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“We’ll find the lunch box,” Maggie quickly offered. “Or—” she shot Cassidy a glance that could only mean trouble “—we’ll buy him a new one from your allowance.”
Cassidy’s mouth opened to an exaggerated O. That quickly, Caleb was back to adversary.
“If he threw the lunch box at her, she’s not buying him a new one,” Jared argued.
“People.” One word, that’s all it took when it was an elementary school principal.
Ten minutes later, Jared stood outside the principal’s office door tightly holding Caleb’s hand. Maggie and her daughter were still inside.
“This is my baddest day.” Caleb didn’t even try to fight the tears. Of Jared’s three boys, he was the one who cried freely, whined often and ran full tilt from the time he got out of bed until he fell back into it. He argued the most, too. But, Caleb was also the one who still climbed on Jared’s lap, laughed until tears came to his eyes and who knew the name of each and every animal on the farm.
If they didn’t have a name, Caleb gave them one.
“I doubt that,” Jared said calmly. “We’ll talk later. Now, don’t start whining.”
“I can’t help it. I really want my lunch box. It’s my favorite.”
Jared pictured the lunch boxes sitting on the kitchen counter. Grandpa Billy packed them every morning. Ryan’s was a plain blue. Nine-year-olds no longer needed action figures or at least his didn’t. Matt’s was Star Wars. Caleb’s was Spider-Man.
“We should go buy a new one,” Caleb suggested. “There’s a really cool one—”
“No, we should go to the cafeteria and see if the lunch ladies found it.”
Caleb followed, feet dragging. “I don’t want to go there.”
Of course he didn’t. The principal had just assigned him a full week of wiping down tables instead of going to recess. Jared intended to do the same at home along with no television for a week.
The cafeteria hadn’t changed all that much since Jared’s years. There were still rows of tables with benches that could be levered up to make mopping easier. Large gray trash baskets were in the four corners. Right now, decorations of snowflakes and wrapped presents were taped to the walls. Snowmen and Santas shared messages of “Don’t Forget our Winter Program.”
No way could Jared forget. He’d recently been put in charge of props. In just a few weeks, Caleb would be dressed like an elf and singing with his class. Ryan actually had the part of Santa. Matt would pretend to have a stomachache the night of the program. According to the note sent by Matt’s teacher, he had the role of delivering presents to people in the audience.
Smart teacher.
“You start in here,” Jared ordered. “I’ll go in the kitchen.”
A few minutes later, Maggie Tate joined them in the search. She poked her head in the kitchen door. “I’m so sorry. She’ll be wiping down lunch tables with him.”
Jared almost bumped his head as he looked up from the cabinet he’d been going through. “That’s okay.”
She nodded and then went into the cafeteria, presumably to search.
Jared was on his fifth cabinet when he heard the giggles.
He followed the noise to the cafeteria and stopped. In the middle of the lunchroom tables stood Maggie and the two children, all of them looking at the ceiling. In her hand, she held Caleb’s lunch box. Jared could see the peanut butter smeared all over it.
Finally, Maggie hunched down and shook her head. “Caleb, it would take a lot more peanut butter to make it stick.”
“I wondered about that,” Caleb admitted.
“I can go find some peanut butter,” Cassidy offered.
Maggie simply shook her head again, smiled at Jared and sashayed past him into the kitchen where she washed the offending lunch box before handing it to Jared.
For a brief moment he’d been worried she’d gone looking for peanut butter.
* * *
Maggie helped Cassidy into her coat and out the front door of Roanoke Elementary. Together they walked the mere block to Maggie’s shop Hand Me Ups.
Well, Maggie walked; Cassidy did more of a sideways hop with a scoot and jiggle follow-up.
“I don’t think it’s fair that I got in so much trouble,” Cassidy said after a moment. “I didn’t throw my lunch box at him, and we found the lunch box right where I hid it. And I only hid it so he wouldn’t throw it at me again.”
“But you didn’t tell people where you hid the lunch box when they asked. That was wrong.”
Cassidy contemplated, for all of thirty seconds. “But, if I gave it back, he might have thrown it at me again.”
“Once adults were involved, that wasn’t likely. You were wasting our time. I might have missed a customer at the shop. And I’m sure Caleb’s dad had work to do. Plus, even you admitted he didn’t exactly ‘throw’ it at you.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“And, what if the lunch box was gone when we went back to get it?” Maggie asked.
