Free Larkspur Cove by Lisa Wingate Page B

Bonnie, wasn’t within line of sight. Bonnie was the most maternal twenty-something I’d ever met. She wanted a husband and kids but hadn’t found Mr. Right, so she’d taken up raising dogs and mothering everyone in the office, including the boss.
    Shifting his coffee cup so that it dangled next to the doughnut, Taz snatched up a coffee-spattered file folder and tucked it under his arm.“I’m an adult. I can have a doughnut if I want, can’t I?” The question had a touch of the rhetorical to it, as if it begged an answer, but he already knew what the answer would be.
    I shrugged, wisely remaining mum as he turned to leave.
    Passing by the copier, he took a bite of the doughnut, then glanced back at me, dropped the remainder in the trash, and offered a little closed-lipped smirk with chocolate frosting on top. “Sometimes, it’s the principle of the thing, Henderson. Even when someone is looking after our welfare, we don’t like being told what to do.”
    Leaning over to check the trash can, he seemed pleased with himself. “A high school football player from Fort Worth broke his back jumping off the Scissortail last fall. Had a fundraiser for him on Channel 9. Nice-looking kid.” Taz’s gaze slid slowly from the trash can to me, his eyes suddenly seeming steady and wise. “It’s all in your perspective.”
    He walked away without further conversation, and I stood there with my coffee cup suspended halfway to my mouth, thinking, Andrea Henderson, you have just been counseled. The primary reason I was still mentally rehashing this morning’s conversation with the game warden was that I didn’t want someone else telling me what my son needed.
    Pride goeth before the fall. One of those inconvenient proverbs that lurks in the back of your head once you’ve heard it a few thousand times from your mother. Megan was always the pliable one in the family, and I the notoriously determined child who seemed to find trouble without even looking for it. My mother always complained that I took after my grandmother’s sister, Lucy, the black sheep who lived an odd life hip-hopping around the world with the Peace Corps, until finally she took a medical ship bound for Africa, where she contracted anthrax and died.
    In our family, Lucy had always been held up as an example of pride, stubbornness, and getting too big for your britches, but I admired her. I wanted to be like her, even though I’d never had the courage to step that far outside the lines. I was a frustrated crusader, afraid to leave my own backyard because my mother would make a federal case of it. Taking this job was the first out-of-the-box thing I’d ever done. Insecurity, in this situation, was defeat. I had to find ways to remain certain of myself, of my own plans, to provide Dustin with a sense of security and a vision of the future. I had to show him that we could create something good from pieces of our old life and pieces of the new.
    Bonnie came out of the supply closet and passed by with an armload of printer paper. She was cheery, as usual, bouncing up the hall with a ponytail of slick-as-glass blond hair sweeping the back of her neck like a windshield wiper. “Hey! Mornin’!” she chirped, stopping a few steps up the hall. “Everything okay at home?”
    “Sure,” I said. “Fine.”
    “How’s your son?” Nothing happened in the office without Bonnie getting in the middle of it. She already talked about Dustin as if he were her little brother or her nephew.
    “Oh, well, you know. He’s just becoming a teenager. Having a few growing pains.”
    Bonnie stood watching me with curious, empathic blue eyes, as if she knew there was more to tell. Drifting a few steps closer, she hugged the paper to her chest.
    “He’s never had to move before,” I added.
    She sucked in her cheeks, the action making her narrow face seem even thinner and more angular. “Oh, sure,” she breathed, one side of her mouth pulling downward in a sympathetic frown.