A gorgeous heap of manure was mingling with the turned earth in his garden now, and Mac was feeling cheerful. He liked the beginnings of things. And he’d grown to love doing things from the very beginning to the very end. It had been his salvation, pretty much.

He’d kind of lost his knack, if he’d ever possessed one, for fielding ambiguity. Or for addressing an onslaught of equal but incompatible feelings, like lust and hilarity, or affection and fury, like yearning and a sense of brutal competitiveness, like admiration and impatience. Avalon Harwood was a whole freaking noisy symphony of those things.

Taking refuge under a tractor that needed fixing seemed like a restful way to spend the next few hours.

He crawled beneath, happily tinkering, not thinking about much, until he slid partially out from beneath the tractor to reach for a different wrench.

A pair of little blue eyes were peering right down into his.

He jerked in shock and banged his head on the metal so hard it rang.

“Ow! Shit! Sorry!”

The eyes belonged to a little girl, wearing a green beret. She took a step back.

“Hi!” whoever this sprite was said brightly.

“Uh, hi yourself. Sorry about the swearing. You startled me. Whoever the he . . . whoever you are.” He rubbed his poor head.

“That’s okay. My grandpa swears a lot. He puts a nickel in the jar every time. My grandma says they almost have enough in that jar for an above-ground pool.”

Realization dawned. “Ah, you must be Avalon’s niece.” He knew Eden Harwood owned the flower shop downtown.

“Yep. My Auntie Avalon owns this big house here. I’m Eden’s daughter, and Glenn and Sherrie’s granddaughter, and Jude’s niece and Jesse’s niece, too.”

“That’s quite a family you got there.”

“I know!”

He couldn’t help but smile at her unfiltered delight in her good fortune to be loved by a lot of people. Even if his head was still ringing like one of John Bonham’s cymbals.

She bent down to peer under the tractor with a frown. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“Know a lot about tractor motors, do you?” He gave the lug nut a good twist.

“Nope, I just like to know stuff.”

“That sounds a lot like your Auntie Avalon. She thinks she knows eeeeeverything.” He gave a bolt a ferocious twist with a wrench.

“Auntie Ava is really smart. She’s got a head for business.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said grimly.

“I can play guitar. I can play G, C, and D now.”

Children and their non-sequiturs.

“I bet you can make a lot of songs with those three chords.”

Why was he making conversation? He gave the nut another ferocious twist.

“You wouldn’t believe how many! What’s your name? I’ll make up a song about you.”

“Mac,” he said. He knew it was a mistake but was frankly curious about what would happen next.

“Mac took a snack out of the shack and he told all the girls they betta jump back! Holla!”

He laughed. She was quick. He slid all the way out from under the tractor and pushed himself to his feet. “Not bad, Annelise. Hey, um, sweetheart, I’m kinda busy right now, so . . .”

He turned around.

And froze.

“What the . . .”

He was surrounded.

He counted eight little girls in green dresses, knee socks, sashes, and little green berets. Sixteen bright eyes, ten sets of braids, two ponytails extending vertically from her head, like handlebars on a tricycle, one shining bob, one woven with a festival of colorful beads.

They might as well be Martians. Because he knew exactly as much about little girls as he did about little green men, and was just as pleased to see them. Absurdly, he was tempted to turn around and run exactly as if they were aliens. (“There were eight of them, officer, with these little beady eyes . . .”)

They stared back at him with that combination of unblinking, uncensored fascination and lack of self-consciousness particular to children.

“It smells like poop out here,” Annelise noted, matter-of-factly.

“Yep,” Mac agreed. “It’s for my garden.”

“Do worms poop?” a skinny one sporting brown knee socks and short horizontal ponytails asked. She had mischievous little brown eyes.

“Everything poops,” he said irritably.

They all giggled. He definitely hadn’t been going for a laugh, but he was flattered anyway. Unless they were laughing at him.

“Cows poop?” she persisted.

“Oh, yeah. Big time.”

“Horses?”

“You bet.”

“My dad?”

