Page 7 of Mountains Divide Us

Ouch. I tried not to show the wince on my face, but it was hard. No matter that it was a perfectly common thing for people to talk about. Pregnancy and babies always hit home like a punch to the stomach. Or more to the point, it was a punch to my barely functioning uterus and ovaries.

Abey laughed. “Can’t complain.”

Mrs. DuBois tsked, eyeing Abey’s gun but trying to hide it. “Do you always wear your uniform, Deputy Lee?”

“Uh,” Abey hesitated. “Yeah? Most the time, I guess, unless I’m sleepin’, and then I’m naked.”

Mrs. DuBois’s face turned red, and the unintentional comedy helped the rush of sadness in my chest ebb a little. I stifled a giggle.

I’d assumed they would all know each other since Wisper was such a small town, but it was occurring to me that maybe they didn’t. “Does everybody know everybody, or should we do introductions?”

“Wait,” Carly said. “Where’s Juneau Moonlight? I thought we were gettin’ to meet a real romance author today.”

“Oh, well”—I checked the clock on the wall—“she should be here any minute. She must be running late.”

Billie raised her arm in the air, then let it flop back down to her chair. “I’m no romance author, but I’m Billie. I married Jay Cade, and I know you all know the Cade brothers. And this is Ace.” She nudged Aislinn’s leg with her shoe, and Aislinn swatted at it. “She’s gonna be my sis-in-law soon. She’s marrying Finn Cade.”

An appreciative moaning sound came from Mrs. DuBois. Everyone looked at her.

She balked. “What, because I’m old, I can’t think a man is handsome?”

“Not my fiancé, you can’t,” Aislinn said, and Mrs. DuBois arched a challenging eyebrow.

Carly giggled, then spoke up. “I’m Carly Eaton, and I have my own cowboy too. Buckey.” She practically had hearts and flowers in her eyes when she said his name. “He works out at Milson’s. We have three kids: Dora, Derek, and Drew. Seven, five, and two.” She patted her chubby but still mostly flat stomach. “Here’s number four. If it’s a girl, we’re namin’ her Delilah. Deli for short.”

Abey mouthed, “Deli?”

Billie snickered.

I panicked for a minute. I wanted to get to know these women, but I hadn’t anticipated one of them being pregnant. I should have. It made me feel like a jerk. A person should be happy for a friend if they were having a child. And I wasn’t unhappy about it, but—

“Good Lord,” Mrs. DuBois said. “You and your husband certainly have been busy.”

“Oh.” Carly laughed, flapping a hand. “We’re not married. He knocked me up in our junior year of high school, and we kinda just kept goin’ from there. We keep sayin’ we’re gonna bite the bullet, but you know.” She shrugged. “Life.”

“What about you, Mrs. DuBois?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation away from the baby subject.

She threw a pointed look at me. “I’m Callie DuBois, but my friends call me Cal.”

Smiling back, I let her know I’d taken her hint and would use her nickname from now on, instead of her married surname.

“I’m from Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, originally, but I married a cattle rancher and lived up near Billings, Montana for years. My husband Herbert died a few years ago so I moved here to be closer to my sister, Myrna. She also married an American. We spent a lot of time at the rodeos in Alberta when we were teenagers.” She looked around the room, tapping the book in her hand with her long red acrylic fingernail. “And just so you know, I have never read a book like this.”

Billie snorted. “Mmhm. Sure you haven’t. Oh, before I forget, my mom-in-law is joining book club, too—Daisy—but she has to work today at the diner. She’ll be at the next meeting.”

Everybody nodded. Everyone knew Daisy because she worked at the only diner in town with her husband, José. And everybody knew José because he’d owned the diner for years and was an exceptional cook. My mouth watered just thinking about his signature fried chicken.

The front door slammed open in the other room, and then we heard, “Girls? Girls! Where you at?”

“That will be Phil,” Aislinn said, shaking her head.

Phil appeared in the doorway, breathless and disheveled. “Oh, there ya are.”

I understood Aislinn’s reaction. Phil was very kind, but she was a whirlwind of a woman. She drove her rusted pickup around town, blasting Fleetwood Mac and Simon & Garfunkel, and she was loud, as in decibels, but also, she was a loud dresser. Today, she was sporting worn-out jeans with a bright yellow Jimmy Hendrix T-shirt under her black, shaggy faux-fur coat. Her gray hair was braided down her back, and she had purple reading glasses perched on top of her head. And I couldn’t remember ever seeing her wear any other footwear besides her black and white checkered muck boots.

“Am I late?”

She was also the first resident of Wisper to welcome me back to the town I’d come to when I was a little girl to visit my grandparents. Phil had remembered me, and she’d made me yellow cupcakes with chocolate whipped-cream frosting on my first day as the new librarian, which, coincidentally, was also the first day I’d met sexy Deputy Frank—not that that mattered in the slightest. But Phil was an avid reader, and she was also a farmer, so she’d call me every couple of weeks to ask me to round up books for her to dive into at night, when she had a few minutes of downtime.

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