And then he was gone.

Cathy heard his truck start up and drive away, and stayed at the table long enough to finish eating. As soon as she got back into the recliner, she leaned back with a groan and closed her eyes.

Her tummy was full of biscuits and sausage gravy, and her heart was full to bursting from the kindness of strangers. The thought of seeing Duke Talbot again did not bother her at all, and it should have. She wasn’t here for a relationship. That wasn’t in her plans at all.

She was almost asleep when it dawned on her that she didn’t have any plans, so that claim held no water…no water at all.

Chapter 3

Moses and J.B. Gatlin hadn’t been to Blessings since right after the hurricane, when they went there to tell their sister-in-law, Alice Conroy, about their mother, Beulah, being dead.

Their reception at that fancy house Alice was living in now had been nothing short of brutal, and they both admitted it was nothing more than they’d deserved. They’d had every intention of leaving the state of Georgia, but it didn’t happen.

After their Mama blew up the house, they didn’t have a change of clothes between them. With no job skills beyond being the hill people that they were, they pooled what money they had left, along with what their mother, Beulah, had put by in the bank, and bought themselves a used trailer house and put it up where their house once stood.

They did odd jobs for people in the area, and made enough money to keep their utilities on and food in their bellies, but they were barely getting by.

Then one morning when they went outside to feed their laying hens, there was a cow grazing near the barn.

“Looky there!” Moses said. “Someone’s cow got out. Who do you reckon it belongs to?”

J.B. stood and looked at it for a minute, and then shrugged.

“Well, it’s down at our barn, eating our grass. I reckon it belongs to us,” he said.

Moses frowned. “No sir. We aren’t thieves. Go put it in the pen. Someone will surely come looking for it.”

J.B. went down to the barn and did as his brother told him, but the thought was still in his mind that they could sell the cow at an auction somewhere and pocket a little extra cash.

And after three days without a single soul coming to look for the cow, J.B. loaded it up and took it to a cattle auction in another county and came home with over eight hundred dollars.

Moses was at the house when J.B. came back, and the look on his face made J.B. a little nervous. He drove the pickup to the back of the barn, unhooked the trailer, and then drove back to the trailer, took the money out of his wallet and got out.

“What the hell did you do with that cow?” Moses yelled.