“He could have one of mine.”
Cassidy had two, both pink and both secondhand, one with Dora on it and the other with Cinderella. Cassidy’s greatest wish was to get rid of both of them in order to buy a new one with a pony on it. Maggie doubted Caleb would be inclined to accept either.
“No, if the lunch box disappeared, we’d be getting him a new one, with your piggy bank money.”
“But I have to use that money to buy presents!” Cassidy’s scoot and jiggle stopped for all of a moment. Then, she was on to a new subject: one where her piggy bank wasn’t in danger and there were other problems to solve. “Am I pretty?”
“Getting prettier every day.”
“Today, Lisa Totwell said that she was the prettiest girl in class and that I was second.”
“Well,” Maggie said carefully, “do you want to be the prettiest, or is it okay if Lisa is?”
“It’s okay if she is. She’s my best friend, you know. Cuz we’re both the new students in second grade this year. Everyone else has been here forever.”
Yesterday, Brittney Callahan had been Cassidy’s best friend. Before that, it was Sarah, a girl Maggie had yet to put a last name or a face to.
Didn’t matter. Maggie was thrilled at how quickly Cassidy was fitting in—maybe fitting in a little too well. Coming to Roanoke, Iowa, was the right choice. For both of them.
“Cassidy, you know that Caleb is only in kindergarten, right?”
“Yep.”
“Maybe you need to play with the kids in your own class.”
Cassidy stopped so quickly, she nearly stumbled to the ground. “No way, Mom. Caleb is my friend, and he’s fun. Plus, he’s Matt’s brother.”
Matt McCreedy was the subject of many a conversation. He was the only one in Cassidy’s second grade who hadn’t been given best-friend status, and Maggie suspected Cassidy might be going through her first crush.
Now that Maggie had met Matt’s dad, she figured he and Matt were cut from the same cloth—rugged, sturdy denim. Caleb seemed to be cut from a different sort of cloth.
Which meant that Mr. Jared McCreedy didn’t understand his youngest son’s creative personality.
“We’ll talk about it later.” Maggie didn’t want to dwell on the plight of the misunderstood child.
She’d been one—an army brat with an errant mother and a father who was used to giving orders and having them followed with a “Yes, sir. Right away, sir.” Her dad was a man who tried hard, but one who definitely didn’t understand girls.
“Mom, you’ve got that look on your face again,” Cassidy complained. “Did I do something?”
“Yes, you did something. You got sent to the principal’s office for the second time, and I had to leave work to come deal with it. After taking most of last week off, I really needed to spend time in the shop.”
Cassidy suddenly was very involved in staring at a crack in the sidewalk.
Maggie wasn’t deterred. “School’s only been in session three months. Next week is December and if you don’t...” Her words tapered off as a black truck drove by. Actually, she was glad for the interruption. She’d been about to bring up consequences, such as not attending Christmas activity at the church this Friday night or even the school’s winter play and the possibility of Cassidy not appearing in it.
Don’t threaten unless you mean it.
“Look, Mom!”
Jared McCreedy sat tall and oh-so-serious-looking behind the wheel of the Ford diesel truck. His three sons, the oldest in the front, two more in the back, all looked at Maggie and Cassidy. Caleb waved. Except for Matt, none of the boys appeared as serious as their father.
Cassidy frowned. “They have a dog. His name is Captain Rex.”
Something Cassidy asked for quite often, usually after figuring out that there was no way her mother would even listen when asked for a horse or a baby brother.
“Yes, they have a dog.”
Cassidy’s letter to Santa—not mailed because it wasn’t finished—had a dog in it, second on the list, right after a pair of red boots. Cassidy wouldn’t be getting a dog. The McCreedys had something Maggie and Cassidy did not: a house and yard. Maggie thought of two more things the McCreedys had: horses and baby brothers.
And family. They had plenty of family. They hadn’t had to fly to New York to celebrate Thanksgiving with her disapproving mother-in-law—the only relative who cared even to invite them.
The McCreedys, Maggie knew, had roots that ran deep in Roanoke, Iowa. She hadn’t seen Solitaire Farm, their place, but she’d heard about it and could picture what it looked like.
Big white house with a huge porch, complete with a swing and a rocker or two. Long driveway, winding its way to the front door, cars parked, meaning a large family. A barn. Lots of green, green grass to run across and trees to climb. Room to breathe. Plenty of animals, especially horses and, of course, acres of corn and soybeans.