“Hopefully.”

This answer was apparently better than they ever dared dream. They erupted into squeals of hilarity and buckled over.

“Do angels poop?” a little blond one asked slyly. A creative thinker, that one.

“I’m not prepared to answer ecumenical questions, ladies.”

At which point he took off at a brisk pace toward the main house.

“Avalon!” he bellowed.

She was nowhere in sight.

“What does eckmechanical mean?” This was Annelise, scurrying along on his heels, demanding the answer in the manner of a prosecutor.

“It, uh, means questions about angels,” Mac said, hoping if he lengthened his stride he could outrun them.

“How do you spell it?”

Uh-oh.

“I-T,” he hedged.

“I meant the other one!” Apparently she’d heard that joke before.

“Er . . . E-C-U-M-E-N-I-C-A-L. Um, Annelise, I need to talk to your aunt. Do you know where she is? AVALON!”

He heard his voice echo: “. . . valon valon valon.”

There was no way Avalon would have let these little girls wander about unsupervised. He was certain she was lurking somewhere, hovering like a mad scientist observing an experiment.

He walked faster. They seemed to have imprinted on him like ducklings and they were fast as hell. He picked up the pace; they scurried behind. He stopped abruptly and they collided with each other and nearly crashed into him, too. He’d stopped because he saw a flash of pink and gleaming chestnut hair: Avalon on the upper deck. She waved gaily, like she was on a cruise ship leaving shore.

And disappeared rapidly inside.

“I think you’re dodging the question,” said Horizontal Ponytails, clearly a future lawyer. “I asked, do angels—”

“Angels poop feathers,” he said definitively.

“They do NOT!” she crowed as if she’d laid that trap particularly for him.

“See? Told you I didn’t know.”

For some reason this made them fall all over themselves in giggles again.

He’d never dreamed he was this amusing.

He picked up his pace, heading around the patio beneath the balcony so he could peer in at Avalon through the French doors.

They all broke into trots.

“AVALON!” he hollered again. Like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Only more incensed than panicked.

Oops. There she was!

Craning her head to see him from the opposite window. He caught a glimpse of her mouth wide open in laughter.

“Listen, girls, I need to get a lot of work done today, so . . . AVALON! AVALON!” He waved both arms at her like a man on a desert island spotting a lone biplane.

She ducked back into the house like a gopher into a hole.

Oh, she was a she-devil. A crafty, crafty she-devil.

“Hey, Mac. Auntie Ava said she had a hunch you would show us what you’re planting and how you plant it and stuff. We need it for our badges.”

“I’ll just bet she had a hunch. Wait, what do you mean, badges? Are you sheriffs?”

How about that. He had to admit to himself that he was deliberately going for laughs.

They obliged him by erupting into those now familiar giggles. Apparently being a child was not much different from being a drunk. Life was intoxicating.

“Nooooooo!” most of them crowed.

“We’re Hummingbirds,” Annelise corrected him, mopping her eyes of laughter tears.

“There’s a surprise,” he said grimly. Hummingbirds were cranky, tireless, demanding little things that never stopped moving. Nevertheless, he kept two hummingbird feeders going because they were, in a word, enchanting. “Is that like a scout troop?”

“Yep,” Annelise said firmly. “And we need to earn badges for gardening. Because Tiffany’s gang in Black Oak Hummingbirds already has them and we need to beat them. They keep beating us! It’s embarrassing! Appalling, really.”

He blinked a little at her vocabulary. “Tiffany’s gang? You have factions inside the Hummingbirds?”

His own reflexive sense of competition reared up.

“What are factions? Like three fourths, one half, like that?” Annelise wanted to know.

“Well, um . . . sort of.”

“Because one half of the Hummingbirds have one half of their badges and I never get behind so I need my gardening badge. We always win.”

Boy, did she sound like Avalon right then. Which only made it harder to resist her.

“Pleeease help us.” She implored with folded hands, all limpid blue eyes. Arrayed all around her, all of the eyes, all those shades of blue and brown and hazel and long fluffy eyelashes, beseeched him.

