“Why not? These are all novels,” she said and closed up the box.
“Cody probably does the bedtime routine for his little brothers. I doubt there’s a book in the trailer.”
“So he makes one,” she mused. “It’s not the story the kids like. It’s the way he draws while they’re watching. He’s making magic, right there in front of them.”
Lucas yanked free a length of copper pipe and dropped it to the floor with a clatter. She opened another box, then made an interested noise. “Found them,” she said.
He focused on the pipes. After a few minutes of silence, he looked over to find her sitting on the floor, going through his grandmother’s gardening books. The covers were beautifully drawn roses twining along the dust jacket, not the glossy pictures covering today’s books.
“She wrote notes,” Alana said.
The delight in her voice made him pause. “That’s good?”
“Oh, yes. Marginalia. It’s becoming a subject matter in its own right. The study of what a book’s owner wrote tells you as much about their thought process when she was reading as the content of the book itself. You have the text, which is an insight into the writer’s mind, then the notes, which are an insight into the reader’s mind as she reads and reflects on what the writer wrote. I love marginalia.”
“It’s messy.”
“One friend of mine would study marginalia in used textbooks. If the previous owner took good, legible notes, she’d buy that book rather than a clean copy.”
He barked out a laugh, then turned to look at her. She sat on the floor, her back to the boxes, the book balanced on her knees. “Ethical cheating?”
“She considered it a strategy for success, but yes, I suppose so.” She began reading. “Why roses?”
“What?”
“Why did your grandmother grow roses? It’s not an ideal climate for them.”
He went to work on another locked joint in the pipes. “She liked a challenge,” he said finally. “Every year it was a battle between her and the roses, and the climate. Some years the heat or the wind won, but most years she did.”
“She sounds tough.”
“She was determined to make her part of the world more beautiful.”
For a few more minutes they worked in silence. Alana removed gardening books and stacked them in a neat pile on top of a box, then quickly skimmed the contents of the rest of the boxes. She crossed the small space to stand next to him.
He gave an internal groan. “You found the photo albums.”
“I did indeed,” she said. “Is this you?”
He looked down at the picture of himself as a teenage boy. Shirtless, tanned, and wearing a pair of jeans with two inches of the elastic band of his boxers visible above the waistband of his jeans, he had one elbow braced on the roof of his car and the other on his hip. A smile split his face.
He hardly recognized the grinning, shaggy-haired boy in the picture. “That’s me. Uncle Nelson and I had just got the car running. I was a couple of weeks away from going home, and the deal was if I got the car running, I could take it with me.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“I thought it was a sweet deal until I realized my dad and Uncle Nelson cooked up the plan to keep me from spending the summer parked on the county roads in the backseat of a girl’s car,” he said.
This time she laughed as she flicked him a glance. Her glasses were still perched on top of her head, holding her hair back from her face. “But did it work?”
“Until I got the car running,” he said. “I had two weeks to go until I went home, and I made up for lost time in those two weeks.”
“Anyone I know?” she asked without looking up.
Absolutely.
She turned another page. “It’s none of my business.”
“It was just high school parking,” he said. “You know what it’s like.”
“I don’t actually. I went to a girls’ boarding school, then a women’s college.” She flashed him another smile, this one complete with the blush staining her cheeks.
Sometimes her innocence astonished him. Who blushed while talking about a high school rite of passage? “You’ve never been parking.”
“Not with a boy, no,” she said in a distracted little voice, her attention seemingly focused on the photo album.
His heart stopped in his chest. He felt like a bird flying solely on expectations then crashing into a freshly cleaned pane of glass. Because if she hadn’t parked with a boy, then . . .
Heat soared into his cheekbones, prickled along the back of his neck.
She flicked him a glance, then laughed—laughed—at him. “Look who else can blush.”
“Um . . . does that mean—?” he said.