Nicole Helm - All I Have

In silence, he and Charlie slid into Dell’s truck, drove up to the vegetable shack and loaded the truck for market. When they got back in and drove off Wainwright property, Charlie made a big production of tapping his leg, fidgeting in his seat.

“Spit it out.” He’d rather hear all of Charlie’s complaints than watch him try to keep them in.

“Look, Dell, you’re not dumb.”

Dell scowled at the stoplight in front of him. “I know I’m not dumb.” Of course, Charlie had read at a kindergarten level at the age of three. And solved for x in elementary school. While Dell had enjoyed remedial reading and math all through middle school.

But that didn’t make him dumb. Not in the areas that mattered.

“So, the thing is, you could have more than this.” Charlie waved at the farmland on each side of the highway Dell merged onto. “I know you like it, maybe you’re even good at it, but how much longer is small-scale farming going to be a lucrative career?”

“I don’t want more than this. This isn’t some compromise or slacker job. It’s what I want. It’s important. I don’t need lucrative.”

“You need to survive. And are you so certain it’s not that you want it just because Dad doesn’t want you to do it? Remember how you didn’t have any interest in playing basketball until I tried out, then suddenly it was all you wanted to do? And once I quit, so did you.”

Dell shifted. “It’s not the same.” It wasn’t, but he knew he couldn’t convince Charlie of that. First, because Charlie thought Charlie was always right. Second, well, he wasn’t about to admit he’d just been trying to get his older brother’s attention.

He’d given up on that. Charlie was always going to look down his nose at him. They were too different, and for some reason Charlie didn’t see the farm the way he did. Didn’t feel the history in it, the belonging to it.

Charlie didn’t say anything else, just shook his head and looked out the passenger-side window.

Dell watched as farmland morphed into suburbia. Tried to imagine living here, in a house all piled on top of another house, with nothing but streets and strip malls and perfectly manicured lawns.

He didn’t belong anywhere here, even less so in the packed-together city Charlie lived in. He belonged on that farm, where he could look out a window and see the swell of the hill, hear his own footsteps, dig in the land and grow something. It was his heart, and the work he did was important. Someday Dell would just have to accept he was the only one in his family who believed it.

* * *

MIASATIN the driver’s seat, working on not hyperventilating. Some positive self-talk, some reminders that, in this space, people looked at her as a professional, knowledgeable businesswoman, not Mia, Queen of the Geeks, whose verbal diarrhea always meant saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

“Mia, get out of the car.”

“I will.” She nodded. Her feet ignored her.

Cara slammed her door shut. A few seconds later she jerked open the driver’s-side door. “Get out, young lady.”

“I’m older than you.”

“Mia.”

“Just give me a second.”

“Mia, look at me.”

Reluctantly, Mia met her sister’s fierce stare.

“Do you think you’re ugly?”

Mia frowned. “Well, no.” She wasn’t a bombshell, but she certainly wasn’t ugly. Decent haircut, no more acne, body in good shape. She wasn’t ugly. Didn’t mean she was comfortable being seen as anything other than background noise. She’d worked so hard at being background noise since coming home from Truman four years ago. Worked on quietly doing what she needed to do, not babbling, not embarrassing herself.

This step seemed to scream, “Look at me,” and as much as she wouldn’t mind some male attention, she wasn’t ready for the screaming insecurity that went with it. If she was ready for that, she’d probably have had a date by now.

“Then, suck it up, sister. You’re cute. No one’s going to look twice at you except people who know you and wonder how you hid that body for so long. You look like a normal twenty-six-year-old woman. Of course, if a guy comes over to buy something, I’d make sure to bend over.”

“Cara—”

“Just be you. Forget what you look like or what people think. That’s how you’ve gotten this far, isn’t it? You learned to stop worrying what people thought?”

That was true. Not an easy lesson to learn, or even one she’d mastered, but Cara was right. Who cared what people thought? She was wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt, for heaven’s sake. Not a G-string and some tassels.

She certainly wasn’t stripping, unlike some people.

Mia sneaked a glance over her shoulder at Dell. He hadn’t taken off his shirt yet, but it was unbuttoned all the way. Moron.

With a deep breath, Mia hopped out of the truck, earning her a back pat from Cara. “Thanks.”

“Anytime.”

Squaring her shoulders, Mia focused on setting up the booth, including their newest tactic: free coloring pages and crayon packets for kids. Next week Anna was going to do face painting. If Dell was going to go the man-ogling route, she would go the family route.

Pants that fit and a low-cut T-shirt just meant looking less like the crazy, isolated farmer she was. It had nothing to do with sex appeal.

Of course, if a single guy was interested...

Mia shook her head. Idiot fantasies had never gotten her anywhere. Certainly not laid. She might look a little more alluring than she once had, but all her work at invisibility had certainly kept any interested parties away.

Well, maybe with her new look she’d work on that next.

This morning, though, she was concentrating on selling the pants off Dell Wainwright. Not literally or anything. But, well, now that she thought of it...

Nope. Not going there.

Mia smiled brightly at a couple and their twin toddlers. “Good morning. Welcome to Pruitt Farms’ stand. Do you see anything you like?”

She chatted with the mother about what kind of fertilizers they used and if they were certified organic. In the end, the twins each took a coloring sheet and crayons, and Mia sold one of everything.

She also made sure to tell them about the face painting next weekend, and they promised to return.

Take that, Magic Mike.

“Dell keeps looking at you,” Cara stage whispered in her ear as Mia filled a bag with greens.

Mia refused to look over her shoulder. “So?”

“So? I don’t mean he’s looking at you like, oh, he happened to look over here. I mean, he’s jaw-dropped looking at you. Like, ‘damn, that girl is fine’ looking at you.”

She waved Cara off, placed the new bag onto the table. As another family passed their booth, she greeted, chatted and focused on her job. Once they were gone, she couldn’t take the curiosity any longer.

She lifted her eyes over the aisle to Dell’s table. There he was in all his shirtless glory, flirting with an older lady. Totally not looking at her.

Except when he handed the woman a bag of broccoli, his gaze met hers across the aisle. Something in her stomach flipped uncomfortably, and a warm sensation zinged down to her toes. Mia quickly looked down at her table, all too aware she was probably beet red from her shoulders to the roots of her hair.

From that point on, she promised herself not to look at Dell, and not to replay that weird moment his eyes had locked on hers and she’d felt something . Just from a look.

Nope. Not thinking about it.

She made it through the rest of the morning, pleased to see they’d sold more than last week. Some of that might have had to do with more people coming as the season went on, and that it wasn’t raining today as it had been last week, but still, progress was progress.