The day after my first trip to the bar, Ann came over at around noon with a black colored colt. Cliff and I were breaking our backs trying to yank up weeds, but Kairi was having the time of her life rolling around in the dirt with a hyperactive Spatz.

"This is the colt?" I asked, wiping the sweat out of my eyes with my shirt then dropping the garment back on the ground. The horse stood almost as tall as Ann at the shoulder, and looked to be nearly the size of a full grown animal; it had a saddle strapped around it's middle Ann was leading it by using reins.

"Yeah," Ann chirped. "He's still got a season's worth of growing left to do. Dad decided to send some tack with him, in the hopes that you'll race him in the local horse races after he's done growing."

"That shouldn't be a problem," I told her as she handed me the reins. "Has he been broken?"

Ann nodded happily. "I broke him. He'll be perfectly safe for you to ride when he's all grown up."

Kairi ran up behind me, hiding behind my legs as she took her first look at a live horse. I picked her up, holding her up to the horse's snout. "It's okay," I told her. I reached out and ran one hand up and down the colt's snout, eliciting a pleased flicker from his ears. Kairi slowly reached out to touch the horse, sticking her small hand into its nostril; the horse snorted, and my little dark-haired daughter giggled.

"The horsey's funny," she managed between giggles.

I sat the three year old girl down in the saddle then looked across the horse's back. "Could you do me a favor, Ann?" I asked. She threw me a big, happy grin and pulled herself up on to the horse's back. With one arm around Kairi, Ann made the colt start walking.

Cliff was happy for the break, and we watched the young woman and the little girl ride around the farm amid shouts of "Look at me, Daddy!" and high pitched shrieks of joy. After a while, Ann brought the colt to a stop in front of us and Kairi, as soon as her feet hit the ground, patted the colt on the leg and started chasing Spatz again.

"What do you think you'll call him?" Ann asked as Cliff helped her down.

I shrugged. "I'm not sure. Do you have any ideas, Cliff?"

The brown haired man looked the animal over. "When I was a kid, my neighbors had a horse. He was huge, strong, but gentle enough that he never even stepped on a butterfly. If I remember right, they named him Adonis."

"Works for me," I smiled. "Does it sound good to you, Ann? Adonis."

The redhead clapped her hands. "That's such a nice name! Now, you better take good care of him. You can just let him roam on the farm because he won't leave, and he'll feed himself on the weeds and drink out of the pond. Just make sure that you brush him and talk to him every day." She grabbed the reins again and started to walk him over to the tool shed. "I'll put the tack away in the shed," she hollered, "so when he's ready to ride it'll be there for you."

Cliff and I started back to work pulling weeds when Ann came over to stand next to us. "So, how was the bar last night?" she asked.

"Not very busy."

"That's not what I meant," she told me crossly.

I looked up at her as I yanked a handful of weeds out of the ground. "What do you want me to say? I downed a couple of glasses and made it home just fine. The bar was fine."

Cliff looked over at the young women with curiosity all over his face. "What are you getting at?"

Ann smiled at me slyly. "Someone was very impressed by Jack yesterday," she informed him. "Someone who doesn't warm up to—"

"Jack? Are you busy?" Karen's voice rang out from down the path.

My farmhand looked at me incredulously. "You got her to warm up to you?" he demanded. "Man, I'm related to her and she's still mean to me sometimes."

"He's over here, Karen," Ann hollered at her friend.

"Related?" I asked.

The brown haired man shrugged and tossed a handful of weeds onto the growing pile. "She's my cousin. My Aunt and Uncle own the vineyard."

I couldn't quite describe the way Karen looked at me when she walked up. Standing there shirtless and covered in sweat, her look made me feel like I was a Popsicle on a hot day or something like that. "What?"

"I just wanted to return your jacket," she told me, tucking a wayward strand of hair back behind her ear. She held the black leather coat out. "You're a lifesaver, thank you."

"You want to meet the rest of my family?" I asked, taking the coat and hanging it over a railing of the fence that surrounded my croplands and pasture. I turned and belted out a sharp whistle that was promptly answered by a bark. Spatz came running up, a dirt covered Kairi chasing him and giggling. "This is Spatz, and my daughter Kairi."

"He's not too bright, is he," Karen stated, watching as Spatz stepped on one of his ears and plowed face first into the dirt. Kairi shrieked and practically jumped on the downed dog, who responded by licking her face hard enough to wipe most of the dirt off it.

I shook my head and bent to pick up my shirt. "Kairi, come here," I called. When she stood in front of me, I used my shirt to wipe the rest of the dirt off of her face; she just grinned up at me. Picking her up in my arms I said, "You met Ann, right? This is her friend, Miss Karen."

All of a sudden shy, Kairi held one hand up in front of her mouth and gave a tiny wave with the other. I rolled my eyes and set her back down on the ground; as soon as her little boots touched the dirt, she was running at the dog to deliver another flying tackle.

