Last-Minute Marriage. Marisa Carroll

are big and strong.”

      “Who told you that?”

      “Tara Webber’s stepmom had a baby last spring, remember? She told me.”

      A lot of his friends’ moms were having babies. He wouldn’t mind a baby brother or sister himself. Except his mom didn’t live with them anymore. He could hardly remember when she had. She’d moved to Chicago so long ago. Chicago wasn’t all that far away. He’d looked it up on the map once. But she hadn’t been back to Riverbend since a year ago last Fourth of July. She hadn’t even called him on the phone for weeks and weeks. Not even since he’d got his own phone. The one with the special earphones so that he could really hear her voice.

      She didn’t have a computer, so he couldn’t e-mail her. She said she’d get one if his dad sent her the money. She said she couldn’t afford to buy one on her own, and she wasn’t allowed to e-mail him from work. Sam wanted to believe her. But the truth was, his dad did send her money, and she always had something else to spend it on.

      He was almost getting used to it—his mom not doing what she said she was going to do didn’t hurt so much anymore. Most of the time. But it would be nice to have a mom again. If he couldn’t have his own mom come back to live with them, maybe his dad could find another woman to be his mom.

      Sam bent his head and pretended to study the piece of ham on his plate. Only he really wasn’t checking out the fat on the edge of his ham slice. He was thinking. Thinking real hard.

      His dad must like the lady in the boathouse. If he liked her some, maybe he could learn to like her a lot. And if he liked her a lot…well, wasn’t that how grown-ups sometimes fell in love?

      When Sam’s mom had first left, he hadn’t wanted his dad to have any girlfriends. He figured if his dad had a girlfriend, then his mom would never come back. But as a guy got older he saw things differently. In January he would be eleven. Practically a teenager. Almost a grown-up. He could share his dad now. With the right woman. Maybe Tessa was the right woman.

      She didn’t have a husband, as far as Sam could tell.

      And she was already going to have a baby.

      That was good, too.

      Once, just before his mom left, he’d come into the room while she was arguing with his dad. Her face was all red and scrunched up like it got when she was going to cry. His dad had seen him and tried to make her be quiet, but she wouldn’t. Sam was getting pretty good at reading lips by then, and he’d seen what she was saying before she figured out he was there. Sam had never forgotten that one sentence. She’d said, No more babies, Mitch. No more babies like Sam.

      But Tessa’s baby wouldn’t be like him. Her baby would be able to hear.

      Tessa didn’t have a husband. His dad didn’t have a wife. And Sam didn’t have a mom, or a baby brother or sister. If he could get his dad and Tessa together, he’d have everything he needed to make a family again.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      “I DON’T KNOW, Ruth. I can’t decide whether I want stripes or a floral pattern in the bathroom. I wish you’d tell me which you like best.”

      “I don’t think stripes will work, Rachel,” said Rachel’s twin sister in a tone of long suffering. “The house is as old as we are and the walls aren’t all that straight.” The two women sat surrounded by sample books at the old-fashioned oak library table in the middle of the hardware store.

      Rachel pursed her pink lips. “But this one is so pretty.”

      Everything about the two old ladies, Tessa had noticed, was pink and white. From the tops of their curly white heads to the tips of their toes.

      Rachel Steele—they’d introduced themselves the moment Tessa walked up to ask them if she could be of help—was dressed in a pink sweat suit, with colored bands of rose and mauve on the sleeves. Ruth wore a raspberry sweatshirt and matching sweatpants. Both were wearing identical pairs of pristine white tennis shoes. They were small and plump and looked like two pieces of candy that had somehow found their way out of their gilded box and into the wallpaper-and-paint department of Sterling Hardware and Building Supply.

      “Rachel. Ruth.” Caleb looked over the waist-high wall that blocked off the view of the office on the upper floor. “Good morning, ladies.”

      “Good morning, Caleb.” Rachel glanced up from the sample book, the frown that had marred her face disappearing in a smile that deepened myriad tiny wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. “The search goes on. I’m almost in despair of ever finding the right wallpaper pattern for my bathroom.”

      “The paper on the walls now is just fine,” her sibling insisted. “We’ve got better things to do this morning.”

      “You always say that. I’m determined this time to find just the right paper.”

      “Perhaps a floral stripe?” Tessa suggested, pulling sample books from the shelves. She’d told Mitch the day he hired her that she didn’t intend to spend her time in paint-and-wallpaper, but that’s where she’d ended up.

      Working for Mitch, she was finding, wasn’t the same as working at Home-Mart, because Mitch’s hardware store was different, and so were his customers. Some of them had been coming to Sterling’s since long before he was born, she suspected. Many of them were friends and contemporaries of Caleb’s, like the ladies she was helping at the moment, and probably of Mitch’s late parents’. The men smiled politely, tipped their feed-company hats and headed for Mitch or Caleb for their electrical and plumbing needs, or sought out Bill Webber in the lumberyard.

      The women did the same if they were buying hardware. But if they were looking for paint or wallpaper, they brought their questions to her. Riverbend was a traditional place, she was coming to learn. And one of the traditional things about it was the unwritten rule that men didn’t like to look at wallpaper books or paint-chip cards. Even men whose business it was to know about such things.