Читать книгу Picket Fence Promises - Kathryn Springer - Страница 7

But I couldn’t tell him that. Not yet. After so many years, how did a person drop that bombshell into a conversation? By the way, remember when I left twenty years ago? I didn’t realize I was pregnant. I decided not to tell you and I gave the baby up for adoption. I didn’t think you were serious about me…about us…and I was too scared to take the risk.

“Alex, why are you here? Really?” The tangled threads of the past, the ones that God and I had been painstakingly snipping over the past few months, were starting to wrap themselves around my feet again, threatening to trip me up.

“I told you—”

“You’re on vacation,” I finished, rolling my eyes. “Well, those of us who aren’t on vacation need to go back to work. I have an appointment in five minutes.”

How could I get rid of him? Maybe a case of frostbite from Prichett’s cold shoulder would discourage him from staying.

“I’ll tag along. I have some suitcases to move before they get confiscated. Ordinance B31, section eighteen.”

It wasn’t fair that he had a sense of humor about all this. I searched for mine and realized it had probably left at the same time the limo did.

Alex paid the bill and left a generous tip for Sally. The skittering up my spine told me that everyone was watching us as we walked to the door. Alex thought that everyone was protecting me, but I realized that I was protecting him, making sure that he was in front of me on the way out. One never knew when a rogue dinner roll could fly out of nowhere and hit someone in the back of the head. I wasn’t going to take any chances.

“So where is this bed-and-breakfast you were telling me about?”

“The Lightning—um, the Weeping Willow? It’s three blocks down, turn right and it’s the last house at the end of the street.” Another twinge of guilt but I rationalized it away, reminding myself that it was too late in the season for thunderstorms. At least if he wasn’t safe from Charity’s bird, he was safe from another lightning strike. I could live with that.

“So, how about dinner?”

Why was it that I couldn’t remember where I’d left my car keys or why I’d walked into the kitchen, but I could remember that those had been the exact words Alex had said to me the day we met? Another question to ask God when we finally met face-to-face. I’d started a list.

“I can’t.”

“You have a date.”

I almost laughed. A date. Oh, those gross brown fruit things that look like crayfish with no legs? Because that’s the only kind of date Bernice Strum is familiar with….

“No, just plans I can’t change.”

“Where do you live? Maybe I can stop by later this evening.”

“Look up.”

“What?”

“Up.” I repeated the word patiently, even though my heart had just shifted into high gear. I didn’t want him to stop by later. Stopping by meant conversation. Conversation would lead to questions like, What’s been happening in your life? Which would lead to answers like, Our daughter found me after twenty years and she’s smart and beautiful and she has your smile….

Alex was looking around, trying to figure out if I was nesting in one of the oak trees in the park or maybe on the roof of the post office.

“Do you see those windows? I live there. Above the salon.”

“I thought you always wanted a house with a picket fence.”

Something snagged in my throat. It took a minute before I could squeeze some words out around it. “It made sense to be close to where I work.”

“This town is the size of a nine-hole golf course,” Alex pointed out helpfully. “I can’t imagine that anywhere you lived would be that far from work.”

The house I’d had my eye on for years wasn’t for sale but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I couldn’t pay rent on the building plus make a house payment. Even with some creative stretching, my budget couldn’t perform those kinds of fiscal gymnastics. When I’d moved to Prichett and opened the salon, I told myself the apartment would be temporary but somehow it had become my “temporary” home for the past ten years.

“Well, your suitcases are still here. All five—” how long was he planning to stay? “—of them.” Again, stating the obvious is a gift of mine but I hoped Alex would take the hint.

“There probably isn’t a taxi service here, is there?”

“Munroe has one but it’s half an hour away. By the time they got here…”

Alex’s hand lifted. “I get the picture. Small town. No extras.”

“Prichett has plenty of extras.” I had to correct him because the snowflakes returned as if on cue. Tiny white parachutes that drifted down and got caught in Alex’s hair. “Just not the kind that you expect.”

“Intriguing.” Alex’s box-office smile surfaced for a moment and he gathered up his luggage. “I’ll see you later.”

I had just enough time to unlock the door and turn the lights on when the bells jingled and Mindy came in.

“How are you today, Bernice?”

For Mindy Lewis, this was not a polite greeting. She wasn’t inquiring about my overall emotional well-being, either. Thank goodness. No, Mindy wanted specifics. Do I have an upset stomach? A low-grade fever? The sniffles? In other words, do I have anything wrong with me that has the potential to jump track via the germ train and get her sick?