"Anyways, I've got to go," Karen turned to leave.

"Say, Karen, why don't you come over here tonight for some drinks?" Cliff suggested. "I've got a little leftover money, so I can go to the bar and pick something up. And I'll tell Duke you'll be over here, not working."

"Whatever." She tossed the word over her shoulder, not pausing as she left my farm.

I looked at Cliff for a moment, and then turned my head. "Kairi, it's time for lunch!" As a group, we all headed for the house and the sandwiches Ann and Cliff had made the night before.

We all sat down around the table in the kitchen and started to eat. "How much do you think we can plant in the extra space we've cleared?" I asked Cliff.

He thought for a moment. "Four or five bags of seeds," he answered.

"We've got a little over two thousand gold in the farm bank account," I told him, pulling out a bag full of coins and rattling it. "Think you can make a trip into town when we're done? Pick up a thousand gold worth of cabbage seeds? We'll plant them and water them this afternoon."

Cliff shook his head with a grin. "Three days on the farm, and you'll already have fifteen sacks worth of seeds planted."

I toasted him with a glass of water, ducking a piece of bread crust that Kairi had launched. "I just hope that everything I've heard about how fast and how big the vegetables from here grow is true," I said before downing the liquid.

At the end of the day, we had more than planted and watered the cabbage seeds. We had done more weeding, and created three full wheelbarrow loads of gravel out of the rocks littering the property. Ann had gone home not too long after lunch was over, and Cliff headed over to Greene Ranch to have dinner with her. That left Kairi and I alone at the house for the afternoon.

Shortly after I put Kairi to bed and got her to sleep with a bedtime story, Cliff and Ann showed back up. My hired help pulled out a bottle of wine and started filling glasses. "Is Karen coming over?" Ann asked.

Cliff nodded. "She should be. When I picked up the wine, I told Duke what was happening. He didn't have a problem with it, but Karen probably knew he wouldn't. She'll be here."

No sooner had he said that than there was a knock on the door. Ann opened it to reveal her friend, who in turn flopped down in one of the two lounge chairs in my living room. I took the other, leaving the loveseat for Cliff and Ann, who were passing out the glasses of wine. While Ann and Cliff held a lively discussion on what they thought we should do with the farm, I simply leaned back in my chair and stared expressionless at the ceiling. I didn't even bother looking down when I was taking drinks out of my wine glass. Karen, I could see out of the corner of my eye, was systematically looking over the pictures on the walls and mantle.

Ann, I quickly discovered, had absolutely no alcohol tolerance. As soon as she finished her first glass of wine, her face flushed and her speech started to slur. Cliff helped her up off of the couch and out the door, stammering about taking her home. Karen silently got up and followed him out after putting her glass in the sink in the kitchen. I opened my bottle of whisky. Don't get me wrong: I'm not a drunk. I have Kairi, and for her sake I can't get drunk. On the other hand, I do drink just enough to get a slight buzz and be able to forget my ever-present depression without having to worry about a hangover.

The next morning, I was shocked when I looked out at the vegetables we had planted. The turnips already seemed to be nearly fully grown, and the potatoes were starting to sprout leaves. Cliff and I made it through watering the crops and settled down to do some more weeding. We figured that if we spend the entire day pulling weeds, we should have the rest of the field cleared. When we hit the day's end, we did.

My fourth day on the farm brought another shock: the five bags of turnips we had planted were ready for harvest. It didn't take long to get them all into the shipping bin; after harvesting, I sent Cliff back into town to spend our last thousand gold on another five bags of cabbage seeds.

Since it was Sunday, and we'd worked like dogs for the last four days, as soon as the new seeds were planted and watered we stopped working. Cliff hurried away to the mountain to spend some time hunting with Cain, and Kairi and I got dressed in swimming clothes to head to the beach. By noon, we were down at the empty beach splashing in the surf. When the three year old got tired of the water, she started digging in the sand along with two boys and a girl who were older than she was. I remembered Ann introducing them as Kent, Stu, and May.

I leaned back against the cliff wall and lit a cigarette, stashing the pack back away inside the bundle of towels I had brought for when we finished here. Within five minutes of my sitting down, Spatz came running and barking down the pathway from the house. True to his nature, he plowed straight through the pile of sand that Kairi had made; he yelped when she tried to grab his tail then barked taunts at her when she and the other kids started to chase him around the sand.

"Are those two always that busy?" Karen's voice startled me from my oceanic daydreams. I hadn't even noticed her following Spatz onto the beach.

"Pretty much," I answered.

