There was something about feeding a hungry man that filled some primordial need in a woman. These men had been more than hungry. She suspected they’d been living on whatever they could grab for weeks.
And they all looked so nice. They’d shaved. Well, Rusty and Linc had. They wore faded but clean clothes. All their hair was slicked back wetly off their well-scrubbed faces.
“Can you make meat loaf?” Jimmy asked all of a sudden.
Everyone turned as one to stare at him.
He ducked his head sheepishly, his face flaming with embarrassment. “My mother used to make meat loaf and mashed potatoes and brown gravy. I just thought…” He shrugged.
Charmaine’s heart went out to the boy. From what Rusty had mentioned during dinner and the little he’d disclosed in whispered asides, she’d learned that his mother had died of cancer a few years back, and Jimmy had become an increasingly troubled kid. Hanging out with a wild crowd. Playing hooky from school. Shoplifting. Running away from home. His father, a feed company sales rep, was trying to pay off a mountain of medical bills from his late wife’s lengthy illness and probably not spending enough time with his child, though he was doing his best.
“I’m sure I could find a recipe for meat loaf on the Internet.” She glanced at Rusty. “You do have an Internet connection on that computer I saw in your office, don’t you?”
He nodded, equally touched, she could tell, by the boy’s simple request. “It’s a dinosaur of a machine, though. Slow as Mississippi mud.”
“As long as it works.”
“I can help,” Jimmy offered.
Everyone looked at him.
“Really. The problem with that machine is they cut some corners so it wouldn’t cost so much to build. It’s really not a bad machine on the inside. If you put on another half gig of memory, get it a faster hard drive, and put in a sound card and faster video card… well, that machine’s never going to scream down the walls, but, hey, it wouldn’t be half the dog it is.”
Three jaws dropped with amazement.
“I knew you were good at math, but I didn’t know you could speak another language. Computerese,” Rusty remarked.
“Maybe you’d be better off utilizing Jimmy inside instead of working him outside,” Charmaine observed to Rusty. Then, changing the subject, she asked Rusty, “Do you have ground beef in the freezer that isn’t old enough to walk?”
He grimaced. “I don’t know. You’ll have to check the freezer package dates.”
“You know, I threw away a whole trash bag full of stuff from your fridge. Talk about mold! You could have started a terrarium in there.”
“Hey, it’s all about priorities. The cattle have to come first if I’m ever going to turn this place around. Man, we must have fifty young bulls strutting their stuff all over the place.”
“Fifty bulls are bad?”
Rusty smiled at her.
And her traitorous heart turned over. At just his smile. Jeesh!
“Fifty bulls are definitely bad.” He smiled some more.
And she developed a sudden fondness for the crinkles that bracketed his eyes and mouth. Really! One smile, and all two thousand of her hormones stood up, and said, “Howdy!”
“And what a bunch of horndogs they are, too. Whooee, those bulls’ll screw anything with four legs. I saw one yesterday that tried to mount a wheelbarrow.” It was Jimmy giving out that wonderful information.
Linc gave Jimmy a light punch in the arm to shut him up, and the boy blushed even more than he had before. “Sorry, ma’am.”
Enough with the ma’am business. I don’t need any reminders that the big Three-Oh is coming up. “You can call me Charmaine. And no offense, honey. I know all about horndogs.” She gave Rusty, who was grinning to beat the band, a pointed glower.
“Did ya see Rufus today?” Jimmy asked Linc. “I swear that bull has a dick the size of a fireman’s flashlight.”
Apparently, the boy had a one-track mind… and the sense of a flea.
Rusty and Linc put their faces in their hands.
“What? Golly, I did it again, didn’t it? I really am sorry ma’am… I mean, Charmaine. I know I talk too much. My dad usta say that if tongues were race cars, I’d a won the Nascar. My mom never complained, though. She always said that she liked my babbling.”