Home Fires by Margaret Maron

’Course it’ll be—
you
know—restricted?”
    I’m told it’s still restricted, but I don’t have firsthand knowledge since none of us ever joined and no Knott ever swam there.
    Uncle Ash and Aunt Zell have an in-ground lap pool for his heart and Robert and Doris have one of those big blue plastic prefab things out back of their house for their grandchildren, but unless we’re at the coast, the rest of us have pretty much made do with Possum Creek.
    This was going to be a lot more convenient and I wondered why some of my brothers hadn’t done it a long time ago. Was it because the spring-fed ponds had been dredged for utilitarian reasons? For irrigation and fishing, not for swimming?
    I walked out on the solid planking and admired everything the kids had done. As I stood on the very end, Herman’s son Reese came up dripping from the water at my feet and grabbed my ankle. My ball cap flew off and I felt myself falling through the sunlit air to land with a huge splash in deep cool water.
    Even with all my clothes on, it felt wonderful, although when I got my hands on Reese, I tried to sit on his head for catching me off guard like that.
    Stevie, home on summer vacation from Carolina, was standing on the pier laughing his head off when Seth’s Jessica gave him a mighty shove from behind.
    Soon the water was swarming with fully clothed whooping and hollering kids, all from here in the neighborhood. Oh well, I thought. Kids—even farm kids—have so many sophisticated distractions these days. Maybe the pier’s homespun novelty would wear off before my house was finished and this privacy thing became an issue. I missed A.K. and his sister, though. Normally they would be here with the rest.
    When I was thoroughly cool, I climbed out and sat on the pier to squeeze water from my shirt and shorts.
    “Hey, you know what?” said Emma, treading water in front of me. “For Deborah’s housewarming gift, we ought to take up a collection and buy her a beach.”
    “A beach?” asked Stevie, who was floating nearby.
    “Yeah. A dump truck full of sand. How much could it cost?”
    “Do you know how many truckloads it’d take to make even a ten-foot-wide beach?” said her brother Lee. “It’d cost a pure fortune.”
    “And your only paternal aunt’s not worth a fortune?” I cooed sweetly.
    They all hooted and I had to scuttle down the planked pier toward land to keep from getting splashed again.
✡      ✡      ✡
    My sneakers squished with every step as I walked up to the house still dripping water. My ball cap was the only thing that had escaped a soaking.
    Delight welled up in me as I viewed my new house. Pride of ownership, too. From the outside, it was starting to look like a proper dwelling now that the roof was on and most of the siding was up. The south windows had been set since I was last out, which meant that Sheetrocking couldn’t be too far behind.
    I had stopped at a store on the way out and filled a cooler with soft drinks and as I pulled it out of the trunk of my car, Will appeared at my elbow.
    “Let me help you with that, little sister,” he said, grabbing the other end.
    Seth had offered to oversee the construction and Haywood was all set to get his feelings hurt if I didn’t choose him even though both brothers were knee-deep in tobacco when the bank finished approving my loan and I was ready to break ground. Fortunately, summer is the slowest season in Will’s auctioneering business and for some reason, he really wanted to do this for me. Since Will actually worked in construction for a couple of years after he left the farm, I agreed.
    Will’s my mother’s oldest child, good-looking and a bit of a rounder. You can’t always count on him to finish what he starts, but when he does work, he works smart. Sometimes the other boys feel a little jealous and say I’m more partial to Seth, so it helps when I can favor one of them over Seth.
    We carried the cooler onto what would be a