“I’m fine. Have a seat, Mindy.” I smiled and patted the chair by the sink. Snapping the cape around her neck, I fought the irresistible urge to cough.

Be a grown-up, Bernice.

“I saw a man dragging a bunch of suitcases down the street,” Mindy said. “But I didn’t get a good look at him. From the direction he was headed, it looked like he was going to the Lightning Strike.”

If grapevines had taproots, Prichett’s would be Mindy.

I tried to postpone the inevitable by changing the subject. I wasn’t about to tell Mindy that Alex Scott had chosen Prichett over the French Riviera for his vacation. “How’s Greta doing these days?”

Greta is Mindy’s niece, her brother’s youngest daughter. There aren’t many teenagers like Greta in Prichett. She dresses in black from head to toe, but that’s just to throw people off. She designed Elise’s dress for the pageant and I know she has a colorful soul.

“Tired lately. Senior year, you know. She’s supposed to find out any day now if she’s been accepted by that college in New York.”

The door opened and Jim Briggs stepped inside. Mindy began to bounce up and down so much that I was tempted to make her sit in the elephant chair. It came equipped with a seat belt for rambunctious toddlers but there were many times I was tempted to stuff fidgety adults into it, too.

If there were an eligible bachelor in Prichett, it would be Jim. He’d sold the family farm and started an excavating business, which must have been successful because a few years ago he built a brand-new, two-story house just outside the city limits. I tried really hard not to drool over the picket fence.

Jim and I had met shortly after I’d moved to town. He’d shocked me by stopping in at the salon even though the majority of the men in Prichett seem to regard personal grooming the same way a stray dog would. When they got too shaggy, they’d go to the barbershop, which had the macho name of the Buzz and Blade. I never confessed to anyone that that was the reason, in a moment of attempted wit, that I named my salon the Cut and Curl. The trouble was, no one got it. So much for being witty.

For reasons that I didn’t want to question, Jim had passed the Buzz and Blade that day and stopped in to see if I had time to cut his hair. His reason became obvious while he was in the shampoo chair. His warm, chocolate-brown eyes stared up at me as he’d tried to woo the new girl in town. I may have been flattered, except that his unique brand of romance was telling me that since we were both over twenty-one and single—and because I had a past the town could only guess at—maybe we should get together. As an afterthought, he mentioned pizza.

So I dyed his hair green.

He ran all the way to the Buzz and Blade and I don’t quite know what happened after that. All I know is that Jim has avoided me ever since and no one else—the cowards—had asked me out on a date since.

And now here he was, shaking snow out of his hair and pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“That’s regular,” I told him.

He made a face. “Is there anything else?”

I’d seen Jim in church just this past Sunday. Elise told me he’d been attending for a few years now but I wouldn’t have known that because I just started to go to church a few months ago myself.

“Is there something I can do for you?” I asked cautiously. Wax your eyebrows? Dye your hair green?

He smiled. “Two things.”

Uh-oh. For his sake, one of those things better not be pizza. I could tell by the way that Mindy’s body had gone completely still that her brain was already set on Record.

“I just joined the PAC and Candy told me I should talk to you about what subcommittee to serve on.”

PAC was the Prichett Advancement Council. Candy had started it shortly after she was elected mayor. Most of the businesses on Main Street were represented, the Cut and Curl included. Candy had finagled me into serving as vice chairman right at the beginning and ten years later I was still the vice chairman. Not because I was such a great vice chairman but because no one else wanted the job. The other committee members had the responsibility of bringing brownies or making sure there were disposable coffee cups for the meeting. I had to convince everyone that change was a good thing. Brownies were definitely easier.

“We don’t have subcommittees.” What was Candy thinking? “We all just kind of pitch in and do whatever needs to be done.”

“She mentioned there was a new committee forming because of the grant the city received last week. Something about the arts?”

“We got that grant?” I couldn’t believe it. Prichett was barely a dot on the Wisconsin map and we’d actually received the grant that Candy had applied for two years ago?

“So she says. She’s pretty excited about it.”

I could only imagine.

“A grant for what?” Mindy interrupted.

Sorry, were we talking too fast for you to take mental notes?

“Candy applied for a special state grant that pays for something in the area of the arts. If we got the grant, we decided to put a sculpture in the park.”

“That’s a good idea.” Mindy’s head bobbed enthusiastically, almost dislodging the clips I’d put in her hair. “Especially since we’re getting new playground equipment in the spring.”

The new playground equipment was compliments of Elise. When she won the pageant, she received a check to donate to her favorite cause. Since the playground equipment had been in the park before the invention of a neat little thing called plastic, it definitely needed replacing.

