Brock’s father’s gaze hit me. His head tipped to the side and his eyes flashed back and forth between his son and me about seven times before he said, “Uh… hey there, little lady.”

“Dad, this is Tess,” Brock introduced.

“She’s Uncle Slim’s girlfriend!” Ellie shouted, her fingers curled into Cob Lucas’s pants, her back arched at an impossible angle, her grape Popsicle-stained mouth smiling huge up at her grandfather.

He looked down at her, put a big hand gentle on her head, and asked softly, “Is she, my Ellie?”

“Yeah!” Ellie cried. “And she wears pretty shoes and she’s gonna watch Tangled with me right now!”

Cob’s eyes came to me. They were curious, searching even, but like he looked at Fern, hesitant as he muttered, “That’s fantastic, sweetheart.”

Into this conversation, Fern asked acidly, “There a reason you’re here, Cob?”

“Well, actually”—his eyes moved from Fern to Brock to me and back again—“yeah.”

“I’ll bet there is,” she mumbled bitingly.

I caught sight of Laura bugging her eyes out at Brock and with that I decided to take action.

I slid out from under Brock’s arm then leaned and carefully took the dishtowel out of Fern’s hand.

I walked to the couch and grabbed the bag of snickerdoodles at the same time I swiped up the Popsicle and announced, “All right, kids, in this bag are bakery fresh snickerdoodles I made at my shop for your uncle. Whoever gets to the kitchen and gets their hands and mouths clean gets a cookie. Who’s with me?”

Dylan and Ellie instantly abandoned their grandfather and raced to the kitchen, Ellie, hindered by her heels, nearly taking a header twice. Grady got to his feet eyeing the bag and his mother, clearly weighing cookies versus hanging with the adults in a tense situation and, not surprisingly, cookies won out. So he sauntered after his brother and sister. I followed them and didn’t look back as I was confronted with a kitchen Fern obviously just cleaned and shut the swinging door behind me.

I set about hiding nine of the dozen snickerdoodles (Brock’s favorite) and setting out the other three at the same time supervising cleaning up three tired, wound-up kids.

When they were clean and sitting at Brock’s scarred, wooden kitchen table eating cookies and sucking back milk from glasses I’d poured, Grady, the oldest (my guess, Ellie around four or five, Dylan around six or seven, and Grady around eight or nine) informed me, “Grandma isn’t Grandpa’s biggest fan.”

Hmm. How did I respond to that?

“Well, sometimes things get complicated with adults,” I told him lamely.

Grady kept the information flowing. “Dad isn’t his biggest fan either. Dad says he’s a douchebag.”