Page 78 of One Bride for Three Single Dads

“Want to help?” I ask.

Slowly she nods. “Let’s see what we have in the cabinets.”

Her somber attitude is not making me feel any more confident. Alexis starts on the bottom cabinets, and I start on the top. Of course there is pasta, rice, and an assortment of other grains.

“Do we have a slow cooker?” she asks, holding a packet of seasonings or something.

“I don’t know, do we?”

She sits on the floor and reads the back of the envelope. Then she stands up suddenly and heads to the pantry, returning momentarily with a large ceramic crock fitted with an electrical cord.

“This says six hours,” she says as she pushes the heavy crock onto the countertop.

“Okay, now we’re talking! What do we need?”

She touches her fingertips as she takes off the list. “Potatoes, celery, carrots, onions… and a roast? Do we have a roast?”

“Actually, I think we do,” I smile.

I suddenly remember that Harrison was messing about in the deep freeze a couple of days ago and found a football-sized slab of… something. Something that was formerly an animal.

That’s as much as I know.

The guys, being guys, took it out in the yard and played with it like a football. Then Boone got bonked on the head, and when Harrison made fun of him he started making fun of Harrison’s wonky ankle.

Long story short, the roast ended up in the refrigerator. And it should be thawed by now.

“How about this!” I practically cheer as I haul the roast-of-something out of the refrigerator.

I can feel that it is no longer rock-solid.

“Can you peel potatoes?” Alexis asks me with one eyebrow raised.

“You know, sometimes the things you say are just a tiny bit hurtful,” I respond with narrowed eyes and a funny voice.

I mean, I want her to think I am joking, but I also want her to know that I am a tiny bit serious.

“Okay,” she heaves a sigh. “I will look for the vegetable peeler.”

Alexis opens almost every drawer in the kitchen, clattering around in them until she finds something that sort of looks like a peeler. I retrieve the cutting boards from the cubby next to the stove and lay them on the counter so we can work side-by-side.

I know she misses her mother.

I know she’s too polite to say it to me, because she thinks that it would hurt my feelings.

But she misses her mother. Who wouldn’t? Daily phone calls just aren’t the same.

We get everything into the crock, add the powder from the envelope, and the required amount of water. Then we put the lid on and turn it on high.

“Okay!” I clap my hands together. “So in six hours, we will magically have dinner! That you and I cooked! All by ourselves!”

“The spices came out of a paper envelope,” she reminds me wryly.

“Oh, Alexis,” I sigh, dropping down to give her a squeeze about the shoulders. “Sometimes you just have to be happy with what you’ve got.”

Chapter 34

JOLENE

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