Argosy Junction by Chautona Havig

have plans for them to come up this weekend. patience and their little girl took to each other immediately so that’ll be good. she’ll be out of our hair a bit anyway. she sure misses you. i’ve never seen anything like it. she’s always hated strangers—especially men.
    i’d planned to tell you more about the wheatleys, but miss IMA here is driving me crazy. time for me to hand over the keyboard and then get her outside. vet is coming for a consultation about breeding cardiff.
    shoved out of the chair,
    tad
     
    Matt laughed. It sounded just like the Argosy banter. He clicked “next” and read Patience’s missive. His mother had some of her old childhood books in a box somewhere. Maybe in the storeroom in the basement of the building. He’d see if there was anything in there a little girl would like to share with a friend.
    Lane’s email struck a hilarious cord with him. Her “sonnet,” a parody of the poem by Joyce Kilmer, was just close enough to the original to make it familiar and off enough to show her dislike of poetry in general. He’d have to tease her about not studying her literature courses more closely.
    He typed www.letterbox.com into his Internet browser and signed out of his account. Within minutes, he had an account created for Lane that would give her some privacy in hopes that it would encourage her to continue writing. He signed back out again and sent another email.
     
     
    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    Subject: The Ins and Outs of Email
     
    Dear Lane,
    You are never going to let me live down my sheep attack, are you? Of course, it sounds more dramatic as a poem, and by the way, it is a poem, not a sonnet. Look up the structure of a sonnet; I think you’ll find it interesting. I’ve never written one, but maybe I’ll try.
    I created a letterbox.com account for you. The address is [email protected] and the password is 123sonnets4me, but you should change it to whatever you’ll remember. If you check the little box at the bottom the email that you compose, under the ‘send’ button, it’ll ask for a “return receipt.” That’ll send you an email when the recipient opens it, and you’ll know exactly when it was opened.
    I sent you and Patience a regular letter today. Mom and Dad are out to the buffet for dinner, but they’ll be home soon, and Mom will probably want to surf a bit before bedtime so I should go.
    Tell Tad to get that mountain lion for me and please give Cardiff an apple; Mama horses need their treats. Remember that owl that used to swoop down in the twilight? Tell him I said hello.
    Thinking Joyce Kilmer can eat his heart out,
    Matt
     
    ~*~*~*~
     
    “So he told Josiah that he wouldn’t do it. He said there was nothing in his contract forbidding anyone in particular from visiting his cabin and called Josiah’s bluff.”
    Rose Wheatley counted kitchen towels almost like punctuation to their conversation. Patience and Megan jumped rope outside the entrance and giggled as they shared the deep secrets of girls the world over. Lane watched everything around her with awe.
    “Why do you think he did that?” Rose’s voice sounded absent-minded as she rearranged colored glass salt and pepper cellars in several colors.
    The question threw Lane off guard. She pondered the idea as she swiped dust off teapots in a door less china cupboard. “I don’t know. I never questioned it. It’s exactly what you’d expect of Matt.”
    “It was the talk of the town. I couldn’t go anywhere for days without hearing of the ‘scandal.’” Rose made quotation marks in the air as she whispered the word scandal conspiratorially. “It got to the point where I told people I was tired of the gossip.”
    “Do you think it was gossip? What is the difference between talking about it with them and talking about it with me?”
    Rose took the duster from Lane’s hands and wiped the tops of the jars before passing it back to her. “Well, I’d say