Her Four Cowboys

“Come on, Mom,” Aaron said. “You know that we’d come no matter what the food was like. It’s Sunday dinner.”

“That’s true,” she said, cutting a piece of chicken daintily and chewing on the bite thoughtfully. “You know, you boys have gotten so predictable over the last couple of years. It’s nice to know that I can always count on your reactions, but it’s been so long since I’ve had someone new to try to impress with my cooking.”

All four of us—well, five including my father—looked back and forth at each other, at the food… anywhere really but at my mother, who seemed intent on fixing all of us with that piercing blue gaze that we’d all inherited.

I knew what she was trying to communicate to us, and I knew how unlikely it was that any of us would bring a girl home in the near future. The last girl any of us had brought home had been Katie, Austin’s now-ex-wife. We’d all liked her well enough at first, not to mention throughout their relationship and engagement, but the second they’d gotten back from their honeymoon, she’d flipped a one-eighty.

It had taken several years and all our energy to get him out of that marriage, and I thought that all of us had been a little burned by that, which made us a little bit reluctant to trust women by the way that she’d changed.

My thoughts drifted to Lucy, and the way that she’d smiled up at me under the mistletoe that Christmas eve. We’d texted since then, but she’d been keeping me at arm’s length, and it had made me reluctant to ask her out on an official date. That New Year’s Eve at Spurs, I’d thought about asking her to take a walk with me so that I could get her alone around midnight, but she’d disappeared to the bathroom, and I hadn’t seen her at all after that.

I looked at the space next to me where Lucy had sat during all the time we spent together as kids. Like back when we were growing up, she’d been asked to stay for dinner after a day-long study session. It had been so often that she’d practically been a permanent fixture at the table.

My heart gave an extra-heavy thud as I thought about us now, as adults, and how it would feel to have her here with me at my side every Sunday. She’d help my mom in the kitchen with the cooking before dinner the way she always had, and the two of them could relax after while my brothers and I tag-teamed to get the dishes washed. Our legs would be pressed against each other under the table, and even though it was now normal to be able to touch her, I wouldn’t be able to get over the way her touch made me feel.

I blinked a few times, snapping myself out of my reverie, and looked around the table at my brothers and Dad. Dad was contentedly digging into his food, reaching forward to take some more potatoes, but all of my brothers had looks on their faces that I knew had to be similar to the one that had been on my own face. They all looked a bit dreamlike as they each stared off into different directions. Austin’s face held a little more pain the others’ did, but each of them really did look like they were dreaming of some woman that evaded them, one that sat just out of reach.

“Yeah, Mom,” Andy said, reaching over me for the rolls. “That would be nice. We’ll try to work it into the to-do list for the ranch.”

Andy’s tongue-in-cheek statement managed to cut the tension that had been lingering around the table, and we all relaxed as my mom got up from her chair and went to get dessert from the kitchen.

After we’d finished demolishing every bite of the cake that my mom had made, we started clearing the table as my parents made their way to the den with their tea.

My mom had instilled in us from childhood how important it was to do our parts, particularly since she worked so hard to put those elaborate dinners together. As soon as we were able to walk and carry, we’d learned to wash dishes.

To this day, I had my own compulsions about refusing to have dirty dishes in my apartment.

Between the four of us, we managed to get the dishes done and the kitchen cleaned in record time. By that point, our parents had long since headed to bed, my dad living on a farmer’s internal clock the way he did, leaving the family room empty and available for our use.

Aaron grabbed the pack of beers that he’d brought from the fridge and tilted his head over his shoulder for us to follow him.