Lone Star Read Free Page B

it.”
    Blake pulled on his brother. “Let’s hoof, bro. Should we pick you up, Chloe?” The Hauls lived three houses up, around the pond through the scraggly pines and birches.
    The girls gazed after their young men, and then resumed walking. Hannah shook her head—in distress? In wonderment? Chloe couldn’t tell. “I guess I’ll be going to Spain with my boyfriend and your boyfriend, but not with you,” Hannah said.
    â€œHar-de-har-har.”
    â€œI’m not joking, Chloe.”
    â€œOh, I know.”
    â€œYou can’t start your adult life being such a chicken. What are you afraid of? Be more like me. I’m not afraid of anything.” Her lip twisted.
    They were almost at the clearing in front of Chloe’s green bungalow. Hannah slowed down, as if she wanted to linger, but Chloe sped up as if that was the last thing she wanted. “I have to be diplomatic,” she said. “If I want them to say yes, I can’t just do an I’m-going-to-Europe vaudeville routine.”
    â€œIf you don’t start acting like an adult, why should they treat you like one?”
    How much did Chloe not want to talk about it. It wasn’t that Hannah was wrong. It was that Hannah always said obvious things in such a way that made Chloe not only think her friend was wrong, but also want her friend to be wrong.
    â€œI’ll talk to them tonight,” she said, hurrying across her pine-needle clearing.
    â€œI wouldn’t tell them about Mason and Blake just yet.”
    â€œYa think?”
    â€œStart slow,” Hannah said. “Don’t make your mother go all Chinese on you. You always make her nuts. First dangle our trip, then wait. The boys might be pie in the sky anyway. Where are they going to get the money from? They won’t come, you’ll see.”
    Chloe said nothing. Clearly Hannah had no idea who her boyfriend was. There was no talking Blake out of anything . And as if to prove Chloe’s point, Janice Haul’s Subaru came charging toward them from around the trees, Blake rolling down the window, slowing down, honking, waving.
    â€œOff to get our passports!” he yelled. “See ya!”
    Chloe turned to Hannah. “You were saying?”
    Hannah brushed a strand of hair from Chloe’s face and fixed the collar on her plaid shirt. “She’s not going to let you go, is she?” Hannah said. “That’s why you haven’t asked. You know she’ll say no.” Something wistful was in Hannah’s tone, indefinable, perplexing.
    â€œClearly I’m going to use all my powers to get her to say yes,” Chloe said. “Don’t worry.” They both looked worried.
    Hannah sighed. “Still, I wouldn’t tell her about the boys just yet. You know how she gets.”
    Chloe sighed in return. She knew how her mother got. “What did you want to talk to me about?” Only a flimsy screen door separated Chloe’s mother’s ears from Hannah’s troubles.
    Hannah waved her off. “Just you wait,” she said, all doom and gloom.

2
Sweet Potato
    â€œI ’M IN THE KITCHEN, ” HER MOTHER CALLED OUT AS SOON AS Chloe opened the screen door. A statement of delightful irony since they lived in a winterized cabin that was one room entire, if one didn’t count, which Chloe didn’t, the bathroom, the two small bedrooms, and the open attic loft where Chloe slept.
    I’m in the kitchen, Lang said, because this month she was baking. Last winter, her mother was scrapbooking, so every day, when Chloe came home, she would hear, I’m in the dining room .
    The previous fall, her mother had decided to become a seamstress and told Chloe that from now on she was sewing all her daughter’s clothes, in the craft room .
    When she was tracing out the family tree on her new Christmas-present software, Lang was in the computer room .
    Lang Devine, née Lang Thia from Red River,