“What’s the sculpture going to look like?” Jim poured himself another cup of coffee. I was tempted to tell him that I hoped he had a good book handy, because with that much caffeine speeding through his system, he wasn’t going to fall asleep until Saturday.

“We haven’t decided yet.” Honestly, the chances of receiving the grant had been so small we hadn’t even discussed it. “I suppose that’s why Candy wants a separate committee.”

In a way that was good because our PAC meetings lasted three or four hours as it was. It may have had something to do with the fact that Prichett’s idea of advancement was one step forward and three steps back. As vice chairman, it was up to me to nudge them into taking the one step forward. Sometimes the nudging took months.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll put myself on that committee, then,” Jim said. “It sounds like fun.”

Fun? The words “PAC” and “fun” just couldn’t exist in the same sentence as far as I was concerned.

“I will, too,” Mindy chimed in.

“You have to be a business owner to be in PAC,” I reminded her. I took out the blow dryer and glanced at Jim before I turned it on. “You said there were two things?”

“Yeah, I also need a trim. Do you have a few minutes between appointments?”

I could tell Mindy wanted to linger and find out if there was something going on between me and Jim by the way she counted out my tip in change instead of parting with the five-dollar bill I saw peeking out of her purse.

“Oh, Greta needs an appointment to get her hair done for the Senior Tea,” Mindy remembered. I may have denial down to an art, but Mindy has perfected delay tactics.

I checked my appointment book. The Senior Tea was one of the highlights of the year and my schedule was always tight that day. According to legend, The Tea started years ago as the final exam for a chapter on etiquette in the home economics class. Somewhere along the way, finger sandwiches and punch served in foam cups evolved into its present-day extravaganza—a rite of passage for the senior girls that gave them the chance to wear formal dresses, have their hair done and sip tea out of bone china cups in Charity O’Malley’s music room.

It had gotten so popular that I had the girls calling me over the summer to book their hair appointments but I knew I would squeeze Greta in.

“I’ll schedule her at seven-thirty before my first appointment. It’s on the early side but otherwise I’m booked solid,” I said.

“I’ll tell her.” Reluctantly, Mindy took a slow, measured step away from the counter. Jim was already in the shampoo chair. A trim, huh? Where was the hair dye? Maybe orange this time, to coordinate with the Thanksgiving napkins…

The bells jingled mournfully as she left and I walked over to Jim.

“Okay, spill it. What’s going on?”

“On?” He frowned up at me, his expression way too innocent.

That was it. Two attractive, overly confident men in one day were plenty. More than plenty. “Take your pick—green or orange?”

Panic flared briefly in his eyes. “I just want you to be careful. That’s all.”

“Careful?” I was confused. “About what kind of sculpture we should have for the park?”

“About that guy you were with at Sally’s.”

Alex. He was warning me about Alex?

“And this would be your business…why?”

“I can put two and two together.”

And come up with eight.

“Or should I say one and one?”

Under normal circumstances, if someone would have shouldered their way into my life and given me advice that I didn’t want, I would have spun the chair around so many times that he would have experienced a g-force. Now I felt a familiar nudge inside and I knew Jesus wouldn’t approve.

I sighed. “You’re talking about Heather.”

“I saw you in church with her a while back. She looks like you. And him. Listen, Bernice, I know you’re right and that this is none of my business, but I always thought somewhere down the line someone broke your heart.”

“So, the little pizza party you invited me to when I moved to town was supposed to be a Band-Aid?” I asked, surprised that that little wound still hurt.

“I’m sorry about that.” Now Jim sighed. “I was just being stupid. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve regretted that. But…just be careful. Now, go ahead and dye my hair green if it makes you feel better.”

He was being protective of me. Just like Candy and Sally and the retired farmers in the café, who all went to the Buzz and Blade but knew who I was. There was a warm and fuzzy chenille feeling inside of me at the thought.

“How about a nice trim? We’ll skip the dye for the next time you ignore my No Trespassing sign, okay?”

After he left, I still had one more appointment and then I had to drive over to the Golden Oaks Nursing Home. Once a month I donated a few hours and cut the residents’ hair and then ate dinner with them. It also gave me a chance to spend more time with Esther and her husband, John.

Should I check on Alex? I chewed on my bottom lip as my brain and my heart tried to come up with an acceptable compromise. The irony of Jim’s warning came back to mock me. He’d assumed that Alex had broken my heart. Assumed that for someone like Alex to have fallen for someone like me would have been impossible. I’d assumed the same thing, which was why I’d left him. Knowing my heart was going to get broken, I’d simply saved him the trouble and done it myself.