Even with friends surrounding her, and Tucker right beside her, a fresh wave of emptiness flooded over her—the same feeling she’d had those Christmas Days. She took a couple of big gulps of sweet tea to get the lump in her throat to go down.

“Speaking of good food.” Tucker put two huge spoons of mashed potatoes on his plate beside a crispy chicken breast. “If I keep eatin’ Sunday dinner with you ladies, I’m going to have to buy a bigger belt.”

“When was the last time you had homemade fried chicken?” Jolene passed the sawmill gravy to him.

“There’s been too many Saturday nights that fried too many brain cells for me to remember,” he admitted. “But whenever it was, it couldn’t have been this good. Is this fresh corn?”

Tucker hadn’t gotten drunk since that first weekend after he’d moved to the Magnolia. Maybe he was putting down roots and moving forward, even if it was just baby steps. Having dinner with the old gals was enough to convince Jolene that he was at least trying.

“Straight from my freezer,” Flossie answered. “I still have a little garden at my place. We’ll have dinner there next week.”

“Little garden,” Dotty almost snorted. “She’s got a quarter of an acre plowed up.”

“How do you find time to garden and run a store both?” Tucker asked.

“She doesn’t. She pays a guy to take care of it for her,” Lucy tattled.

“I do not!” Flossie argued. “I provide the seeds. He does the work and we share the bounty. He has lots of friends that he gives fresh vegetables to, just like I do. That’s not payin’ him. I’m helping him. His wife took sick, and they had to sell the farm to keep up with her medical bills. He’d go stir-crazy livin’ in town if he couldn’t play in the dirt.”

Jolene’s thoughts went back to her father’s flower beds. He’d spent hours out there every evening—watering, fertilizing, deadheading, and taking out every single hint of a weed. Had he really loved the work, or had it been an escape from her mother? They’d come from such different backgrounds. He’d been raised in Louisiana on a small farm, and she was a city girl from Amarillo. They’d met at a party given by mutual friends who worked at the bank with him. He’d been told when the company transferred him to Texas that it would only be for a couple of years. But when the opportunity came up to go back to Louisiana, he turned it down for Elaine. She liked living in the city. Jolene had never thought of it before, but maybe her father had been wishing he was back in his own world when he was out there in his flower beds.

Flossie nudged her on the arm. “You woolgatherin’, darlin’? You’ve been holding that basket of biscuits for a full minute.”

“I’m sorry. I was thinkin’ of my dad. He never planted a garden, but he had the prettiest flowers in the whole county.” Jolene hurriedly put a biscuit on her plate and passed the basket on to Tucker. “I like getting my hands dirty in flower beds. Maybe we’ll put some in at the inn this spring.”

“I like that idea, but right now I’m more interested in this corn,” Tucker said.

“Person gets used to good fresh food and then that canned stuff don’t taste good,” Flossie said.

Tucker took a biscuit and passed them on. “I’ve lived on takeout for so long that two Sundays of this good cookin’ makes me feel plumb spoiled.”

Jolene stole a glance at him and remembered what Aunt Sugar said about no one being truly bad or good. Tucker was a good man, in spite of his weekend binges. He worked hard, had a sense of humor and a kind heart. But could he ever forget Melanie? The drinking seemed to be tied tightly to his deceased wife, and that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to get over it if he couldn’t let go of the guilt surrounding her death.

She was still pondering those thoughts when Flossie bumped her on the knee and nodded toward Lucy.

“Having you around,” Lucy was saying, “makes us feel like we did when we had our Friday-night girls’ night.”

Dotty yawned. “I agree, but I’m in bad need of a nap. Jolene and I were up until three this mornin’.”

“I’ll help y’all with cleanup, and then we can all go find us a nice soft bed for a Sunday afternoon nap,” Jolene said.

“You don’t need to help us,” Flossie said. “Lucy’s got a good dishwasher, and we’ll have this done in no time. Don’t forget next week is at Flossie’s.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for anything, but please let us bring something,” Tucker said.

“You can bring a half gallon of ice cream,” Flossie said. “We’ll have ice cream sundaes for dessert. But I’m going to put some of this cobbler on a plate for you to take home for supper. There’s no way we can eat it all.”

“I won’t argue with you one bit. That was some fantastic cobbler.” Tucker grinned.