He craned his head toward the balcony again.

No Avalon.

He looked back toward the Hummingbirds.

He was made of something like stone. But how did any human resist those faces?

He heaved a sigh so exasperated it ought to have fluttered their ponytails.

“Well, this is what I’m doing today, girls. I need to check my tomato plants for worms that can hurt the tomatoes. And then I need to pluck them off when I find them. And they’re so gross. I mean, grosser than poop. Really icky. They’re fat, and green, and they kind of have little diamonds on their sides, and horns.”

“Real diamonds?” One of them was skeptical.

“Real horns?” Another sounded hopeful.

“It’s not nice to call something fat.” This was from a stern-faced little girl sporting the shining, symmetrical bob.

“Diamond the shape”—he outlined this in the air with his fingers—“not the diamonds that you can wear in your ears or in tennis bracelets.” Too late it occurred to him that they might have no idea what a tennis bracelet was, as they weren’t old enough to date spoiled rich boys yet. “It has really little horns.” He demonstrated by propping two fingers atop his head. “And it’s squishy and plump and doesn’t mind being called fat, because it’s an accurate description and because it’s a worm.”

They absorbed this, assessing whether they wanted to be involved, perhaps.

“Because that’s what I’m doing. Today is all about worms. I’m pulling worms off the tomato plants.”

He said all of this almost desperately. Hoping for at least a token “ewwwwww!”

But they were all eyeing him with fascination.

They were silent, he realized too late, because they could not believe their luck.

“We can help you do it!” Annelise announced. “We can help you in your garden! We need to learn about worms and gardens for our badges. It’ll be perfect! Oh please oh please oh please.”

And now they were pogo-ing around him with excitement.

He closed his eyes briefly and tipped his head back as if beseeching a heartless God.

How had this happened to his morning?

Avalon freaking Harwood. Damn, she was good. And it was yet another thing she’d remembered: he’d claimed to loathe children, way back then.

“What do you do with them when we find the worms?” Annelise was worried. “You don’t hurt them, do you?”

“I . . . um . . . put them in a coffee can. And then I send them to live on a different farm where they have plenty of room to roam.” He crossed his fingers.

“That’s what my dad did with our dog Rufus when he got old!” the bright-eyed Hummingbird named Emily told him.

Poor old Rufus, Mac thought. “You don’t say.”

“But aren’t other worms good to have around?” Annelise demanded.

“Excellent! They certainly are. Just like people, different kinds of worms have different kinds of jobs. Earthworms help the soil. They eat stuff and poop it out and the soil becomes richer and more fertile and your vegetables become more delicious.”

“So does that mean when we eat tomatoes and lettuce and stuff we’re kind of eating worm poop?” Annelise asked.

He hesitated only a second. “Absolutely,” he intoned solemnly.

If she never ate a salad again, that was his revenge on Avalon.

“Awesome!” she breathed.

They didn’t make little girls like they used to. Or maybe they did, and they just felt less obliged to be sissies for little boys, which was probably a good thing.

Avalon, for that matter, had never felt obliged to be a sissy of any kind.

He found coffee cans for them to drop the worms into, if and when they found them, and set them loose in his garden, about a quarter acre of tomatoes and peppers, and he kept an eye on them, because he simply couldn’t help it because they were just so little, and how did parents not panic when they set these reckless, energetic, gleeful little creatures loose in the world?

He did his own worm hunting. He found only one.

He could see the house from this field, and out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Avalon peering out at them from the balcony. With binoculars. Even from where he stood he could imagine her grinning.

He didn’t have time to be incensed because he felt obliged by his sheer size and adultness to watch over his charges as surely as if he were a sheepdog. He was a slave to some sort of atavistic protective instinct.

They never stopped talking. Never. It was like being trapped in an aviary. Peep peep peep peep peep peep in their little high-pitched voices. A ceaseless bombardment of often startling incisive questions, sprung from minds so alarmingly quick and sparklingly new it made him feel like a dullard, like every bit of his thirty-two years. They shrieked in triumph when one of them found a worm, and they plucked with surgically delicate fingers, and showed him every single one.

