Free My Heart Can't Tell You No by M.K. Heffner

than to Maddie, then turned his attention back to her. “What do you want a husband with a lot of hair for?”
    “I don’t know,” she said honestly, jumping in the air to catch the next ball before throwing it back fiercely at the boy, making him yowl silently as the ball smacked into his mitt. “Dad isn’t bald.”
    “You tell him, Maddie,” said Janet.
    “Oh, you love it, you know you do. You should hear her at night, Joe, beggin’ to stroke my bald spot. Of course I just lay in the other bed and tell her to go the hell to sleep, but you know women. She’ll just lay there and beg, until I finally get up and let her pat it a few times, then I can go back to bed and get a good night’s sleep.”
    “You rotten . . . ,” Janet laughed as she flustered again under her husband’s teasing.
    Lew started laughing at her, then pretended to sober as he saw Sarah’s car pulling up next to them. “Shut up everybody. Can’t talk about sex now, my big sister’s here.”
    “Did I hear you mention sex?” Sarah asked as she got out of the car on the driver’s side and John got out of the passenger’s side.
    “Not me.” Lew raised his brows to her. “Where’s Ilene?” he asked John, referring to his wife.
    “Work,” John said simply.
    He sat next to Janet. John’s second wife wasn’t with them, not unusual as they were on shaky grounds after only two years of marriage. Ilene liked to wander and didn’t make any secret of it, but it went unmentioned—John was too good a young man to deserve such a wife.
    “Maddie was just saying she doesn’t want to marry a guy that’s bald,” Lew told Sarah as she sat next to him.
    “I don’t blame her, a woman likes to have something to hold onto.”
    “That’s right,” Maddie said from the middle of the road.
    “And what’s wrong with bald?” John asked over his shoulder. “You don’t even know what the hell you’d be hanging on for.”
    Maddie just smiled over at her brother as she caught the next ball. “That’s enough, I’m done for now,” she told her cousin as she moved back to the table by her brother. “Sure I do. So you can kiss him and he can’t get away! Just like this!”
    John’s face turned crimson as Maddie quickly grabbed him by the hair and pulled him back in a mock kiss before leaving him drop. She moved to sit on the bench again, this time across from Joe.
    “Jesus,” Lew breathed. “Almost makes me glad I’m going bald.”
    Joe’s eyes returned to Maddie. She really had changed. His eyes moved over her face before dropping to the front of her overalls again. She most certainly didn’t look fourteen—more like seventeen, eighteen, but not fourteen. Realizing his probing gaze was stirring the sensation in his loins again he guiltily looked back to her face, hoping for some signs that said she was still almost a baby. She looked at him at the same moment she was about to get another olive from a jar on the table. He saw an emotion of pain cross her face as she put the jar down, then turn to anger as she threw the olive on the ground.
    “Go to hell, McNier! I know I’m fat!!” She turned and shoved her hands into her pockets as she started walking down the lane toward the bridge where Lew’s other sons were coming toward them.
    “Hey Maddie’s here!” they called as they ran up to her then turned and headed back across the bridge to follow her.
    John and Lew chuckled at the look of pure shock on Joe’s face, but Janet and Sarah both sighed, uneasiness filling them at Maddie’s discomfort.
    “Puberty,” said John. “Nothing like it.”
    “What the hell did I say?” Joe asked quietly in astonishment.
    “I didn’t hear you say anything.”
    “No, me either,” Lew agreed, both of them knowing more than they were letting on.
    “Ya don’t have to these days,” John told him.
    “Then what did I do? I was only looking at her. Jesus! Remind me not to look at her!”
    “She’s sensitive about her weight. You were