Free Can't Hurry Love by Molly O'Keefe Page A

shovel she had left by the sliding glass door and then clawed her way back up.
    She used the shovel to clear a trench in front of the wall and then kicked the hay bales into the trench before the mud had a chance to fill her little moat. Ruby took the shovel and used the bottom edge as a knife to separate the bales, spreading them out. Jacob jumped on them, pounding them into the hole.
    God, as a personal favor, put a cease-fire on the rain and downgraded the deluge to a minor downpour as Jacob, Victoria, and Ruby stood watching to see if the hay would hold back the worst of the mud.
    Come on , Victoria thought as the water ran down her back in a cold stream, finally dousing the lingering heat of Eli’s touch. She knew it was stupid to have so much of her worth tied up in hay, but that’s where she was. All she had left was hay.
    And when the hay held and the rain slowed and the mud stopped running in sheets down to the verandah, pride erupted inside of her.
    “You did it, Mom!” Jacob cried, and Ruby nodded and Victoria laughed. Really laughed, the sound rolling up from her wet, cold toes, from the horrible memory of her husband’s betrayal, from her desperate gullibility with Dennis, the satisfaction of getting the best of Eli and the embarrassment of wanting his hateful touch.
    At the sound of her laugh, Jacob jumped, wrapping his arms around her waist. Her feet slipped on the unsteady ground and she fell down hard, her son right on top of her.
    But she could not stop laughing. She was drunk. Uncorked. Filthy. And it was so damn great.
    Jacob rolled away, flopping beside her.
    Victoria grinned at his mud-smeared face and scootched around to make a mud angel.
    “I was just kidding before, but you really have lost it.” Ruby picked up the shovel and half slid, half walked her way back down the hill.
    Jacob stayed with Victoria, his love so powerful it warmed her, even as she lay in the cold mud.
    “No more reacting, Jacob.”
    “Okay, Mom.”
    As of this moment, she would no longer be a mouse in a maze. No more blind scrambling.
    “We’re going to make something right here. Right now. For us.”
    Jacob looked around. “Like a mud castle?”
    Starting right now, half-drunk under a low-hung moon, she would build a life from the ground up.
    Like all the self-help books she’d read in the last year had told her to, she emptied her body with a long sigh, clearing out her lungs, closing her eyes. She gripped her son’s hand and opened up her blank mind to the world. To possibility. And waited for the universe to answer.
    Right now, this minute, what do you want more than anything else?
    I want …
    I want …
    The answer crawled out of her past, a forgotten wish that she’d been too meek to reach for.
    Mud .
    Her eyes flew open.
    And her answer was right there in the moonlight, all over her little boy’s beaming face.
    Eli slammed his truck door so hard the windshield rattled. In the silence he didn’t start the pickup, didn’t do anything, really. He stared up at the rain pouring down insheets and wondered if he was sad. Or angry. Because he couldn’t tell anymore.
    Fifteen years of this shit and he was just numb.
    Losing his job today. His chance at the land. Everything he’d been working for his whole life felt like it was buried under ice.
    The knock on his driver-side window made him jump, his heart startled out of its apathy with a heavy thump. In the shadow of the big elm, Caitlyn stood next to the truck, her palm pressed white against the window. Her raincoat hid most of her face.
    Her panic was obvious and he quickly opened the door. “What’s wrong?”
    “I’m sorry, Eli.” She stepped sideways, letting him slide out. His feet splashed in a mud puddle. “He just lost it after you left and I know you don’t like the drugs—”
    Before she was finished he’d started walking back through the twilight toward The Elms, his head bent against the rain. He shouldn’t have left those pictures.
    The