He had to admit, they were better at this stuff than he was.

An hour had gone by in an eye blink, and yet it felt like he’d been sprinting that entire time.

And they’d found ten tomato worms.

That was a damn good hour’s work.

He gave each of them a beautiful ripe tomato. As solemnly as if he were bestowing badges. And as it turned out, he kind of was.

They accepted them with touching awe and great care into their cupped hands.

“Girls!” Avalon had her hands cupped to her mouth like a mini-megaphone and was now shouting through them. “Snack time!”

He pivoted and marched toward Avalon. Unbeknownst to him, he looked like a general leading a miniature parade. They followed him at top scurrying speed toward Avalon.

Avalon had set up a long picnic table neatly arrayed with shiny craft supplies, the kind that crows would just love to steal. A golden heap of hot dog buns and bowls of plastic-wrapped something or other and a cooler with juice and sodas poking up out of the ice were at the other end.

Off in the distance near the driveway, willowy Eden Harwood was moving at a brisk mom-jog, one of those giant ubiquitous mom bags slung over her shoulder, heading straight for the picnic table.

The girls broke ranks and swarmed upon all the food and shininess with their typical gusto.

“Hang on, ladies,” Avalon commanded. “We’re going to do this politely. Remember how you need to earn your good manners badge? Say good-bye to Mac.”

They paused to wave. “Bye, Mac! Thank you, Mac! Bye! Bye! Bye!”

He waved, charmed by the thank yous and the utter cluelessness to the chaos they had imposed upon his world. They took for granted that their needs would be accommodated. Happy little tyrants.

He smiled, despite himself. Albeit tautly.

Because he was not well pleased at how Avalon Harwood had engineered the disruption of his day.

“Hey, Mac. You kind of looked like a mama duck there with your little posse. You seemed to be having such a great time I hesitated to interrupt.”

“Avalon,” he said pleasantly. And casually transformed his waving hand into a single upraised middle finger and rubbed his forehead with it.

Avalon noticed. But she just grinned at that as if she’d won an Olympic medal.

“We’re going to make friendship bracelets out here on the tables. And then have a sing-along. And games. Involving mallets and balls. Care to join us for hot dogs and fruit smiles?”

He could vividly imagine a day’s worth of shrieking. Croquet balls hurtling through his windows. Little feet trampling the well-tended landscaping. Unannounced visits while he tried to work on his tractor or the lawn mower.

“No. Thank you. I’m good.”

Her hair was piled in a ponytail on top of her head, and it fluttered in the breeze like the tail on a fox. She was wearing a perfectly ordinary dark pink T-shirt and a perfectly ordinary pair of faded jeans, rolled up a little at the bottom, but the way they smoothed so perfectly over her curves made her look more edible than a “fruit smile,” whatever the hell that was. He imagined resting his hands in those sweet notches of her waist, and he would bury his face in that little hollow beneath her ear and whisper dirty things and explicit compliments . . . and . . . and . . . lick her.

She tipped her head and studied him. “You look more like you’d like to drink a fifth of Jack for lunch.”

He said absolutely nothing. Because he couldn’t yet. Thanks to the previous unbidden reverie, his head was as light as if he’d sustained another blow to the head by a tractor bumper.

“Next week we thought we’d have a campout. Games and songs and activities. All. Day. Long. We’ll maybe do it once or twice a week. Maybe even forever.” She whispered that last word like a Marvel Comic villain.

He was silent.

And grim.

Honestly, lickable or not, there really was only so much a man could take.

“You really want to do this, Avalon?” he asked idly. His tone said: bring it.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She laid her hand delicately across her sternum, as if that’s where an invisible rope of pearls was draped.

He fought the impulse to look below the hand at the boobs.

“Those girls found ten horn worms on my tomatoes. Pretty useful. Best thing that could have happened to me today.”

