“But can he type?” Jess asked, chuckling.

“I think his hand made it all right. He’s a surgeon. Dr. McElroy… Specializes in good looks. He claims to have helped create half the bodies that come skiing here each winter. When he sees a gorgeous woman, his wife has to threaten him to keep him from asking who her surgeon is.”

Leigh realized that she knew very little about John’s family. Was it possible she hadn’t even asked? And she had accused him of being self-centered…

“So, Jess, we’re a go on the yard?” John asked, moving onto safer ground.

They were on one condition, she said. That he take the boys fishing once. They had no uncles or cousins, no one to do that sort of thing with them.

John said he would be glad to.

Sometime between that first dinner and the first couple of weeks of work on the yard, the weather got warm enough for John to choose a Saturday for their fishing trip. And Leigh found an excuse to go along.

“I didn’t realize until the first night you came over for dinner that I never asked about your family.”

“I’m the youngest of four, and the only one, my mom says, who isn’t ambitious. It’s a pretty well-known fact that I don’t like to work all that much. Well, I like work that feels like play. I found out accidentally that I like to fix things and make things look good. Lucky break, huh?”

“So, what about your family?” she asked. They were sitting together on the ground right behind the boys, who sat at the edge of the water with long cane poles.

“Bob is the oldest. He’s about forty. He has his own tool-and-die business in Denver. He makes a great living and has a terrific wife and three kids. Judy, his wife, wanted ten kids until she had two. Number three, she says, was not her idea.

“Mike, the second one, he’s around thirty-seven, I guess. He’s a minister… Can you beat that? And not a hokus-pokus type minister, but a real live theological mastermind with his own church in Wyoming, a doctorate in theology. He’s married with two kids.

“Ted, my surgeon brother, has three kids and a wife who will never need a bit of work from a plastic surgeon. Chris is a knockout. She’s his surgical nurse.”

“I wish I’d had brothers and sisters,” she said, “but I understand why that wasn’t possible. The way my dad had to travel was one thing, and he was kind of up there when he and Mom got married. He was over forty when I was born.”

“You didn’t know about any of the regular things kids grow up knowing about, did you? About fighting, games, fishing?”

She shook her head.