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Ismay looked up from her phone. “No.”
“Is that normal?”
Since he was so much better at the game than she was, he’d been teaching her various strategies instead of just beating her over and over again. But when he’d excused himself to use the bathroom, she’d immediately thought of Jack and checked to see if her brother had responded to any of her calls or texts. “I don’t know. He’s never gone through anything like this before,” she said, laying her phone back on the table.
“Have you talked to anyone else in the family today?” Bo had changed into his own clothes as soon as they came out of the dryer, and she was washing Mort’s robe. She knew he’d hated wearing it, but now he had clean dry clothes, he’d eaten his second egg salad sandwich for the day, as well as a salad, and he was safe instead of risking his life on the roof of a home he didn’t even own. Ismay felt good about all of that and refused to consider it meant she was supporting his position over that of the rich family who was hosting her—her prospective in-laws, no less.
“My brother Hank texted me to say he’s worried, too,” she replied. “And I spoke to my mother this morning.”
Bo sat down across from her again. “How’s everyone taking the news?”
“They’re just as shocked and upset as Jack is.”
“Would you say you’re a close family?”
“I would. I mean...my parents never had a lot of money, especially when we were little. We had to use our imaginations and get creative to have fun.” She remembered playing hide-and-seek in the barn and other outbuildings, driving the tractor and helping to pick whatever fruits or vegetables her father felt he could sell. “A farm is a good place to grow up.”
“I bet.” He started to move the pawns back to their starting positions on the board. “What does your father grow?”
“Pumpkins, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, peaches. Brigham City, which is nearby, is known for its peaches. It even has a peach festival that started as a day off from the harvest and has been going since the early 1900s. So he put in an orchard about ten years ago.”
“I love peaches,” Bo said.
“I’ll have to send you a box when they’re ripe. There’s absolutely nothing better than the ones my father grows.”
“Did you work on the farm as a child?”
“Some. But as I grew older, I was relegated to the kitchen to help my mother cook, clean, and can.”
“Your folks are traditional.”
“Very.”
“How old are your siblings?”
She finished the last of her beer. “Jack is twenty-five. Hank is twenty-two and recently graduated from college. Ryan is twenty and chose to attend the University of Utah instead of Utah State, which is as radical as my family gets,” she said with a chuckle. “Liam is seventeen and will finish high school next year. Terrence is fifteen, a sophomore. And Oliver and William are twelve and thirteen, only eighteen months apart. They’re in middle school.”
“That’s a big family.”
“It is.”
“How’d your folks manage having so many kids?”
“My father’s strict and can be a bit harsh now and then, but feeding and clothing so many isn’t easy, and we know he loves us. That’s the important thing, I guess.”
As he finished lining up the other chess pieces, Ismay wondered if Bo was comparing her family to his own and couldn’t help feeling she should’ve made hers sound less idyllic. But she had to be fair to her parents at the same time.
“What’s Tremonton like?” he asked.
“It’s in the Bear River Valley of northern Utah. Has a population of about nine thousand people, which is small, but it’s not far from bigger towns like Logan. Low crime rate. Religion is a big part of the culture.”
“Areyoureligious?”
“Not anymore. I was never really interested, even when I was young, and became even less so when I went away to college.”
“And that’s okay with your parents?”
“Not really,” she said ruefully. She knew they were disappointed, but to her, what was most important was having integrity and being a good person. “They’d like to see me come back to the church.”
