-stitch, by someone with big careful hands.

Lottie lifted Birdie quickly.

"We have to run, baby. Your auntie's waiting."

She turned back to me with her brightest face.

"Hattie, whatever you decide about Jesse, I'll never stand in the way. I want you to know I'd never come between a family."

She was halfway to her truck when I said her name.

She turned around.

I had not planned what I said next.

"Daisy turned three on Saturday, and her father spent it somewhere else," I said.

I said it loud enough that the dock went quiet.

"So she's having it again."

Nobody moved.

"This Saturday, at the Odom place, two o'clock. There'll be cake and a pony. Everybody's welcome."

I looked down the dock at the faces watching me.

The auction men. The clerk. A rancher's wife I had known since grade school.

"I'd like the whole county to come," I said. "Jesse too. And you, Lottie."

Lottie held very still for the space of a breath.

Then she smiled.

"Of course," she said. "We'd love that. Birdie would love to meet her properly."

She squeezed her daughter's hand.

"They'll be like sisters," she said.

Daisy looked up at me.

"Mama, is Birdie going to be my sister?"

"No, baby," I said. "She's not."

But Lottie was already in her truck, and when she pulled out she was still smiling, and she lifted two fingers off the wheel in a wave.

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