Meet Me At The Chapel

“Hercules—that’s not nice.”

“How do you take your eggs?” Brock asked her.

“Are they eggs from free-range chickens?”

“The chickens live out back. Is that free enough for you?”

“Lucy and Ethel!” Hannah supplied the names of the chickens.

“I Love Lucy and ladybugs. That’s what she loves.” Brock looked over at his daughter.

“And animals,” Casey added.

Brock turned his body away from the stove and toward Casey. This wasn’t the first time he’d wanted to get a better look at her in his favorite shirt. It engulfed her, but it looked good on her. Her hair, seemingly more red than auburn in the daylight, was mussed and wild, and he could swear that she had the brightest green eyes he’d ever seen on a woman.

“And animals,” he echoed her sentiment. Then, so he wouldn’t be standing in his kitchen ogling her like a teenage boy, he asked again, “How do you take your eggs?”

“Scrambled works.”

“How about some bacon made from free-range pigs?” Brock teased her.

“No. Thank you. I’m a pescatarian.”

Brock wasn’t exactly sure he’d heard her right, so after he got the eggs cooking, he turned back around.

“Did you say you were a Presbyterian?”

“No!” Casey laughed so easily. It had been a long time since he’d heard a woman laughing in his house. “Pescatarian. I don’t eat meat, except for fish. But I’m trying to give up fish, too.”

“What for?”

She smiled at him; she had deep dimples in each of her pale cheeks. Sweet.

“Health mainly—bacon is full of fat and salt. High in cholesterol.” Casey wrinkled her nose at the thought of eating bacon.

“Dad has high cholesterol and high blood pressure,” Hannah shouted from the living room.

“Hannah—remember what we said about private information?”

“But Dr. Patel says that he has the heart of a much younger man.”

It was too late to cork that bottle—instead, Brock decided to ignore the fact that his daughter had just provided a near stranger with all of the recent results of his physical and finish scrambling the eggs. The only thing that she hadn’t shared, because she hadn’t been in the room to hear it, was the fact that he had a mildly enlarged prostate and needed to drop twenty pounds.

Brock put a healthy portion of scrambled eggs on the plate, along with cheese grits and a couple of biscuits.

“Eat it while it’s hot.” He put the plate down in front of her and then sat down on the opposite side of the kitchen table.

“Mmm. Thank you. I’m so hungry.” Casey stabbed a couple of eggs with her fork. “What about you?”

“I ate hours ago. We’ve been waiting on you.”

Casey chewed her eggs quickly so she could ask, “Why didn’t you wake me up when you got up?”

“I got up while it was still dark.”

“Oh.” That was different. “Well, why didn’t you get me up sooner, then?”

“No harm done. It’s my day off and I’m not looking forward to getting up on the roof to see how many shingles need to be replaced. You need salt or pepper for the eggs?”

“No. I’m good. These eggs are delicious, FYI.”

“That’s good.”

She finished her breakfast, offered to clean the dishes, which he refused, and then all five of them, two dogs and three humans, piled into Brock’s truck. First stop was the moving truck and the second stop was Taylor’s house.

“I feel really bad about Clint breaking his collarbone.”

She watched Brock’s face for a reaction. There wasn’t one.

“He was supposed to be gone all summer,” she added.

Brock glanced over at his passenger. She had been biting her lip nervously since they had gotten into the truck. Now he understood some of her nerves at least—she was worried about living in a house with a newly married couple and a newborn. Even if they told her that she wasn’t going to be a bother, Brock had a feeling that Casey wouldn’t even take the chance of being an inconvenience to anybody. During the short time they had spent together, she was always worried about his comfort and his feelings, as well as the comfort and feelings of his daughter. He found her politeness refreshing.

“Might be mighty tight over at their place,” Brock said, broaching the topic.

Casey turned her head his way, met him eye to eye. She said, “I was thinking the exact same thing.”

“You thinking about cutting your trip short?”

The woman beside him breathed in very deeply and then let it out on a long, extended sigh. “I’d hate to do that. But I just might have to...”

“It’d be a shame. Coming all this way just to go home.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Casey making little circles on the top of Hercules’s head. “I know. But I can’t impose on Taylor for the summer—not now. Newlyweds need their private time. Besides, Clint is hurt. He’s not going to be in any mood to have a houseguest.”

“That’s right,” he agreed, then added, “I have a loft apartment above the barn. It’s a little rough, but it’s livable.”

Casey looked at Brock, interested.

“The way you are with Hannah—like I said last night—it’s impressive. And it got me thinking that we could help each other out. Hannah does fine with academics—she’s even strong in math and science. But it’s her...”

“Pragmatics,” she filled in for him.

He glanced at her again. “Exactly. As you can tell from our breakfast conversation, there’s still a bit of a ways to go with that.”

Casey nodded her agreement—a deficit with social use of language was a universal symptom of individuals with autism across the spectrum.

“How ’bout I let you use the loft for the summer in exchange for some private social language support. How does that set with you?”