She sat down next to me, hugging her knees to her chest and watching Kairi and the dog play. For some reason, I was having a hard time taking my eyes off her. Her slim, hourglass figure was clad only in a two piece swimsuit with a towel around her waist, and that image was beginning to dominate my mind. "So, I talked to Ann this morning," she began. I pulled another cigarette out and lit it, offering her one. Karen shook her head. "She told me about your wife." I didn't say anything; instead, I blew some smoke rings. "I'm sorry," she finished.

I shrugged. "Not your fault. So, you're Cliff's cousin?" I asked, trying to turn the conversation in another direction.

"Yep. You know," she told me with a sad smile, "Cliff was going to show me around the city. But after your grandpa helped us get the vineyard back to what it was, all of my interest in leaving just disappeared. Even though I still live with my parents, my desire to leave just disappeared."

The look of this gorgeous young woman in a bathing suit eventually started taking its toll on me, so, after a half an hour of chit chat I decided to do something about it. And the something that I did was walk down the dock and jump into the cool ocean water. I held my head underwater for a couple of extra seconds, letting the cool temperature settle my body down before surfacing. When I broke the surface there was Karen, treading water in front of me and looking into my eyes.

If I thought the sight of her in a swimsuit was attention worthy, I had to admit it was nothing compared to seeing her in said swimsuit and wet. Slowly, my gaze made its way up from the blurred sight of her chest to get lost in her eyes. My peripheral vision caught sight of the droplets of water making their course down her long, brown hair, then I noticed the little drops of water that were traveling down her shoulders and neck towards the ocean.

Ever so slowly, we moved towards each other. Really, I don't think either of us noticed how close we were getting until we were crushing our mouths together. I growled into our kiss, pushing her back up against one of the dock's pilings as her legs tightened around my waist.

"What about—" I panted when our lips separated. I couldn't get any more words out before moving my lips down to where her neck joined her shoulders.

"They're at the other end of the beach," she gasped back, giving a small moan as I pulled the straps of her top down.

An image of my dead wife suddenly popped into my brain, stopping my movements and prompting me to bang my head on the piling we were leaning against. "I can't do this," I groaned. "I just can't."

When I pulled my head back to look at her face, Karen's green eyes seemed to be on fire. "Want to bet?" she asked heatedly. One of her hands gripped the back of my neck to support her, but the other began to make its way down my chest and abs. She leaned in to nibble at my ear, and the feeling of her pressing her chest against me drove all thought from my brain.

"It is a lot nicer here than in the city," I murmured, lying on my back on my beach towel with a cigarette between my lips. "No traffic, you don't have to worry about getting mugged, you don't have to constantly keep an eye on the people around your kid . . . This place has a lot going for it."

"True, true," Cliff agreed from a couple of feet away. Ann, I knew, was half laying on him as they sunbathed. The two of them had come down to the beach only a handful of minutes after Karen and I had pulled ourselves out of the water, flushed and tired. Now, the aforementioned brunette was lying down on the opposite side of Cliff and Ann from me. "Although anything you need is at your fingertips in the city."

Ann snorted. "What does the city have that you can't find here?" She demanded drowsily.

"Lots of stores," Karen commented. "Concerts, movie theaters, public transportation, lots of people, places to live where you don't have to stay with your parents . . ."

"Public parks and zoos," Ann admitted. "And amusement parks with lots of rides!" She giggled. "Those are good, even though we're supposed to be too old for them."

"Misery," Cliff suggested. "The most miserable I have ever been was when I was living in Carston Mills. You should try supporting yourself working only a fast food job."

We were all silent for a moment, contemplating the clouds that were cruising overhead. "Jack? Can you think of anything that you could find in Carston Mills that you can't find here?" Ann asked, referring to the nearby city that Cliff and I had come from to get to Flowerbud.

I took a long drag on my cigarette before responding. "Pain," I commented. "Find yourself in-laws who didn't like you from the beginning and blame you for the death of their child, and try to live around that." That was true to my style. Whenever I sit around and start thinking, it usually means I'm not going to be happy. Put anyone around me, and I can usually bring down anyone's good mood at that point.

After my little speech, all four of us fell asleep as the shadow of the cliff bordering the beach began to cover us, saving us all from getting sunburned. We dozed throughout the late afternoon, finally waking up when the air started to get chilly and Kairi and Spatz decided it was time to leave.

Lying in my bed and staring at the ceiling, my stomach started to knot. My heart was screaming that I had betrayed Erin today, and it was tearing me apart. I knew that my head was trying to get in an argument on my behalf, but the feeling of being a traitor drowned it out.

I could really start to like this girl, Karen, I knew. She seemed to be reaching out for someone who could understand a semblance of whatever pain it was that shaped her attitude, and deep down I knew I could do something to help. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that I could feel myself falling for her because I could understand how she felt, but I was torn between doing that and betraying the memory of the woman who had been a soul mate to me, or staying single and raising Kairi on my own. Without any help from anyone.

With that dilemma twisting my brain into knots, I didn't get any sleep that night.