“Huh.” He could tell it took a good deal of self-restraint for her not to ask what had become of the worms, even though the Harwoods of course had a garden when she was growing up and hornworms had likely met a similar demise back then. He saw the flicker of worry anyway, and he knew a shocking surge of tenderness and impatience that made him curl his fingers into his palms and dig his nails in a little.

“They can be quite a . . . handful . . . don’t you think?”

The question had begun as a sardonic little test; oddly, it ended on a different note. She was asking a genuine question.

And all at once he understood something: part of why she seemed so attractive now was that she was literally glowing. When he’d found her flat on her back outside the gate a few days ago, she’d been tense and pale and nervy; he knew now it was because something had made the light go out of her. Some element of joy she’d always radiated had been missing. But it was back now.

How did she veer so far off course?

How did the two of them veer so far away from each other?

Had she seen something in him that warned her of disaster, or heartbreak?

“They didn’t bother me in the least.” He gave it an ironic lilt. To make it sound like a lie.

But there was a peculiar, surprising ache in his chest.

They locked gazes. Something in her eyes told him that she knew he wasn’t entirely lying.

“Avalon . . . why aren’t you a teacher?”

She blinked. Her eyes widened in surprise.

She looked back toward the table, at all the little girls, the tomatoes, the friendship bracelets in progress.

“GradYouAte is kind of a school,” she said vaguely, finally.

He didn’t know quite what to say. “Right. Sure. Of course.”

She didn’t turn around to look at him again.

So he just said, “I’ll see you around, Avalon.”

She smiled faintly. “You very likely will.”

She’d noticed then that Eden was watching this little tableau from about twenty feet away at the picnic table, where everyone was busily making friendship bracelets. A shiny red orb glowed at each place setting. A tomato.

He’d been great with the kids, even though he’d once claimed to loathe them.

In all likelihood, what he didn’t like was being responsible for the feelings of another being.

She moved over to her sister. She actually kind of wanted to make a friendship bracelet, too.

Annelise was giving Eden a rapid-fire recap of the afternoon. “Mom! We totally caught tomato worms!” Annelise informed her.

“Oh no! You caught tomato worms! What are the symptoms? Do they make you . . . ticklish?”

Annelise doubled over with gales of laughter as her mom went in for a good tickle, then ran off to join her friend.

Eden pulled Avalon toward her by looping her arm through hers.

“If that guy looks as good from the front as he does from the back, then I have no idea what you’re doing hanging out with the Hummingbirds and me, Avalon.”

Avalon dodged that. “How’s the Sacramento scion? Was he sent off with appropriate flowers?”

“A wreath of gladiolas and ivy shaped like a dollar sign.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“It’s ‘what he would have wanted.’” Eden made air quotes. “And I provided it. They were happy. At the very last minute. Which means I’m happy.”

“Good on ya.”

“So who’s the guy?” Eden gestured.

“That’s the groundskeeper.”

“Whoa. Are you kidding me? Does he have a name?”

Avalon hesitated. “His name is Mac.”

Eden frowned faintly; the name was clearly tickling the memory banks.

And then she seized Avalon’s arm as if she were about to fall off a cliff. “SHUT. UP. Mac Coltrane?”

Avalon sighed. Then nodded, resignedly.

Eden was silent and frozen, clearly mulling the ramifications of this. She maintained a grip on Avalon’s arm.

“You were going to let him touch your boob,” she finally said on a hush.

They both stifled an eruption of giggles.

She had indeed confided this to Eden one breathless summer night, and they had discussed it with all the seriousness of a peace treaty negotiation. Eden was all for it, though she’d rather superciliously admonished at the time, “You should be careful because you tend to get carried away, you know.”

That was funny. Eden could be such a priss back then.

When you store up all your wildness and don’t release it a little at a time, you are bound to accidentally let it all out at once the first time a truly hot guy comes around and get mysteriously knocked up.

“I think he still wants to touch your boob,” Eden said sagely. “He had that look about him.”

“Shut up! You only saw the back of him.” The back of her neck was hot now.

