Big Sky Mountain. Linda Lael Miller

table and waited for supper to start.

      “See you on Saturday,” Hutch said lightly.

      And then he tousled Madison’s hair, nodded to Kendra and the dog, and left the house.

      “Are we going to see the cowboy man on Saturday?” Madison asked eagerly. Once again, it struck Kendra that, for a four-year-old, the child didn’t miss much.

      “Yes,” Kendra said, setting the salad bowl in the center of the table and then pouring milk for herself and Madison. Daisy curled up on her dog bed in the corner, rested her muzzle on her forepaws, and rolled her lively brown eyes from Madison to Kendra and back again. “The whole town gets together every year to spruce the place up for the rodeo and the carnival. Lots of people like to visit the Pioneer Cemetery while they’re here, and we like it to look presentable, so you and I and Hutch will be helping out there. After the work is done, there’s always a picnic, and games for the kids to play.”

      “Games?” Madison was intrigued. “What kind of games?”

      “Sack races.” Kendra smiled, remembering happy times. “Things like that. There are even prizes.”

      “What’s a sack race?” Madison pursued, a little frown creasing the alabaster skin between her eyebrows.

      Kendra explained about stepping into a feed sack, holding it at waist level and hopping toward the finish line. She didn’t mention the three-legged race, not wanting to describe that, too, but she smiled at the memory of herself and Joslyn tied together at the ankles and laughing hysterically when they lost their balance and tumbled into the venerable cemetery grass.

      “And there are prizes?” Madison prompted.

      Kendra nodded. “I won a doll once. She had a real camera hanging around her neck by a plastic strap. I still have her, somewhere.”

      Madison’s eyes were huge. “Wow,” she said. “There were cameras when you were a little girl?”

      Kendra laughed. “Yes,” she replied, “there were cameras. There were cars, too, and airplanes and even TVs.”

      Madison pondered all this, the turning gears in her little brain practically visible behind her forehead. “Wow,” she repeated in awe.

      After supper, Madison had her bath and put on her pajamas, and Kendra popped a favorite DVD of an animated movie into the player attached to the living room TV.

      Madison snuggled on the floor with Daisy, one arm flung companionably across the small dog’s gleaming back, and the two of them were quickly absorbed in the on-screen story.

      Kendra, relieved that she wouldn’t have to sit through the movie for what must have been the seventy-second time, set up her laptop on the freshly cleared kitchen table and booted it up.

      She’d surf the web for a while, she decided, and see if there were any for-sale-by-owner listings posted for the Parable/Three Trees area. She was, after all, a working real estate broker, and sometimes a well-placed phone call to said owners would produce a new client. Most folks didn’t realize all that was entailed in selling a property themselves—title searches and tax liens were only some of the snags they might run into.

      Alas, despite her good intentions, Kendra ended up running a search on Hutch Carmody instead, using the key word wedding.

      The page that came up might as well have been called “We Hate Hutch.”

      Kendra found herself in the odd position of wanting to defend him—and furiously—as she looked at the pictures.

      Brylee, the discarded bride, heartbroken and furious in her grandmother’s wedding gown.

      Hutch, standing straight and tall and obviously miserable midway down the aisle, guests gawking on either side as he held up both hands in a gesture that plainly said, “Hold everything.”

      The condolence party over at the Boot Scoot Tavern, Brylee wearing a sad expression and a T-shirt that said Men Suck.

      Beware, murmured a voice in the back of Kendra’s mind.

      But even then she knew she wouldn’t heed her own warning.

      After all, what could happen in broad daylight, in a cemetery, with Madison and half the county right there?