LITMIR.BIZ

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      “With the first three months rent-free because none of this work is being hired out.”

      “That’s a big change for Coop, too—that putting down roots thing. But he seems really happy.”

      “I think he is. I know Kelsey is.”

      “Good for them!” Flint decreed. “And Kelsey is okay raising Anthony?”

      “She is. I don’t think she would love him any more if he were her own.”

      Jessie knew that Anthony was the product of an earlier relationship Cooper had had with a woman named Lulu. There were many questions about Anthony turning up in Red Rock at the same time Flint and Cooper’s Uncle William had had his car accident in January. Ultimately Anthony had been linked to the Fortunes through a small gold medallion that had been draped around his blanket-cocooned little body by a fragile chain. A medallion that had been traced back to Cindy Fortune’s children, narrowing the possibilities for Anthony’s father to Cooper or Flint.

      “I’m really glad it all worked out for them the way it did,” Flint said. “It looks like Anthony will have a good home.”

      “Were you disappointed that he wasn’t yours?” Jessie asked.

      Flint laughed spontaneously. “No,” he answered forcefully. “I was a wreck thinking he might be mine and wondering what I was going to do with him if he was. I can’t even keep plants alive. Believe me, this was a much better way for things to turn out.”

      “What would you have done if he’d been yours?” Jessie ventured, challenging him just a bit.

      He laughed again. “I probably would have cried like a baby myself,” he joked.

      Jessie smiled at the wall she was painting, amused by the thought of the man she’d been thinking of as supermacho quaking at the mere possibility that he might be a father.

      “I would have stepped up,” he said then, without hesitation, winning him points. “But I’m afraid poor Anthony would have suffered for it.”

      Jessie laughed at him. “Well, I know you travel for work and that would have made it a lot more complicated, so you’re probably right—it’s for the best that things ended up the way they did.”

      But what she didn’t know was much about his work and that seemed like another avenue for conversation, so she said, “You’re in sales, aren’t you?”

      “Buying and selling, yeah.”

      “What is it that you buy and sell?”

      “I buy Western-themed arts and crafts and novelty items, and I sell them to gift shops and galleries and some private clients all across the country.”

      That piqued her interest. “When you say that you buy arts and crafts and novelty items, do you mean from manufacturers or—”

      “I have accounts with some wholesale houses that bring up trinket-type things from Mexico. But whenever I can I buy from artists and craftsmen. I like to deal in the unique and original more than in the mass-produced stuff.”

      “Do you work for a company or something?”

      “The business is mine. But business sounds more … I don’t know, corporate than I am. I’ve just come up with a name—Fortune Fine Arts and Crafts—because I’m in the process of having a website set up so I can do more selling over the internet. But really, I’m just a middleman—I hunt down stuff to sell, usually buy it outright myself and then resell it at a profit. Or sometimes I find a gallery or shop that will let me place a piece there and if it sells, the money gets split three ways—between whoever produced it, whoever’s shop or gallery it was sold from, and me.”

      “That would make you an agent or an artist’s representative, then, wouldn’t it?”

      “Again, sounds a lot fancier than I am. What I am is an old-fashioned horse trader. Except that I don’t deal in horses, I deal in brass sculptures of horses and kachina dolls and hand-sewn moccasins and tribal headdresses and authentic totem poles.”

      “Hmm. I never considered that there would be a market for tribal headdresses or totem poles.”

      “They aren’t my best sellers, but they’re fairly popular for decorating hunting and fishing lodges and hotels that want a rustic appeal.”

      “And I guess you can’t call yourself a totem pole seller,” she teased him a little.

      “That’s why we just say that I’m in sales,” he concluded, pleasing her with the fact that he’d grasped her gentle gibe.

      “Is the goal of the new website to reduce the amount of travel you have to do?” she asked.

      “I guess potentially it could, but the traveling doesn’t bother me. I don’t have anything tying me down, and I like getting around, seeing the country. The life of a traveling salesman suits me.”

      Their painting met at the center of the wall behind the washer and drier then, and while Flint stepped back to survey their handiwork, Jessie used one final application of her roller to blend that meeting line seamlessly.

      And with that, she sat back and looked around, too.

      “That didn’t take long,” she admitted, thinking that the time had actually seemed to fly.

      “Apparently we work well together,” Flint said just as Adam burst through the door with an excited, “Hi, Fwint!”

      “Hi, Adam,” Flint greeted the three-year-old with a mirroring of Adam’s enthusiasm. “Where’ve you been today?”

      “He’ppin my grampa wis our new junger gym. We digged howes for plantin’ the powes so it don’t fauw over.”

      “They dug holes to cement the poles into the ground so the jungle gym doesn’t fall over,” Jessie translated. “Sometimes the L’s come out and sometimes they just don’t.” Then to her son, she said, “What are you doing here now?”

      Before Adam answered that Jessie heard the voice of her oldest daughter, Ella, calling for Adam.

      “We’re in the laundry room, El,” Jessie called back.

      The seven-year-old bounded in, much the way Adam had except rather than joyfully having discovered Flint, the much more serious Ella scowled at her brother. “Gramma said you could only come with me if you held my hand, and you didn’t!”

      “I had to find Fwint,” Adam answered as if his sister should have known that.

      “Ella, you remember Flint, don’t you? Coop’s brother?” Jessie interjected, both to remind her daughter of her manners and to avoid a fight between her oldest and youngest.

      “I remember,” was all Ella said to Flint because she was still more intent on wrangling with her brother. And to Adam she goaded, “Flint. His name is Flint.”

      “Okay, okay,” Jessie said before war broke out. “What’s up, El?”

      “Gramma says it’s almost dinnertime and she needs a pan she can’t find to cook. Can you come home and show her where it is?”

      “I think I can probably do that. We’re finished here, aren’t we?” Jessie said, trying not to analyze why she was sorry that that was true, and why she was also sorry to be pulled away so suddenly.

      “Looks finished to me,” Flint confirmed.

      To Ella, Jessie said, “You can tell Gramma I’ll come home as soon as I wash out these paint things.”

      “Come on, Adam, let’s go,” Ella said as if she’d just been given the upper hand.

      “Ouw go wis Mama when she goes.”

      “Adam …” Ella said in the warning tone she always took when she was in the mode

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