Free Meg's Best Man: A Montana Weekend Novella by Cynthia Bruner Page A

that was like. Maybe he was flirting with one girl when he already had made promises to another. Meg slipped on another steep spot and sighed. She was too close to the camper to bother pulling the flashlight out of her bag now.
    Had he been flirting? For heaven’s sake, had she? How embarrassing. She couldn’t help but smile when she was talking with him, or worse, dancing with him. Her face felt funny from all the smiling she’d been doing. She rubbed at her cheek—that’s what the world needed, cheek workouts. She could imagine opening a chain of stores where eager clients stood in front of a mirror and a perky girl in spandex told jokes.
    Okay, now she was just getting silly. She tried to open the door and was surprised to find it locked. Oh yeah, she had locked Gage out this morning. Funny how your opinion of someone could change—or change back—in such a short time. She unlocked the door and went into her dark camper, closed the door behind her, and stood still. It was very, very quiet. All traces of the sun, the laughter, and color were gone. Instead of turning on the light, Meg sat down on her bed. She didn’t feel like reading, she still had nothing to write, and she didn’t have to do anything special and wedding-like with her hair anymore.
    How long had it been since a man made her smile like that? It didn’t matter. Like just about all new friendship she made these days, someone would be leaving soon. Usually it was her, going from job to job. She liked that better than having people, even strange people who might already have girlfriends, leave her. She dragged herself through her bedtime routine in the dark, crawled into bed, and let her tired body drag her racing mind deep into sleep.

Saturday
    Bam bam bam! Meg jolted awake, but she couldn’t make sense of what she was hearing or where she was. It was barely light. Her first coherent thought was that it was Gage and she didn’t have any coffee ready yet. “Margaret! Are you in there?”
    She got up, pulled a blanket around her shoulders, and opened the door of the camper. “Mom! Dad! Hi… what time is it?” Hugs were exchanged all around. The cold morning air seeped in, and she heard her little propane heater kick on. “Come in!”
    Her father’s blond hair had more gray, but other than that, he looked just the same. Gray eyes like his brothers and so many of the Parks clan, and a face that seemed always to be faintly smiling. Her mother had put on a couple pounds, as she usually did between missions, and she looked cute that way. Meg didn’t like it when she got stringy and tired looking. No doubt Catherine had been working hard to fill her out. Her mother didn’t like to cook, and she often just forgot about meals entirely.
    Her parents squeezed past her to sit at the table, and her father fingered the newest painting on the walls. “Nice. I didn’t know moose like to go sledding.”
    “Neither did he,” Meg said with a smile. She poured some drinking water into a pot on the burner and used a lighter to get it going since the flint had long since worn out. She pulled two mugs from the drying rack and rummaged through a cabinet to find some green tea for her parents. All the boxes in the cabinet were still jumbled, but if they noticed, they didn’t say.
    “It looks like your mother and I will be going to Burma in a month.”
    “It’s going to be so exciting! They are building an orphanage there. So many orphans, thousands of them, from the flooding and the warfare. It’s just awful.”
    Meg adjusted the flame on the burner and swallowed down the worry that always came along with her parents’ plans. “Are you going alone?”
    “No, we’ll be part of a team. We’re going to spend the next month doing a tour of churches in South Dakota, raising funds and getting ready.”
    Her mother laughed. “Just when we thought we’d gotten every vaccine we could get, it turns out we have to get boosters.”
    “Where will you be