“I saw the way he turned around just then. All huffy and . . . sexy.”

“What? How the hell does anyone turn around ‘sexy,’ Eden?”

Eden ignored this question. “And macho. And your heads were practically touching when you were talking.”

“Were not.” Were they?

Edie was grinning. “I’m teasing. But boy did you ever take the bait.”

Avalon snorted. “We were arguing. It wasn’t anything sexy at all.” Which actually felt like a lie, because, let’s face it, she told herself, everything he did felt sexy. “He’s an arrogant—” She recalled she was around a passel of ten-year-olds and refrained from saying “SOB” aloud. “He’s arrogant. And he wants to buy this house. He apparently tried to buy it at auction. He’s not well-pleased that I bought it.”

“You’re not gonna let him, right?” Eden knew her sister.

“Of course not. But he owns Devil’s Leap. The part with the swimming hole. Turns out these are two different parcels.”

Eden took this in and wisely didn’t editorialize. “Did you know that going in?” She attempted to be neutral but there was the faintest whiff of schoolmarm about that question. “Wait. Don’t answer. You’ll get that land from him somehow.” Being a mom had edited Eden’s schoolmarmy impulses a little. “You talk to Corbin yet?”

“Nope. Texted him once and told him to stop texting me. I bought myself at least this week of time away from the office. He’s going to just have to keep handling things.”

Eden could gauge her mood. She wisely didn’t pursue that line of questioning.

Avalon lowered her voice. “So what’s up with you, Edie? Going to let anyone touch your boob?”

“Sure. I think I have ten minutes next Wednesday between the time I pick Annelise up from school and her guitar lesson for some stranger to cop a feel. Maybe we should send out a press release.”

Eden didn’t date. She claimed she didn’t want to. It was pretty clear she didn’t have time to, given her work and her devotion to Annelise. Avalon was pretty certain guys went out of their way to order flowers and buy various gewgaws from her shop just for a chance to talk to her. Eden probably didn’t notice.

“I’ve almost forgotten the point of men.” Eden shrugged. “I’m getting it done, aren’t I? The momming, the shop, everything? With a little help from my friends?”

Two cars pulled in one after the other to pick up the Hummingbirds.

More moms would be on the way soon.

“Sure,” Avalon said, after a second, because now was not the time to advance her theory that Eden was kidding herself, at least about the man part.

Although that could, of course, make two of them.

About twenty minutes later, all the little Hummingbirds had gone home with a mom or a dad, and that included Eden and Annelise.

“Bye, Auntie Avalon! Bye! Bye!” Annelise walked backward blowing kisses at her. Little goofball.

Damn, but she was alone. Not that she wasn’t before, but the sudden influx of light and joy made everything seem a trifle fuller in contrast. They all seemed to have taken just a little bit of her with them when they left. Surely that was an illusion.

She sat down at the picnic table, which could stay right where it was for now, and rested her chin in her hands.

She’d been buzzing from the pleasure of bedeviling him and from being around her family and the kids. But Mac’s question bothered her. It burrowed right in and felt almost like an accusation, an existential quiz. Why aren’t you a teacher?

He’d sounded genuinely troubled.

She plucked up the friendship bracelet Annelise had made for her and twiddled it in her fingers.

She gasped when a squirrel hopped up on the table.

Her heart gave a happy skip. They really were characters, sparkly little individual souls, with their smooth gray coats and plump white tummies, their curving tail plumes. She’d rescued and nursed a squirrel back to health. Trixie had lived with Avalon for almost a year, and Avalon had loved her with her whole heart. She’d passed away in her sleep in her cage for mysterious squirrel reasons, and to this day the memory was an ache. Funny how something so small could take a divot right out of your heart.

Avalon found a scrap of hot dog bun on the bench next to her and held it out. The squirrel leaned delicately forward, snatched it and ran off with it in its mouth.

And she was alone again.

Get a grip, Avalon, she told herself. This maudlin ruminating is ridiculous.

She knew exactly how she intended to spend the next couple of hours.