“So you know something about flowers?” Flynn asked.

“Don’t look so surprised.” April gave him the old stink eye. “I do know how to do a few things.”

“Did you ever work in a flower shop?” Nessa asked as she whipped eggs and milk together, then added sugar and cinnamon.

“No, but I worked in several greenhouses,” April answered. “Of all the jobs I’ve had since I left here, those were my favorite ones.”

“Good, because I don’t like to work outside, and I hate to get dirt under my fingernails. I’ll gladly do the cooking if you’ll take care of the flower beds and the lawn,” Nessa said.

“It’s a deal.” April nodded.

“What about me? Do I get to sit on the porch and watch you two work?” Flynn refilled all their coffee cups.

“No, honey.” Nessa reached over and playfully pinched his cheek, then browned four pieces of toast. “You get to sit on the porch and wait until a pretty woman comes by. Then you get to chase her down and seduce her.”

“You haven’t changed a bit.” Flynn slapped her hand away. “I think they mixed all of us up as babies. I should have been a preacher’s son, and you should have been the daughter of the greatest smart-ass in Texas.”

“That’s pretty much what Daddy told me this very morning. You wouldn’t have lasted overnight in the house I grew up in.” Nessa went back to the stove and browned more toast in a big cast-iron skillet.

“As bossy as you are, Nessa, and as smug as you are, Flynn, y’all would have wilted and died if you’d grown up here,” April said. “Nanny Lucy was a wonderful lady, but she could put a guilt trip on a person that went all the way to the bottom of the soul, and believe me when I tell you that she knew very well how to wield a switch. Ten licks was the minimum.”

“Are you serious?” Nessa was stunned.

“Y’all knew her as a sweet nanny for two weeks. Somehow you being here was when she had good days,” April answered. “But I was the bastard offspring of the daughter who had disappointed her and then died four days after I was born. At least once a day, more in the days after y’all left and went back home, she reminded me that I had my mother’s genes, and I knew that was a bad thing from her tone. It didn’t seem to matter if she was having a good or a bad day. I was always a thorn in her side.”

Nessa could well understand what April was saying. Looking back, she’d always felt like one of those thorns for her father. “I guess that’s where my daddy got his ability to make me feel guilty about even the air I breathe.” Nessa talked as she cooked breakfast. “He could put a guilt trip on Jesus, and he practiced on me almost daily.”

Both women glanced over at Flynn.

“Hey, my dad was too busy either chasing women, getting married and then chasing women, or getting divorced because his wife caught him chasing women to ever even talk to me.” Flynn shrugged. “I was just a bratty kid that he didn’t want to raise but had to when my mama died. I pretty much did what I wanted from the time I went to live with him—no questions asked except on payday, when he held out his hand for half of what I made to pay for my room and board in his house.”

“We should call that childhood the O’Riley curse.” Nessa set a platter of toast and bacon on the table.

“Amen,” April and Flynn both said at the same time.

Chapter Five

When they went out into the shed that morning, Nessa walked all the way around the quilt. “I can show you how Mama and I did the smaller throws when we were making quilts for the elderly folks, but this is at least four times bigger than what I’m used to working on. On one like this, with only five-inch squares, my advice would be that we start on one side and work our way across, quilting around each square. This doesn’t look a thing like what Nanny Lucy usually made.”

“Why not start in three of the corners so we’re not all crammed up so close to each other?” Flynn asked. “With your temper, I sure wouldn’t want to accidentally stick you with a needle.”

“If you do that, then when you get to the middle, you’ll have wrinkles and bumps. You start on one side, then if there’s excess, it works itself out on the other side,” April explained. “Don’t look at me like that, Nessa. I know how to do the job. I just don’t like it, and neither did my mother.”

“How do you know what Rachel liked?” Flynn asked. “You were only four days old when she died. You can’t possibly remember anything about her.”

“No, I don’t. What I do know is that Mama was too wild to ever learn to do something profitable like quilting. But I never heard anything about what she did right, so I guess you’re right. I don’t know a lot about her, other than that I’m tall and blonde like she was, and I’m a total disappointment just like she was, too,” April answered.

Nessa wondered if the fact that Rachel had slept in the bedroom back before April had was the reason April didn’t want to go in there. Did she truly believe that the house had powers and a mind of its own to cause her pain and misery? And if she did, then why would she ever come back to Blossom?

“Must be that O’Riley curse we were talking about earlier,” Nessa said. “I didn’t get praise when I did something right, but I sure got yelled at when I did something wrong.”

“The curse presents in different ways. I wonder if Nanny Lucy’s ups and downs were part of the thing. Maybe that’s what got it all started to begin with.” Flynn sat down, picked up a spool of white thread from the edge of the quilt, and threaded a needle. “It’s nine thirty. I’m not putting a single stitch in after the clock hits twelve.”

“Me either.” April had already gotten her needle ready and had begun to stitch her area.

“After we eat lunch, I’m diving into the quilting cabinets in the garage.” Nessa hummed an old country tune as she stitched.

“Is that a hymn?” Flynn asked.

“Nope,” April answered for her cousin. “That’s Miranda Lambert’s song ‘The House That Built Me.’ In its own way, maybe this isn’t the house that built us. Maybe it’s what broke us all in some way because we are the kids that were produced from the kids that grew up here.”

Nessa nodded along to the lyrics in her head that said she’d gotten lost in the world and couldn’t remember who she was. She looked to her left at Flynn, and then to her right at her other cousin. April had been right. All three of them were broken—maybe in different ways, but broken all the same—and they were products of what had gone on in this house years ago.

Jackson used a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a block of wood instead of an electric sander to put the finishing touch on what he built. It gave him better control, and his pieces never had the swirls that a sander could cause. He’d been working on a hope chest to take to the next craft fair and thinking about the law firm he’d left behind five years ago. He’d never had a single regret, but here, lately, he’d found himself wishing for someone other than Tex to talk to during the long stretches between craft fairs, or when someone drove out to his place to pick up a piece of furniture.