Page 41 of Just Ten Seconds

She adjusts her glasses up her button nose and crosses her arms. I flash her a grin and hold the mums higher on my arms to show her how cheery I can be.

She lets out a huff and drops her shoulders. “Why don’t you pay for those, and I’ll be inside, stuffing my face with the cider samples?” she says.

“Sounds like a plan, Stan.” I give her a thumbs-up.

She walks away, leaving me to look around the nursery section of the market.

The market is a beautiful place to be, especially this time of year. There are flowers in abundance and pumpkins lined up on bales of hay for people to purchase. There’s a wooden building that houses the indoor section of the market where they sell pies, apple cider, and bushels of picked apples, and another building that’s a cidery where you can taste the hard stuff.

A tractor swings around from the back of the cidery and comes into view, towing an open wagon with people who have just come from pumpkin-picking in a nearby field.

I’m walking around a table with a display of scarecrows when there’s an explosion, the sound of something backfiring with the velocity of a firework and the vibrating pulse of an earthquake.

Bang!

On impulse, I turn around and hunch over the mums. I’m hugging the pots to my chest, and the flowers are in my face, the leaves scratching against my cheeks.

The vein in my neck throbs as the blood pulses through me in sheer panic.

The sound of children laughing is quickly followed, so I open an eye and look to the side. Everyone around me is shopping. A woman nearby cautiously looks at me. I straighten up and give a half-smile, and she turns and walks in the other direction.

With my hand on my head, I lean against the table and gather my wits. By the barn is a tractor with black smoke pluming out the back. A man is fanning the smoke with his hat while another looks at the engine.

It was a tractor. A damn tractor had me cowering for cover. Luckily, my feet are upright, unlike the last time I freaked out in the diner.

I’ll chalk this one up to a small step in the right direction.

As I look down at my shirt, I see black dirt all over the front of my green top. It must have been from squeezing the planters so tightly that the soil overflowed. I put them down on a wooden table and brush my shirt off. There are small black particles. I wipe some more. It doesn’t matter because it’s just making a blackened, dirty mess.

“Fels-Naptha,” a man’s voice says from behind me.

“Gesundheit,” I say over my shoulder, assuming he sneezed.

I hear a giggle come from a little girl. I roll my head back and swing around to the familiar sound. Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised to see Dean and Amanda standing in front of me, Amanda with her hands over her laughing mouth and Dean with sunglasses over his handsome face.

It’s been days since I told myself I wouldn’t see him again, and here he is. Looks like avoiding Dean is going to be harder than I thought. It’s like when you buy a car, and all of a sudden, you see it everywhere. My subconscious can be quite selective in what it wants to give its attention to. And right now, it’s looking for Dean.

His eyes might be covered by his glasses, but from the way his chin is lowered, I can assume his focus is on my stomach and the mess I just made of myself.

“Fels-Naptha,” he says again as I tilt my head at him in confusion. “It’s a yellow bar soap. Rub it on the shirt and then spot-clean it with Era. It’ll come right up.”

“Is that a trick from Mama Delgado?” I ask.

“Sure is.” He lifts his chin at me. “You okay?”

Why does this man always walk into my life when I am at my absolute worst? I look up to the sky. Karma, you’re a tricky little minx. I smooth my fingers over my ponytail and right my shoulders. My long, oversize cardigan hangs long over my jeans. I close it over the mess I made of my blouse.

“I had a stomach pain. It passed,” I say.

“It didn’t look like a damn cramp,” he assesses.

“Dad, you can’t say damn.” Amanda looks up, squinting her eyes from the sun.

As he nods his head, I lift my mums off the wooden table. “Are you here for the hayride?” I ask, keeping my eyes on Amanda.

She has on an orange shirt that reads Boo in black sequins. Her pink cast creeps out the end of her sleeve.

She looks over at the hayride wagon. “We just came off. We got the biggest pumpkins and loaded them up in Dad’s truck. That’s when we saw you, and Dad sad we should make sure you’re okay. Do you want a pumpkin? We’ll go on the hayride with you.”