Gnome On The Range Read Online Free PDF Page A

than anyone else in town. She was the expert on fun, he the consequences.
    “John Poleski was there with his wife and grandson. Fortunately he had that pacemaker put in last year.”
    John Poleski was eighty if he was a day, shaped like a tall Humpty Dumpty and bald. He’d worked for the railroad on the highline near Malta, a small town near the Canadian border, for decades. I’d never seen him in anything but overalls.
    I rolled my eyes at her as I rung up a sale for strawberry flavored body lotion and a DVD rental of Hit Me With Your Black Cock.
    “Wish I’d been there.” She chuckled. “I’ve got to kiss my grandson for stirring things up.” Goldie was all for stirring things up. She’s Bozeman’s Stir-Things-Up Queen. She liked to stick her nose in everyone’s business, which was easy to do around here. “John also said you met Ty Strickland. He’s a real man. I bet he’s good with his hands.” She waggled her eyebrows at me.
    I dreaded where this was going. I decided to take the high road. “I’ll definitely remember him when my snow blower stops working.”
    She clicked her manicured nails on the glass topped display case full of the higher end toys. “Snow blower, my ass. He can take care of other things you need worked on, Jane.” She looked at me, her head tilted down to give me a beady-eyed gaze. “You need sex and that man can give it to you.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind,” I grumbled walking over to the hanging racks with the lingerie.
    “It’s been, what, three years since Nate’s been gone. How long before that?”
    This was a typical conversation I had with my mother-in-law. She’d talk sex with the pope. Although I thought the pope would be more comfortable than I was at the moment. This was her son—her dead son—she was talking about. But she was the first to admit his elevator hadn’t gone all the way up and it had skipped the morals department all together.
    “Obviously you did it to have Bobby and that’s been, what, five years or so?” She looked up in the air at her imaginary calculator.
    “Holy crap,” I whispered. I’d have sex with the first guy who came through the door if Goldie would just shut up.
    “Honey, I’ve known you since you were a little baby freshman at MSU.”
    MSU, or MontanaStateUniversity, was practically downtown, in fact only a few blocks from my house. “Coming from a state like Maryland, I swear you didn’t know one end of a cow from another.”
    It was true. I hadn’t.
    “Didn’t know one end of a man from the other, either.” She chuckled. “You met Nate right away. I bet he was your first too, hmm?” She winked at me.
    No way was I answering that one. She knew the answer.
    “Then you up and married him. Your first. Your only .” She casually rearranged the basket of foiled condoms we offered like mints to customers. “Your Mama has always entrusted me to be there for you. I swear Savannah’s gotta be on the other side of the world and you needed all the help you can get. Still do, for that matter.”
    Goldie had been a fixture in my life from the very beginning of my fateful relationship with her son. Sweet and kind, yet over the top crazy, I’d fallen in love with her almost as fast as I had Nate. Since I’d grown up in Maryland, Bozeman was as far from home geographically as possible, barring moving to Alaska. Lifestyle-wise, it would have been more familiar to me if I’d been launched into space.
    At the time, I’d wanted something different, something far away. My dad had walked out and my mom divorced his sorry ass lickety split. I’d figured I’d find myself in Montana. I was still working on that one. During my college years, my mom moved south to Savannah to find herself , and Goldie became a substitute mom as I settled into Bozeman. My real mom, more apt to wear Lily Pulitzer than Levi’s, had forged an unusual bond with Goldie and was comfortable with her acting as mom-by-proxy.
    “The way I see it, you’re