When Scott Met Annie

Chapter 9: The Other Hale Sister

The next day went more or less the same way. Annie made a few calls to some friends of hers around the town, and Scott wracked his brain for something that he could do to be useful. He insisted on helping to clean up after meals, at least, and whatever else he could do around the house, but he really was trying to find something that he could do to earn his keep. He felt bad that Annie was doing so much, and it couldn't have been easy to suddenly switch to buying groceries for twice as many people.

He wondered briefly when he'd started thinking about contributing as if this was a long-term arrangement, but if he thought about it too long, he was convinced he was going to mess this up somehow and half ready to leave, so he tried not to think about it too much.

When they weren't combing through the help wanted ads and searching online — he was grateful that Annie didn't say anything when she noticed that he had narrowed his search to the Anchorage area — Annie would sit next to him on the couch with her feet tucked up underneath her as she told him stories about her family and tried to get stories out of him as well.

He was more interested in listening to her stories, though. She and her sisters just sounded so close. Theresa and her husband worked in Atlanta — both of them for the WHO — while Annie's parents watched their little grandson during the day. ("He's darling. His name is Oman, and he's painfully shy, but he knows everyone's names. He can talk, but he doesn't really talk to anyone but his pappaw and his dad.") And then there was Rachel, who lived five minutes away and stayed home with the two girls. Leslie Ann was set to start Kindergarten in Annie's class that year, and Mary Beth was learning to count to ten and what sounds animals made.

It was obvious she loved every one of them the way she talked about them, and it was even more obvious how much she was loved as she talked about how Rachel, the oldest of the three Hale sisters, had come up to take care of her baby sister when Annie had moved all the way up to Anchorage on her own. Or about how Anton had stepped in on more than one occasion if he thought any catcalling was getting out of hand — for Rachel or for Annie. Or about how Theresa and her husband would travel the world on assignment and would come back with new recipes that they could add to their steadily growing stash.

Scott didn't feel like he had much that could match up to Annie's stories, especially not when they were filled with so much loving detail, like the fact that Leslie Ann was already missing her first tooth but it wouldn't grow in for a long time because it simply wasn't ready yet — Mary Beth had thrown a bottle and knocked it out.

He tried to tell her about the team back in Westchester, since that, really, was home for him. He told her the story of meeting Bobby — and how much trouble they'd gotten themselves into — and before he could say anything further, she had already asked him to do the same for how he'd met Hank, since that was the only one of his friends that she had met so far.

But he really was more interested in Annie's stories, and at his prompting, she told him about how Leslie Ann had been just a few months old when she graduated college and how her first word had been 'no,' to the consternation of both of her parents, especially when her second word was 'stop' and her third was 'mine'. Rachel was horrified, and Annie thought it was hilarious.

He was grinning all the way through her animated storytelling — which continued even as she went to the kitchen and came back with Phoebe's bag, and then it continued as she pulled out bandages and cream, and it continued all the way up through unwrapping the bandages he was wearing — though she stopped her story about the last time Anton had gotten desk duty for crossing the chief ("I'm sure he's on desk duty again right now, but pretend you don't know that for the sake of his pride; he likes to brag about pissing off the chief on his own.") when she finished with his arms.