Like that little compliment, Jolene thought. It made the ladies feel special, and that was a good thing, so even a weekend drunk has good qualities.

Jolene gave them all a goodbye hug, just like she had when she was a little girl. “Thanks for a great day. I can’t wait to tell Aunt Sugar all about it.”

“Well, that was strange,” Tucker said when they were in the truck and headed down the highway toward the inn.

“What?” she asked. “Hasn’t anyone ever sent leftovers home with you?”

“No, my grandmother always sent food home with me. But I felt just like I did when I went home with Melanie the first time to meet her parents,” he answered. “Like I should be on my best behavior, and yet, it wasn’t hard to do because they’re so much fun to be around.”

“What kind of food did your granny make?” she asked.

“They lived on a ranch, so it was usually steaks. But my grandma made the best cheesecake in the whole world. Didn’t you notice all three of them making eye contact as if they were sharing an inside joke?” He turned down the lane to the inn and parked in front of the house.

It hit Jolene in a flash. Dotty had denied that she was playing matchmaker, but those old gals were up to something. “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck . . . ,” she said.

Tucker’s eyes went to every window in the truck. “Where’s a duck?”

“I’m not talkin’ about a real one.” Jolene giggled. If he didn’t know that Dotty, Flossie, and Lucy had united to play matchmaker, then she wasn’t going to tell him.

“Oh, I see.” Tucker grinned. “So you noticed what they were doing, too?”

“I did.” She nodded.

“Well, honey, if it makes them happy and they make cobbler, then I don’t mind, do you?”

She smiled. “Then it is true. The way to your heart is through your stomach.”

“Today it is.” Tucker changed the subject. “Guess we’d better go on inside and do some laundry while we take our naps, right?”

Jolene got out of the car and bent against a cold wind sweeping down from the north. “Does it seem strange to you when we combine our clothes?”

“Yep.” He nodded. “But that’s because my tighty-whities haven’t been tossed in with a woman’s underbritches in a long time.”

She unlocked the door and led the way inside. “It’s been a long time since I was in a relationship that got to the stage where we did laundry together. Guess it’s a normal reaction, but it’s nice to save water.”

“Yes, it is.”

Sassy came out of the kitchen, rubbed around Tucker’s legs, and looked up at him with begging eyes.

Tucker set the cobbler on the cabinet and stooped down to pet her. “Sorry, darlin’. It’s people food. It’s not leftover steak, pizza, or even hamburger for you. We didn’t think to bring home a fried chicken leg. How about a handful of cat treats?”

Jolene watched him shake out the special treats from a plastic container and let Sassy eat them from his hand. One more good thing—Aunt Sugar said you could judge a man’s character by how animals and kids treated him. Dotty, Flossie, and Lucy weren’t children, but they sure liked him, and the way Sassy was trying to eat and purr at the same time didn’t leave any doubt about how much she loved him.

Jolene went straight to the utility room and put all the white things in the washing machine—his T-shirts, her white bikinis, and his tighty-whities. She adjusted the dials and poured in a capful of detergent. She had time for a thirty-minute power nap while that load ran, but she wasn’t sleepy like she usually was on Sunday afternoons.

When she turned, Tucker was gone but had left a few more treats on the china plate that Sassy ate from. The cat followed her into the living room and jumped up on the sofa.

Jolene found Tucker stretched out in the recliner, his arms crossed over his chest. She eased down on the end of the sofa and stared her fill. His head rested at the top of the chair, but his feet hung off the bottom. He’d removed his boots, and he had probably fallen asleep as soon as he pulled the lever to put up the footrest. His hands were calloused from hard work, and he really did need a haircut, but then, he would look pretty sexy with a little ponytail.

“Don’t go,” he muttered.

“Go where?” she stammered.

He opened one eye. “I was dreaming.”

“About?” she asked.

“Melanie.” His eye slid shut.

She picked up a throw pillow and tucked it under her head as she curled up on the sofa with Sassy right beside her. The way he said her name was so sad that Jolene’s heart ached for him. Would he ever get past the grieving process?

Chapter Thirteen

On Monday morning Jolene grabbed the broom and dustpan and started for the stairs, intending to clean up behind Tucker. Yet she hadn’t even gotten out of the kitchen when her phone rang. When she saw that it was Sugar, she propped the broom at the end of the breakfast bar in the kitchen and sat down in a chair.