Big Sky River

“It’s wonderful to be here,” Erin answered, adjusting her wire-rims.

Tara felt a little stab of love as she shifted, putting an arm around each of their tiny waists. They wore the narrowest of jeans, sandals and long-sleeved T-shirts, Elle’s blue, Erin’s pink. “We’re going to have a great time,” she told them. “You’ll like Parable, and the farm, too.”

Erin’s eyes grew big and very blue. “We were so scared Dad would change his mind and make us go to summer camp instead of coming out here to stay with you.”

Elle nodded her agreement as they all strolled purposefully through the small airport, moving aside now and then so they didn’t block foot traffic. “And summer camp started weeks ago,” she added. “The day after school let out. So everybody’s already chosen their friends. We would have been, like, geeks.”

Tara laughed. “Geeks?” she countered. “Never.”

“Elle likes to be in on all the action,” Erin said, wisely tolerant of her sister.

They reached the baggage claim area and waited with the other arriving travelers, until a buzzer squawked and the first bags lurched into view.

Erin and Elle had two large suitcases each, color coordinated like their T-shirts, with busy geometric patterns.

Tara, after getting one luggage cart, went back for a second after her stepdaughters pointed out their bags. By the time she got back, a man in a cowboy hat had lifted one pair of suitcases onto the cart. He repeated the process, tugged at the brim of his hat and, without a word, picked up his own bag, and walked away.

“That was a cowboy,” Erin breathed, impressed. “A real one, I think.”

Tara grinned and nodded. “The genuine article,” she agreed.

“How do you know?” Elle asked them both, ever practical. “Maybe he was just a guy in boots and a hat.”

“I know he’s a cowboy,” Tara replied, “because he stepped up and helped with the suitcases without being asked.”

Elle pondered that, looking only partially convinced, and Erin gave her sister a light prod in the ribs. “Cowboys do polite stuff,” she informed Elle. “Like lifting suitcases and opening doors.”

“Not just cowboys,” Elle retorted. “Tony—” she glanced at Tara, no doubt figuring her stepmother was out of the loop, having been gone for a couple years “—he’s the doorman in our building. He does the same things.”

“But he doesn’t wear boots and a hat,” Erin said in the tone of one bringing home a salient point. “Not one like the cowboy had on, anyway.”

“He’d look silly if he did,” Elle said. “Right in the middle of Manhattan.”

“I’ve seen cowboy hats in Manhattan, though,” Erin reasoned. She was the diplomat of the pair, Elle the pragmatist.

Tara, enjoying the exchange, reveling in the presence of her beloved stepdaughters, didn’t comment. She simply led the way outside, pushing one cart while Erin managed the other, and silently counted her blessings, two of them in particular.

Sunshine shimmered in the twins’ hair, and there was a cool breeze out.

Life is good, Tara thought, rolling her cart through the crosswalk.

Elle swung around her backpack in front of her as they walked, rummaged through it, extracted an expensive cell phone and switched it on before pressing a sequence of icons. By the time they’d found the SUV, she was finished with whatever she was doing and popping the device into a jeans pocket.

“There,” she said. “The paternal unit has been duly informed of our whereabouts.”

Tara smiled again—not that she actually stopped smiling since the moment she had spotted Elle and Erin in the flow of incoming passengers—and opened the hatch on the SUV with a button on her key fob.

This time, there was no cowboy to step up and load the baggage into the back of the rig, but working together, they jostled the luggage inside. Then the twins flipped a coin to see who would sit in front with Tara and who would sit in back.

Erin won the toss, crowed a little and climbed in across the console from Tara.

“I thought you had a dog,” Elle remarked from the back as she buckled herself in for the ride home.

“Lucy’s waiting impatiently back at the farm,” Tara told the girls, starting the engine, preparing to back out of her parking space. “She likes to ride in cars, but she’s still a puppy, really, and I think this trip would have been a little too long for her.”

“What happened to the red car?” Erin wanted to know. “The one you sent us pictures of?”

Tara might have sighed in memory of her zippy little convertible, if she’d been alone, or in a less ebullient mood. “I traded it in,” she replied.

“We wouldn’t all fit in a sports car, goon-face,” Elle pointed out, affably disdainful.

“I know that, ding-dong,” Erin answered, without a trace of hostility.

“No name-calling,” Tara said lightly. The way the girls said “goon-face” and “ding-dong” sounded almost affectionate, but it was the principle of the thing.

Erin bent to lift her backpack off the floorboard and ferret through it for her own phone, an exact duplicate of Elle’s, except for the case. “You texted Dad that we got here okay, right?” she asked Elle without looking back.

“He’d be the paternal unit I mentioned, goon—” Elle paused, and her tone took on a note of mischievous acquiescence. “I mean, Erin,” she said sweetly.

Tara concentrated on maneuvering the SUV through the exit lane and onto the road, still smiling. Talk about a goon-face, she thought, having caught a glimpse of herself in the wide-range rearview mirror. She couldn’t seem to stop grinning.

Erin sat with her head tilted slightly forward so her short hair curtained her face, working the virtual keyboard on her phone with all the deft expertise of any contemporary child. Presently, she gave a little whoop of delight and announced, most likely for her sister’s benefit, “Savannah got her ears pierced!”

“No way,” Elle said. “Her mom told her she had to wait until she was fifteen. I was there when she said it.”

“Savannah’s not with her mom,” Erin answered airily. “She’s with her dad and her stepmom at their place on Cape Cod and her stepmom took her to some place at the mall. It stings a little, she says, but she has gold posts and looks at least five years older than she did fifteen minutes ago.”

Amused, Tara marveled at the perfection of her own happiness as she drove away from the airport, headed in the direction of Parable. The twins’ front-seat/backseat conversation might have seemed pretty mundane to anybody else, but she’d been starved for the small things, like the way the twins bantered.

“Maybe we could get our ears pierced,” Elle ventured.

Duh, Tara thought, finally picking up on the stepmom correlation. She wondered if the text exchange with Savannah had been a ruse. It was possible that the sisters had rehearsed this entire scenario on the flight out, or even before that, hoping Tara would fall in with their plan. “Not without express permission from your father, you can’t,” she said.

Both girls groaned tragically.

“He’ll never let us,” Erin said. “Not even when we’re fifteen. He says it’s too ‘come-hither,’ whatever that means.”

“His call,” Tara said, with bright finality, busy thinking of ways to skirt the probable next question, which would be something along the lines of, What does come-hither mean, anyway? “Are you hungry?”

“Why do grown-ups always ask that?” Erin reflected.

“We were in first class,” Elle added. “Every time the flight attendants came down the aisle, they shoved food at us. I may explode.”

“Okay,” Tara said. “Well, then. We’ll just head straight for home.”

“I want to meet your dog,” Erin said, sounding both solemn and formal. “Dad won’t let us have one in the penthouse. He says the rugs are too expensive for wholesale ruination.”

“For the time being,” Tara replied, watching the highway ahead as it unrolled like a gray ribbon, twisting toward the mountain-spiked blue horizon, “you can share mine.”