Big Sky Summer. Linda Miller Lael

wish he’d left well enough alone and talked about things like the price of beef or the weather or, better yet, nothing at all.

      “How much time?” he asked, because they were already knee-deep in the subject and wishing he’d kept his mouth shut in the first place wouldn’t help now. “It’s been a couple of years since you and Hutch parted ways and, far as I know, you haven’t so much as looked at another guy since then, let alone dated.”

      Brylee propped one elbow on the table and rested her chin in her palm, regarding him with a sort of tender amusement. “I’m running a business, Walker—a successful business, in case you haven’t noticed—and that keeps me pretty busy.”

      “Too busy, if you ask me,” Walker grumbled.

      “I didn’t ask you,” Brylee reminded him sweetly. Her brow furrowed in a slight frown, quickly gone, and another twinkle sparked in her eyes. “Are you afraid I’ll wind up an old maid, and you’ll be stuck with me for good?”

      An image of Brylee sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair, her hair gray and pinned back in a bun, wearing a church-lady dress and knitting socks, flashed into Walker’s mind and made his mouth twitch upward at one corner. “Heck, no,” he teased. “I’d just park you in some nursing home and get on with my life.”

      Brylee didn’t laugh, or even smile. Her expression was sad, and she gazed off into some unseeable distance. “What if we do end up all alone when we’re old?” she murmured. “It happens.”

      “I reckon I’ll wait a decade or two before I start worrying about that,” he said. There had to be things he could say that would encourage Brylee, get her off the sidelines and back into the rough-and-tumble of life, but he was damned if he knew what those things were.

      Like quicksilver, Brylee’s mood changed again. The timer on the stove made a chiming sound, and she pushed her chair back to stand, dislodging Snidely’s big dog head from her thigh. All hustle and bustle, she picked up a couple of pot holders and started taking tinfoil loaf pans out of the oven and setting them on the waiting cooling racks. “You’re right,” she said, as though there had been no lag in their verbal exchange. “Let’s wait twenty years and figure it out then.”

      Remembering that he was hungry, Walker stood, went to the breadbox on the counter, a retro thing coated in green enamel, took out a loaf and set it on the counter while he rummaged through a nearby drawer for a knife. “It’s a deal,” he agreed, proceeding to open and close cupboard doors until he found a jar of peanut butter and one of those little plastic bears with honey inside. The bottle was sticky and the cap was missing, and honey went everywhere when he squeezed too hard.

      “Honestly,” Brylee scolded, elbowing him aside, constructing the sandwich and shoving it at him, then wiping up the mess with a damp sponge.

      Walker grinned at her efficiency. “You were born to pack lunches for a bunch of little kids,” he observed.

      “Gee,” Brylee said, “thanks.”

      “I only meant—”

      “I know what you meant, Walker,” she broke in crisply.

      He bit into the sandwich, chewed, swallowed. “Well, excuse me,” he said, pretending to be wounded.

      “Shut up and go to bed,” Brylee told him.

      “I’ll do that,” Walker replied, thinking that they must have slipped into a time warp and been transported back to their teens, when they couldn’t be in the same room without needling each other.

      She made a disgusted sound and thumped the tops of a few loaves with one knuckle. She’d be up for a while, waiting for the last batch of bread to cool off so she could wrap it.

      Walker saluted her with a lift of his sandwich and headed for his room, shaking his head as he went. He wondered when he was going to learn. Ninety-five percent of the time, reasoning with a woman, especially when that woman happened to be his kid sister, was a waste of breath.

      * * *

      IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT when the last guests took their leave and the carousel finally stopped turning.

      Surveying her backyard, empty except for the caterer’s helpers and the guys taking down the big canopy and dismantling the dance floor, Casey was reminded of her childhood and the feeling she got when the carnival moved on after its yearly visit, leaving a bare and somewhat forlorn patch of ground behind.

      “Mom?” Clare stood at her elbow, barefoot but still in her party dress. She was already taller than Casey, and so was her brother, and she had the elegant carriage of a young woman. “You okay?”

      Casey turned her head, smiled at her daughter, thinking that if she loved her kids even a smidgeon more, she’d burst. “I’m fine, sweetheart,” she said. “Just a little tired.” She paused, enjoying the night air and the sky full of stars and the bittersweet remnants of a happy day. “Speaking of which—shouldn’t you be in bed by now?”

      Named for Casey’s late grandmother, Clare resembled the woman more with every passing year. Now she made a face. “Mom,” she said, “I’m almost fifteen and, anyway, it’s Saturday, so I can sleep in tomorrow.”

      “We’re going to church,” Casey reminded the woman-child. “There’s a bake sale after the eleven o’clock service, and I promised Opal I’d help out. And you won’t be fifteen for another eight months.”

      With a dramatic sigh, Clare turned and started across the darkened sunporch, toward the kitchen, and Casey followed with some reluctance, turning her back on that big sky full of stars.

      “Well,” the girl argued, since teenagers couldn’t go more than ten minutes, it seemed to Casey, without offering up some kind of back talk, “you didn’t promise Opal that I’d help, did you?”

      Shane stood at one of the sleek granite-covered counters in that gleaming, cavernous kitchen, eating leftover wedding cake with his fingers. He gave Casey a look of good-natured guilt, shrugged once and reached for another slice.

      “You’re disgusting,” Clare informed him.

      Shane stuck out a crumb-covered tongue and made a rude noise.

      “Yuck,” Clare wailed, drawing the term out to three times its normal length. “Mother, are you just going to stand there and let him act like a baboon?”

      Casey pretended to consider the question. “Yeah,” she said finally, with a little grin. “I guess I am.”

      Shane laughed in obnoxious triumph, snorting more crumbs. The three dogs, clustered around him, waited eagerly for scraps.

      Clare made a strangled, screamlike sound of truly theatrical proportions and stomped off toward the rear stairway, bound for the sanctuary of her upstairs bedroom, a private preserve where Shane was not allowed.

      “That’s enough cake,” Casey told her son. “Have the dogs been outside?”

      Shane nodded, his mouth full, and dusted frosting-sticky hands together. Once he’d swallowed again—actually, it was more of a gulp—he answered, “Only about five times. Rockford ate a crepe paper streamer and part of a balloon.”

      Rockford, the baby of the chocolate-Lab trio, gave a mournful little howl of protest, as though objecting to being snitched on.

      Casey walked around, took a gentle hold on the dog’s ears and looked him over closely. “He seems all right,” she said.

      “He’ll be okay,” Shane confirmed nonchalantly. “He already barfed. That’s how I knew what he ate.”

      “Ewwww,” Casey said, taking her son by the shoulders and steering him toward the stairs. “Be sure to wash up before you turn in for the night,” she added as he followed the trail blazed by his older sister.

      The dogs trooped after him, the way they did every night.

      Doris, the cook