Page 35 of Second Chance With a Cowboy

Leni frowned. “Yikes. That’s a bummer. But I guess you can just save them for next year.”

“No, you’re not getting it. We’re still doing the booth.”

“Who’swe? You and your trusty knee-scooter, Betty?”

Her sister gave her one of those stares that meant serious business. “No. I meanweas inyou and me. And Emily, I guess,” she said referring to the Johnson girl who worked at the shop. “And anyone else I can talk into helping us.”

“Are you serious? You still want to try to make chili, run a booth, and sell a thousand water bottles of iced tea and lemonade?”

Lorna nodded. “And I’ve also been thinking about asking you to make a bunch of your cookies, individually wrapping them, slapping our stickers on the front, and selling those too. I looked on Amazon, and we can get the cello bags by tomorrow, and I’msure our little print shop could easily make me a couple hundred stickers by then too.”

Leni almost choked, and she was sure she was bug-eyed as she stared at her sister. “Youmustbe joking now. You want me to maketwo hundredcookies bythisweekend? Like, you know today is Wednesday, and the festival is what? On Saturday?”

Lorna nodded. “We’ve still got tonight and two full days, and I know how you love to plan and execute a project. We can get the ingredients tomorrow. And I already called Elizabeth, and she said she’d love to help at the coffee shop on Friday, so you can have the whole day off to bake.” She frowned again. “Although we’re going to have to make the chili that day too.”

“And we’re going to accomplish this all with your broken ankle and nursing a newborn baby? You’re crazy.”

“Maybe, but that’s never stopped us from pulling a plan together before,” Lorna said. “Remember when we arranged that whole surprise birthday party for Mom’s 40th? You didn’t believe we could pull that off either, and yet we still had a bouncy house, a chocolate fountain, and Mom’s favorite band set up in our backyard.”

Leni laughed. “That was a fun night.”

“Come on. We can do it,” Lorna said, a pleading tone in her voice. “I’m not totally helpless. I can sit at the kitchen table and put stickers on the bags and stuff cookies in them.”

“Well then, that’s practically everything.”

Her sarcasm was not lost on her sister.

“Will this be tough? Yes. But I promise it will be doable.” Lorna held up her notebook. “I’ve been working on a plan and a schedule all afternoon. We can’t make the lemonade and iced tea until the night before, but I’ve already got multiple huge ten-gallon water coolers for the drinks and several five-gallon buckets purchased to put the chili in. The chili we give away for free, but we just do small samples, so we don’t have to make asmuch as you’d think. I’ve already placed an ice order with the grocery store for Saturday, and I got the water bottles months ago, so those have already been washed and are ready to fill.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought of everything.”

“Everything except how to find a few more volunteers to help us.”

“Do you want me to ask Chevy and his family? He told me he would do anything for me. I’m not sure he knew that meant baking two-hundred cookies and making a ten-gallon vat of chili, but I’d bet he’ll still be willing to help.”

“That would be great. Except the Lassiter Ranch has their own booth. They’re the ones who took the winning prize last year.”

Chapter Seventeen

Their date night at the Tipsy Pig wasn’t quite the romantic evening Leni had envisioned. Although how romantic could a date be when they were slurping barbeque sauce off chicken wings and listening to the old nineties music someone kept choosing on the jukebox.

She had laid out Lorna’s plans to Chevy, and just like she’d thought, he’d instantly agreed to help.

“But what about your family’s booth?” she asked.

Chevy shrugged as he took a swig of beer. “We’ll be fine. Duke’s already been working on his chili recipe. He’s made us six different versions over the summer. And I think if we set up our stalls next to each other, the guys and I should be able to help with both booths. I think Maisie might be doing a booth for the library, so she’s out, but we’ve got Elizabeth to help this year, too.” He waved a chicken wing at her. “It’ll be fine. I can come over the night before and help with the cookies, too. And we’ll use my pickup to load all your stuff and take it to the fairgrounds Saturday morning. Although, come to think of it, last year, they let us set up our tents on Friday night. That would help if they did that again this year.”

She stared at him. “The idea of this doesn’t make you anxious?” She’d spent her whole time in the shower running numbers in her head and trying to figure out the logistics of how to make this massive thing happen.

“No way. This’ll be fun.” He offered her a casual shrug. “Don’t worry. It will all work out.”

“I thought you said this would all work out,” Leni practically shrieked into the phone that Saturday morning as Chevy was loading his truck with the canopy tent they planned to use for their booth.

“And it all still will,” he told her.

“Oh really? Because nothing has so far. I burned two batches of cookies yesterday because I was trying to help put stickers on five million cello baggies, I accidentally put a cup of sugar into my chili instead of salt, and Max lost his shit when he left one of his favorite Legos on the stove and it thermally reconfigured.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

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