Lee Mckenzie - His Best Friend's Wife

She put on a fresh pot of coffee and while the scent of it filled the kitchen, mingling with the aroma of fresh baking, she iced the muffins and arranged them on a footed Depression glass cake plate. Soon her sisters would join her and she liked having everything ready before they arrived.

“Hello! I’m here.” Emily let herself in the front door and breezed into the kitchen as Annie poured boiling water over the decaf coffee grounds she had spooned into the bottom of a Bodum.

“Is that for me?” she asked, pulling Annie into a sisterly hug.

“It sure is.”

“You’re the best. I’ve been dying for a cup.”

“You do know there’s no caffeine in it.”

“Doesn’t matter. I let the smell and taste of it trick me into believing it’s the real thing.” Emily set her oversize bag on the counter. “I have something for you.”

“You do?”

“Remember when I asked you about writing a weekly column for my blog? And you said you’d give it a try at the end of the summer after Isaac was back in school?”

Right. The Ask Annie column. Annie had not forgotten, but she had hoped her sister would.

“Jack gave me a new camera for my birthday, and it’s amazing. You should see the photos it takes.” Emily ran a hand over her belly. “This will be the most photographed baby in the world.”

Annie smiled at her sister’s enthusiasm over a gift that other women might find overwhelmingly unromantic from a man who had recently proposed. Not Emily. Since childhood, she had dreamed of becoming a journalist. Now she was a reporter for the Riverton Gazette, and a popular blogger with a recently signed book contract.

Emily pulled her old camera out of her bag. “I thought you might like to have my old one. For illustrating the column, although you can use it for anything. Isaac’s birthday parties, school events, whatever.”

Annie eyed the camera suspiciously. “You said you wanted me to answer a question about running a busy household, a farm, a bed-and-breakfast. You didn’t say anything about taking pictures.”

“Oh. I guess you don’t have to. I thought you might like to.”

“I don’t know the first thing about photography.”

“That’s the beauty of the digital age. You don’t need to know anything. I’ve put all the settings to auto, which means that as long as the light is reasonably good, the camera will do all the work. You simply have to point and shoot.” Emily thrust the device into her hands.

Annie cringed as she studied the undecipherable symbols that presumably indicated what the various buttons and dials were for. “What do you want me to take pictures of?”

“Whatever you like. Whatever will work with the column you’re writing.”

“I’m not a writer, remember? I have no idea what I’m going to write about.”

“Fine. We’re calling the column Ask Annie. Would you like me to give you a question to answer?”

“I think you’ll have to.” For the life of her, Annie couldn’t think of anything she did from day to day that anyone else would want to read about.

Emily glanced around the kitchen as though pondering what to ask, and then her gaze settled on the kitchen window and beyond. “Chickens. Farm-fresh eggs. That’ll be your first question. Is there any advantage to cooking and baking with farm-fresh eggs?”

“In a word, yes.”

Emily made a face. “Now you’re being difficult. Tell us about your chickens—what you feed them, how many eggs you get every day, what the eggs taste like. Maybe include a recipe or two.”

Annie found herself wishing she had never agreed to this. Emily’s posts on her blog were hugely popular, filled with humor and insight and charm about life in a small town. Why would her readers want to read about chickens and eggs? She had long accepted that Emily was a brilliant writer and that their younger sister was an accomplished horsewoman. Annie herself had none of those exceptional skills. She raised a family, prepared food, kept house. She loved what she did. Taking care of her family was enormously satisfying, but there was nothing earthshaking about any of the things she did.

As though Emily could read her thoughts—and given how close they had always been, she probably could—she gently took the camera from her and switched it on. “Just line up whatever you want to take a picture of in the monitor and push this button. Let me know when you’re ready to upload them to your computer and I’ll show you how. For the first column, I only need about two hundred and fifty words. Then we’ll take it from there.”

Never one to go back on a promise, Annie gave a reluctant nod. “Fine. I’ll give it a try. Now can we talk about you?”

She gave her sister a good look up and down. Her flowing tan-colored top, worn with a pair of off-white jeans and accessorized with gold hoop earrings and bangles, suited her perfectly and did an excellent job of disguising her expanding midsection. “You’re looking gorgeous this morning. New outfit?”

“Newish.”

“Your baby bump is getting very—”

“Bumpish?” Emily suggested.

Annie smiled. “It’s going to be more and more difficult to disguise this under a wedding dress.”

Emily shook her head. “Honestly, I’m not trying to hide. It’s not as though people don’t already know. But I did find a dress online that I really love. It has an empire waist with a full skirt. Really pretty.”

“White?”

“More ivory with just a hint of pink. They call the color champagne.”

“That’ll be perfect with your complexion. Is it a full-length gown?”

“Knee-length. I didn’t want anything too formal. I’ll show you a picture when CJ gets here.”

“Rose is joining us, too.”

The excitement in Emily’s eyes dimmed.

“She is our sister,” Annie reminded her.

“I know. I’m just not ready to share my wedding arrangements with her.”

“Fair enough. But you do realize you have to invite her, right?”

Emily sighed and gave a reluctant nod.

Rather than push the point, Annie changed the subject. “Have you set a date?”

“We have, finally. The last Saturday in September. We’ve decided to get married outdoors, in the gazebo, because we want to take advantage of the fall color.”

“Oh, my.” The gazebo. The place where Eric had proposed to her. Overcome with nostalgia and a fierce longing for her old life, Annie’s chest tightened and her breath clogged her throat. It was also the place where Jack had proposed to Emily, she reminded herself. She recovered before her sister noticed, she hoped, and pasted on a smile. “The end of September. Wow. Your big day will be here before we know it. Doesn’t give us a lot of time for planning.”

“There’s no need for a big plan. We want to keep the wedding simple, and we didn’t want to hold it until Jack’s mom was feeling up to it and his sister, Faith, could make it from San Francisco.”

“Makes perfect sense. How’s his mother doing?”

“She’s good. It’s taken her some time to recover from the fall she had at the start of the summer. The cast came off her arm last Wednesday and she’ll be starting physio soon. Jack and his dad and I will take turns driving her to appointments.”

“She must be so happy to have her son at home with her, even if it’s just until the two of you find a place of your own.”

“Well, that might already be taken care of.”

“You’ve found a place?”

“Not yet. His mom has always been a homebody and never wanted to travel, but after breaking her arm and having to rely on everyone else’s help, she’s decided she likes having other people take care of her. So his parents have decided to take a cruise this fall, right after the wedding. Go figure, huh?”