“Shhh . . .” Betsy put a finger over her lips. “Sloan is whistling.”

“You’re kiddin’ me.” Kate jerked the glass out of Betsy’s hand and listened for herself. “You are so right. Sloan is whistling. I ain’t seen him happy enough to whistle since before he left to go to the service.” She handed the glass back to Betsy and turned to Ginger. “What’d y’all talk about last night?”

Ginger raised one shoulder. “Just life in general. How it ain’t fair, or at least that’s the way it seems until we done lived through it and got on down the road a few years. Then we look back and figure out that maybe things worked out the way they were supposed to.”

“That’s pretty deep for a girl your age,” Betsy said.

“It’s just the way I see it, I guess.” She went back to washing the berries and getting them ready for Betsy.

“Well, whatever you did, do some more of it.” Betsy crossed the room and got out the big pot that she used to make jam.

If Ginger could whistle, she might have been doing the same thing as Sloan, because her heart felt lighter that morning—even before she found her paycheck on her plate—than it had ever been.

Folks at the bank knew Sloan, and several of the tellers either waved or else spoke to him when he and Ginger came in the front door. Some even raised their eyebrows at him coming in with a pregnant woman, but he was long past the time when he cared what people thought or even what they might say when he was gone. He showed Ginger into the office, where a girl he’d graduated from high school with took care of new accounts, and then he went to one of the teller’s windows to transfer some of his money from checking to savings.

“Hey, is that the woman I’ve been hearing about?” The teller was a girl who lived in Rooster, named Samantha. She was a few years older than Sloan and was a daughter to the preacher at the Rooster church.

“What woman and what’s been said?” he asked.

“That you met her when she came to the cemetery looking for her relatives’ graves and y’all had a fling. Now she’s come back and says she’s pregnant with your baby. The Banty House ladies are letting her stay with them while y’all sort this crap out and you can get a DNA done when the baby is born.” She made out a slip and handed it to him. “All done with your transaction. Need anything else?”

“Not today.” He knew that gossip was crazy in small towns like Hondo, but holy smokin’ hell. How had the rumormongers ever come up with a story like that?

“Are you goin’ to tell me if the story goin’ around is anywhere near right?” she asked.

“Not today,” he said, repeating his previous words, and walked over to the office where Ginger was signing papers.

She glanced up and saw him standing in the open doorway and held up a finger. “Just a few more minutes. They’re making me a debit card right now.”

“Take your time.” He stopped just short of saying “darling” just to keep the rumors going. What kind of wild stories would folks tell when Ginger left Texas—would he be the son-of-a-bitch, deadbeat father who didn’t even acknowledge his own child?

That got him to thinking about what it would be like if the rumors were true. Would the news that he was about to have a daughter make him happy? His grandmother would probably shout so loud in heaven that he could hear her right there beside the Cottonwood Cemetery. One of the last things she had told him before she died was that someday she wanted him to find someone who’d make him as happy as his grandpa had made her.

He was deep in thought when Ginger touched him on the arm. “I’m all done, now.”

He tucked her arm into his, and they walked out of the bank together into a fierce wind that whipped Ginger’s hair around in her face and sent Sloan’s cap tumbling down the sidewalk right beside a big tumbleweed. He chased after it while Ginger stood on the sidewalk and laughed. Finally, after several tries, he caught the blasted thing and shoved it in the hip pocket of his camouflage pants.

“Good thing your hair is attached to your head,” he teased when he came back to her.

“And that I’ve got the extra weight of this little girl in my tummy to anchor me,” she said. “I’ll treat you to an ice cream at that store over there, if you’ll go with me.”

“I’d love a hot fudge sundae,” he said. “But are you sure you want to be seen with a man like me?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

He told her what the gossips were saying about them, and she threw back her head and laughed. If the wind could have carried the sound of her laughter across the whole eastern half of Texas, it would have put a smile on lots of folks’ faces.

“I’ve never mattered enough for anyone to spread gossip about me,” she said. “I think that’s pretty funny. Anyone who knows you should know that you are the kindest, most honorable man in the whole state.”

“Didn’t you hear a word I said the other night about my buddies?” He took her hand in his, and they bent forward against the wind as they crossed the street. No one could ever understand what he was going through, not even a woman with a hard-luck past.

“Yes, I did, but you need to let that go and move on with your life. You’re not dead for a reason,” she shot back.

The business of going forward was tough when he carried the guilt of not being there for his team on his shoulders. He couldn’t just throw off the weight like a bag of topsoil or fertilizer. If he was alive for a reason, he damn sure wished he could figure out what it was.

“I try, but it’s easier said than done.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. After all, it wasn’t Ginger’s fault that he was the cause of his team’s death. “Let’s go get ice cream now, but before we go into the ice cream shop, let me tell you, I can’t let you treat me. My granny would rise up out of her grave and use a pecan-tree switch on me if I let a lady pay when I’m with her. Besides, it’ll show everyone that I do have a little decency left in me.” He opened the door for her and had to fight it to keep the wind from slamming it shut.

“All right,” she agreed as she crossed the floor and looked at the menu up above the counter. “But if you pay, then you have to stay and play dominoes with us tonight, and you have to come to movie night next Wednesday.”

“I’ve played dominoes with the ladies a few times, and beware, darlin’, those old gals take their games very serious. But I didn’t know about movie night. They don’t even have a television, do they?”

“I want a caramel sundae,” she said.

“I’ll take a hot fudge sundae with chocolate ice cream,” he said.

“Oh, do we get to pick the ice cream? If so I want butter pecan under my caramel,” she told the young lady behind the counter.

“Have it right out to you,” the girl said as she made change from the bill that Sloan handed her. “Y’all sit wherever you want.”

Ginger slid into a booth beside the window. “Their television is behind the wall above the fireplace.” She went on to describe the whole thing to him and then to tell him about the shows they’d watched.

“What time does it begin?” Sloan asked.

“Seven on the dot. Betsy makes popcorn and puts it in bags for each of us and brings us each a candy bar and a bottle of root beer. I could ask them if they’d mind if you had a real beer. I don’t think they’d mind since Kate makes moonshine,” she said.

“I haven’t had a drink . . .” His voice trailed off.

She laid a hand over his. “Then root beer it is.”

The girl brought their sundaes, and they both set about eating. To Sloan, even in the midst of a busy ice cream shop, there was no one else but the two of them in the world right at that moment, and he rather liked the feeling.

So this is what it feels like to have real friends, Ginger thought that evening as they sat around the dining room table and played dominoes. Connie won the first hand of a game called Shoot the Moon, and Betsy won the second. Sloan whipped them all in the third hand, and Kate declared that Connie hadn’t shuffled the pieces well enough when she lost the next round.

Betsy excused herself to go get the snacks after the fourth round, and Ginger followed her into the kitchen to help.

“What can I do to help?” Ginger asked.

“Get out the cheese tray from the refrigerator and fill the center part with black olives,” Betsy said. “I’ll slice up some apples. Didn’t want to do them too early or they turn dark, but Sloan likes them with my special cream-cheese dip.”

“How often do y’all have a domino night?” Ginger went to work following Betsy’s orders.