understand you and your husband are probably anxious to spruce things up in order to get your business off the ground. You could send Shelby with her grandparents.”
Pulling herself up to her full five-foot-three inch height, Greer let stormy eyes rake the much taller man’s guileless expression. “Shelby’s never met my parents. And for the record…I don’t have a husband. Now, if you’ll excuse us, I’d like to finish shopping so we can get out to our ranch before the movers show up.”
Spinning on one heel, she sped down an adjacent aisle, uncaring that she’d been rude to a man of the cloth. She didn’t let up her mad dash until she reached the bins of vegetables and began pitching items willy-nilly into her cart.
Shelby finally found her. “Yuck, Mama. We don’t eat turnips. And what’s that green stuff with the red edges?”
Greer frowned at her cart. “It’s chard. On second thought, these greens will probably spoil before I have a chance to use them.” Meekly she put back the chard and some lettuce snatched up in her hasty attempt to escape Noah Kelley. Father Noah!
Greer’s heart tripped fast. It would be better if Noah did resemble his formidable dad. Instead the son had straw-blond hair that fell appealingly over a suntanned brow. Standing a good six feet in boots, Noah’s worn blue jeans fit his long legs as if sculpted. Even at a distance, Greer had been aware of eyes the color of a Hill Country sky. Up close, once he’d taken off his cap, those same blue eyes surely saw straight into her guilty soul.
Now why would she think that? She was guilty of nothing! She threw baking potatoes haphazardly into a paper bag. Father Noah would change his tune fast enough. As soon as his ailing dad clued him in about her ignominious fall from grace.
It seemed so long since she’d raced home from college in East Texas, heartsick and needing comfort. Instead she’d endured hearing Father Holden advise her folks to send her to Denver to live with her dad’s sister—so she could adopt out her illegitimate child. Oh, he’d made it plain she wasn’t the first girl in their parish to be shuffled off. Any girl in her predicament set a bad example, for their congregation, he said.
Greer’s dad, one of St. Mark’s loyal board members, went along with it. That still hurt. Even after all these years—or so she gathered, reading between the lines of her mom’s sparse letters—Robert Bell hadn’t changed his stance. Greer had hoped that with the passing of time, and with her added maturity, it’d be possible to get over the past. Maybe not.
She still quaked inside as she recalled what a humiliating experience that had been at seventeen. It wasn’t as if she didn’t already feel like dirt over being duped and dumped by a college senior she’d thought loved her. In truth, Dan Harper couldn’t shed her or his responsibility for a baby fast enough. When her parents and her church turned against her, too, that had been the worst blow.
“Mama, can I get this cereal?” Shelby ran back to the cart with a box of a kid-popular variety her mother rarely let her eat.
Greer opened her mouth to refuse, but saw shadows lurking in Shelby’s eyes that she recognized. A favorite cereal spelled comfort to a nine-year-old. Mom and child had left behind everything in Shelby’s world.
Gently, Greer pushed aside her daughter’s overlong bangs. “Okay, but when this is gone, it’ll be stick-to-the-ribs oatmeal for a while. Or whatever Cook whips up for our paying guests.”
“We have a cook?”
“Not yet. I plan to hire someone as soon as we make our guest ranch livable. We need to book guests ASAP. Until then, though, it’s just you and me, kid.”
Shelby hugged the box to her thin chest. “Maybe Grandma and Grandpa Bell will invite us to their house for dinner tonight. My friend, Rhonda Ann, in Colorado—she ate dinner at her grandma’s a lot.”
Greer winced. “Don’t get your hopes up, Shel. My parents lead busy lives. You and I, ah, are going to be busy, too. Remember what I told you about Mayor Wright saying our new place is a fixer-upper?”
“Yeah.” Shelby dropped the cereal in the cart next to a gallon of milk her mother had taken from the cooler. “Mayor M’randa said our place needs cleaning and painting. That’s why Mr. and Mrs. Sanderson gave us a bunch of paint before we moved. So we can get straight to work, right?”
“Right. Miranda said the previous owner of our ranch let it go downhill. That paint was a very generous gift from the Sandersons,” Greer added, thinking fondly of her previous employers at the dude ranch in Colorado. “I hope paint and elbow grease is all it takes to make it presentable for guests.”
Shelby darted down the next aisle, where she located their brand of peanut butter. She placed the jar in their cart, and Greer tossed in a loaf of bread and some jam, sensing her daughter’s desire to leave. Greer, too, was dying to see their property so she could assess what needed doing.
“Okay, Shel, I think we have enough here so we won’t starve for a few days. All our talk about settling in has made me want to hurry and get there. Shall we go pay for our stuff?”
“Can I push the cart? Oh, and can I buy the book I showed you? It’s about a girl who grew up in Texas.” She latched on to the cart handle, all the while bouncing up and down on her toes. She did slow where two aisles intersected.
“I don’t know about buying the book today. I need your help to put the house in order. I know you, Shelby Book Worm. Once you bury your nose in a story, you tune out the whole world. And how do I know? Because you’re just like me.” Greer tweaked her daughter’s shoulder-length coppery hair. “I’ll ask Mr. Tanner to hold the book for you. It’ll be your special treat for helping me clean up around the ranch.”
“O…kay!” Shelby was generally agreeable. “Mama, where are the other shoppers? Look at all this neat-o stuff. How come nobody’s here ’cept the clerk and the man who told us about church?”
Greer secretly hoped Father Noah Kelley had made himself scarce. Shelby had always been a kid with a million questions. “You remember how, after I started working for Cal and Marisa Sanderson at Whippoorwill Ranch, we only shopped every two weeks? We drove into Denver. Those stores are huge compared to the ones in Homestead. Everything’s bigger there, and there’s way more people. We’ve come to a small town, Shelby.”
“Yeah, I told my teacher I was scared to leave Colorado. She said I was lucky to be going to a small town. She said kids in small towns stay friends forever and ever. Is that true, Mama? You never talk about friends from here. But you said you were born in Homestead and lived here until you went away to college.”
How did she explain to Shelby that her good memories of growing up in Homestead were erased by what had happened during her first year of college? A year that had vastly changed her life?… “Honeybun, people move in and out of small towns, too. And Mr. Tanner remembered me. So did Mayor Wright. In fact, Miranda said she’ll drop by to make sure we get in okay this afternoon. If I remember correctly, Miranda’s three years older than me. So is Ed Tanner. I’m sure we’ll run into some of my other classmates, too.”
“Okay.” Shelby sighed as they approached the counter. Greer was relieved to see that one particular customer had left.
“I wish you were still friends with Father Kelley. Then we could go to his church on Sunday, and I’d hurry up and meet kids my age.”
The truth was that Greer had been hoping against hope that Holden Kelley had been among the people who’d pulled out of Homestead, a part of an exodus that had led to Miranda Wright’s land giveaway. The mayor almost didn’t get her program approved by the council. But Greer knew how stubborn farmers like her dad, not to mention powerful ranchers like Senator Clint Gallagher, could be. She could easily imagine the difficulties Miranda had experienced.
According to the article Greer had read in the one newspaper her mom had sent, some residents resisted Miranda’s plan, calling it stupid. If not for that article, which had caught Greer’s interest, she would never have checked out the land deal. Personally she was thankful,