Except for the corn, soybeans and animals bigger than a dog, what Maggie imagined was pretty much a portrait of one of her goals: a real home for Cassidy.
Too bad this farm was owned by a man who reminded her of her late husband, Dan, thinking of his duty above all else. Because, if Jared McCreedy had been a different kind of man—softer, more jubilant and easygoing—maybe Maggie would have engaged in a little flirting.
What would it have hurt?
It had been a year.
Not a chance. Jared even looked like Maggie’s late husband: tall, thick dark brown hair, and almost black piercing eyes. Both men were capable of walking into a room and suddenly making the room seem small. There were a few differences. Dan wore fatigues while Jared wore jeans and a flannel shirt. Dan had to wear his hair at a precision cut while Jared’s was long enough to cover his ears. Dan was always clean-shaven. Jared had a five-o’clock shadow that made Maggie think about how good whiskers felt during a kiss.
Whoa.
Been there, done that, not a chance Maggie wanted to deal with a man so intent on being in control that he didn’t know how to have fun.
Or appreciate the concept of getting a lunch box to stick to the ceiling with the help of a little peanut butter. Maggie smiled when she pictured the abject horror on Jared’s face when he spotted the sticky lunch box. No, Jared McCreedy was not her ideal man. No sense of thinking about him at all.
Chapter Two
It had been a tough week thanks to Monday’s phone call from the principal. And now once again, thanks to a Friday phone call from Caleb’s teacher, Jared was standing in the hallway of Roanoke Elementary.
He checked his watch. He had at least a dozen things to do today, starting with figuring out—since he was here—what props were needed for the school’s Christmas program. The father who had been in charge was now working extra hours and Beth, the woman he was about to see, had asked Joel, her fiancе and Jared’s brother, to help.
Joel had a rodeo, so right now, Jared was it.
But that had nothing to do with his visit today. No, Beth had something to say about Caleb, his youngest, who was responsible for Jared standing in the school’s hallway at four in the afternoon on a working day.
Through a window in the door, he could see Beth sitting at a small table. Someone else’s mom had her back to the door. So, maybe Caleb wasn’t the only one in trouble. Both women seemed overly fascinated by some paperwork spread out on the small table.
He didn’t intend to let any more time pass doing nothing. He needed to gather his boys, find the teacher in charge of the program, talk shop and head home. There was still an hour or two of Iowa daylight, and he had things to do and was already behind. He opened the classroom door and stepped in.
“Jared.” Beth Armstrong—Miss Armstrong to his son, Beth to him—twisted in her seat, looking surprised.
Funny, she’d called his cell phone and left a message requesting this meeting.
Then she glanced at the large clock just over her desk. “Is it that time already?”
“That time and then some,” Jared said, finally figuring out who was sitting with Beth. Hmm, she didn’t have a child in Beth’s class. Had something else happened between Caleb and Cassidy?
His future sister-in-law didn’t even blink, just nonchalantly walked over to where Jared stood. “Sorry, I was looking at pictures of wedding dresses and time got away from me. You know Maggie, right?”
“Away from us,” Maggie Tate agreed as she closed magazines and reached for some loose pictures, “and, yes, we’ve met.”
When Jared didn’t respond, didn’t say that keeping him waiting was okay, Beth grinned. She was getting entirely too good at teasing him. He could blame the fact that she was about to become his sister-in-law, but truth was, he’d known her most of his life. This time, she simply told him something he already knew. “Patience is a virtue.”
“Whoever coined that phrase wasn’t a single father of three with a farm to run,” Jared retorted.
“And I didn’t realize that you were standing outside waiting for Beth.” Maggie finished loading the papers into a canvas bag and made her way to the door. Jared couldn’t help but think her small frame looked right at home in the five-year-old wonderland of kindergarten.
His mouth went dry, and the annoyance he felt at being kept waiting almost vanished.
Almost.
Then, the young woman, her eyes twinkling, spoke again. “Patience is a virtue, have it if you can. Seldom found in a woman. Never in a man.”
Beth clapped her hands, clearly pleased that someone else shared the same opinion.
All Jared could think was, great, another female with a proverb. The only sayings he knew by heart were the ones his father said, and they were more advice than quips. Jared’s personal favorite: always plow around a stump.
He doubted the women would appreciate his contribution.
