“Just thinking,” he said as he put in the last stitch on his section, “and now I’m going into the house to finish up that wiring. I’ll have to turn off the power for a little while.” He wished he could turn off his thoughts as easily as opening a breaker box and throwing a few levers. He stood up and stretched the kinks out of his neck and back and, with a wave, left his two cousins behind to do their sections.

Nessa was still working on her daily portion of the quilt when April finished hers a few minutes later. “I’m going to water the flowers while you finish up,” she said, and she was gone before Nessa could say anything.

She kept sewing, but the shed felt empty now, and more than a little gloomy. The dark clouds kept rolling in from the southwest, and that edgy feeling she always felt when a storm—either natural or mental—was approaching washed over her. She hated the heavy feeling in her chest, but not even the breathing exercises the school counselor had given her for anxiety when she was a kid were working today.

She’d just finished the last stitch and was threading her needle for the next day when her phone rang. The noise startled her so badly that she jabbed herself in the thumb, and a bubble of blood appeared immediately.

She hurried to the back of the shed, wrapped a tissue around it, and fished her phone from her hip pocket. “Hello, Mama,” she said.

“I was about to hang up,” Cora said. “What took you so long?”

“I was quilting,” Nessa explained, “and stuck my thumb with the needle. Had to get a tissue to keep from getting blood on the phone. How are you and Daddy?”

“I’m fine,” Cora said. “He’s in a funk because of the way things went about that property out there. To tell the truth, I’m glad he lost. I don’t want to move out to that godforsaken place. I like where we live—and our friends are here—but losing in court has shattered all of his retirement dreams. I told him that getting that property wasn’t God’s will for us, and he agreed, but he’s still bummed out over it.”

“Retirement dreams?” Nessa frowned. “Daddy is only sixty-two years old. I figured he’d preach a sermon on Wednesday night and drop dead right after the last amen was said when he was about a hundred and ten.”

“That’s sacrilegious,” Cora scolded.

“Well, it’s the truth.” Nessa put the phone on speaker mode and put a Band-Aid on her thumb. “What were all these big dreams, anyway?”