Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay by Babette Jongh (best summer books .TXT) 📗

Better than good. A dream come true day! This was followed by a photo of Reva bottle-feeding a bobcat cub. Her aunt was grinning like a teenager at the prom, and the cute studly guy from the cafeteria picture—the one with the buzz cut—had one arm around her while he held the phone out with the other, selfie-style. Blond guy is my lab partner. He’s about your age. Should I inquire?

Seeing how much fun her aunt was having made Abby glad she had decided not to tell Reva after all. No need to worry her. Abby would manage. She responded to Reva’s text with a horrified-face emoji, and NO! Not interested in blond guy. You can keep him. Cute bobcat, though. Maybe you can bring him home.

Abby knew she’d have to tell Reva about her broken foot sometime, just not right now. She could probably hobble around just fine and do all the chores. The next time Reva called, Abby could report that she had broken her foot, but everything was fine, and she was managing quite well. At the thought of putting off the inevitable, Abby’s stress level dropped significantly.

Maybe sometimes, letting the bull wander off into the field was better than trying to take it by the horns.

* * *

Quinn took Abby to the pharmacy and the medical supply store. He picked up fast food so she could take her pain medication on a full stomach. He held her elbow while she maneuvered on crutches and made it inside the house. He unfolded the knee scooter and set it by the back door.

While he did all these things, he surrendered to the fact that he was about to pay, and pay dearly, for his stupid decision to help with the fence-building project and then leave a roll of fence wire lying in the neighbor’s grazing field. His father had always said, “No good deed ever goes unpunished.” Quinn was beginning to see the wisdom in that viewpoint.

“Thanks for taking such good care of me.” Abby leaned against the doorframe, balancing uneasily on the new crutches she had already managed to drop or trip over at least a dozen times.

Georgia came out of the bedroom and shot out the open door into the darkness, barking at nothing. The donkeys brayed, the goats baaed, and a general sense of unrest settled like a smelly old blanket over the farm. “What can I do to shut these hollering animals up?” he asked. “I know they’re expecting to be fed, and there must be chores…?”

Abby shook her head. “I couldn’t possibly ask you to do my chores. We’ll be fine. I’m just gonna use the scooter and—”

“You’re just going to sit on that couch with your foot elevated, while I do what needs to be done around here.” She’d better not be a reluctant patient; he didn’t have time to do all her work and argue about it, too.

“But you won’t know what to do unless I show you.” She leaned the crutches against the wall and held on to the doorframe, hopping on one foot to make tiny, incremental progress through the doorway toward the knee scooter.

“What are you doing?” He grabbed her arm. She stumbled over the threshold, and he held her up. “You trying to kill yourself?”

“I’m going to feed critters.” She grabbed the handlebars of the scooter and put her knee on the cushion, then pushed the scooter forward and hopped behind it. “You can come, too, if you want.”

“Where are you going?” He put a hand on her back; she didn’t look too steady, and she was hopping in the exact opposite direction from the barn. “You’re going to fall and break your other foot if you’re not careful.”

“I’m trying to get to the barn.”

“Oh, really? Well, you’re going the wrong way.”

“I know that.” Hopping sideways, she wrestled the handlebars and almost tipped the damn thing over. “How does this thing turn around?”

“You have to make a wide circle, I think. Push it forward and then circle back.”

She shoved the scooter out in front of her and hopped to keep up with it. “Damn fucker,” she mumbled when the wheels stuck. Then she looked over her shoulder at Quinn. “Push it forward,” she mimicked. “Circle back around. That’s exactly what I was doing when you yelled at me.”

“I didn’t yell,” he yelled. “I never yell.”

She snorted, then laughed. “Thanks for letting me know what a pussycat I’m dealing with. I had no idea.”

Together, they struggled toward the barn, step by hopping step. Scooters and flagstone pavers across a grassy lawn didn’t mix well. But Abby had proved herself to be even more incompetent on crutches.

Georgia tried to urge Abby on at first, dancing around and yapping at the wheels of the scooter. Finally, she gave up and hopped onto the padded seat next to Abby’s knee. She looked forward, ears up, eyes bright, tongue hanging out. In the barn, she hopped down and rushed to the first food bin, doing her own version of Vanna White. Her wagging tail was just as expressive as Vanna’s graceful wrist flick. If Georgia could speak, she’d be saying, “This one’s first; that one’s next.”

Quinn felt like he’d landed back in kindergarten when he encountered the color-coded buckets and bins and scoops arranged in a line below the color-coded instructions written in wide-tipped Vis-à-Vis markers on the big whiteboard.

“First, you put the buckets on the floor next to the same-colored bins,” Abby instructed. “Then, you use the same-colored scoops to dish up the food.”

“No shit. How ingenious.” Because yes, Reva’s instructions had left nothing to chance, unless the person doing the work was color-blind.

“Yeah, I know, right?” Abby chirped. “My aunt Reva is really good at breaking things down into small, doable chunks.”

“Color-coding makes everything better.” Lord God, he thought. Just let him finish this, throw down these color-coded buckets, and get out of here. He wanted nothing more right now than