Josh went back to what he was doing, which was trying to tell if he was holding the board he needed and the instructions in the same direction. He had to admit, sex was the one thing he had going for him.
Maybe it would snow again soon and they could make another groomer run. He’d take any perk of the job he could get.
*
Katie made a whooping sound and laid down her cards. “Gin!”
Muttering a curse, Josh threw his cards on the table and pushed more of his M&M’S across the table. She had almost all the chocolate now.
“You’re not really paying attention,” she said, since she’d been thinking it most of the evening.
“This isn’t the game I want to be playing with you right now.”
“If you’d come to my place instead of me coming here, we wouldn’t be playing gin rummy for M&M’S.”
“I might have, but the couple staying in room two are not only new to the trail system, but new to snowmobiles. I want to be here, where I can be reached and have easy access to my truck and trailer, just in case.” He gathered the cards and started shuffling them. “That’s how it is. Weekends I’m tied to the lodge and weekdays, when I have a little more freedom, everybody has to go to bed so they can work in the morning.”
This was one of those pissed-at-the-world days he’d told her about, she thought. And there wasn’t much she could do about it. “I heard you spent the day putting together Paige’s office furniture.”
He dealt the cards, scowling at the deck the whole time. “This town will talk about anything.”
“Always has.”
She was only a couple of cards away from taking the last of his M&M’S when the lodge phone rang. Frowning, Josh pushed back from the table to answer it just as Rose walked into the kitchen.
“I got it,” he told her.
Katie took advantage of the short reprieve from the game—and the fact her mom was there to guard her cards and chocolate—to head to the bathroom.
When she came back out, Josh was putting on his coat and boots. “I told you.”
“Room two? Are they okay?”
“Yeah. Just a little undereducated about important details like gas mileage. They’re not too far out, so I’m just going to meet them with the gas can.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“No, I won’t be very long, so there’s no sense in getting all bundled up.” He grabbed his keys off the hook and opened the door. “Don’t touch my M&M’S.”
Once he was gone, she might have cast a sideways glance at his tiny pile of chocolate, but her mother gave her a look and she didn’t touch them.
“I hardly get to spend any time alone with you anymore,” Rose said, taking silverware out of the drying rack to put in the drawer.
“Where’s Andy?”
“Helping Butch Benoit work on the transmission in Fran’s car. He said he’d probably be late, so he was just going to go straight home from there. But I want to talk about you. How have you been doing?”
Katie laughed. “I’m here half the time, Mom. You can see how I am.”
“Are you happy?”
The question hit her like a sucker punch and she sat down hard in her chair. Was she happy? “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know. Just checking. I’m your mother, remember, so I’m supposed to keep track of these things.”
She was happy enough, but she had a feeling that answer wouldn’t satisfy her mom. The barbershop was doing well and she had Josh. Granted, things had been a little touchier since he’d turned down the offer on the lodge, but emotional upheaval did that to people.
Until he put it behind him, though, their relationship was treading water. They weren’t sinking, but they weren’t making any progress toward distant shores, either.
“It was rough on him, you know,” she said, because maybe she did want to talk to her mom. Not only was Rose her mother, but she knew Josh better than anybody else, too. “It’s going to take him some time to reconcile how much he wanted to leave with how much he needed to keep the lodge.”
Rose put her hand over Katie’s and leaned down to look at her face. “Do you think he can be happy here with you, honey?”
Katie saw the love and concern in her mother’s eyes and couldn’t lie. “I hope so, more than you can even imagine, but I really don’t know.”
*
Even though he woke in a much better mood than he’d gone to bed in, Josh didn’t shed any tears when the last guests—who were naturally the couple from room two, running an hour past checkout time—drove away.
After he stripped their room, which was the last one he had to do, he went into the kitchen to see what he could scrounge up for lunch. Then, as long as nothing went wrong between now and then, he was going to call Katie and try to drag her out for a ride on his sled with him. It wasn’t really built for two, but she’d just have to snuggle close.
He’d just finished demolishing his second bologna sandwich when Rose walked through carrying a basket of dirty towels. “Did they finally leave?”
“Yeah. I made a note next to their name in the book so if they come back, we can give them a little extra coaching.”