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“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.
Chapter Four
I sat in my car for fifteen minutes trying to decide if I should stop by Charity’s. Hard to believe that when I woke up this morning, I thought the most challenging part of my day was going to be Mindy’s one o’clock appointment.
I put the car in Drive and inched my way down Main Street, pretty sure that I saw a kid on a tricycle pass me on the sidewalk.
“Fine.” I huffed the word out loud and made a quick right turn at the last second onto Lily Road.
Charity’s house was a bright spot of color, even surrounded as it was by the faded colors of fall. It was painted a cheerful buttery yellow, its gingerbread trim accented with a soothing ivory coupled with soft shades of sage and ochre. What gave it an unexpected touch of whimsy was the crimson front door that greeted her guests where the cobbled walkway ended.
Weirdly enough, right before I pressed the doorbell, I heard it ringing inside the house.
“Bernice!” Charity opened the door and greeted me like a long-lost relative. She was small and birdlike, her entire body enveloped in a lavender tasseled shawl that hung past her knees. She wore blue eye shadow and there was a brush of peach face powder on her cheeks, like a fine layer of dust on a piano. Pulling me down to her level, she brushed her face against mine. I caught the unmistakable scent of rose water.
“Bernice?” Alex suddenly darted into view farther down the hallway. He looked slightly rumpled and extremely glad to see me. And extremely handsome. Once again awe struggled with irritation. I mean, think about this. Does a woman really want to be with a man who’s better-looking than she is?
“I just stopped by to make sure you were settled.” Yes, I was defensive. Call it self-preservation against the pair of gorgeous blue eyes locked on me.
Charity chuckled. “Of course he’s settled, dear. I gave him my best room. The one with the fireplace. He’s from California, you know.”
At least Charity seemed to be treating him well. Maybe the grapevine hadn’t sent out runners to the side streets yet. Somehow, though, I sensed that it wouldn’t make a difference to Charity. She didn’t have many honest-to-goodness guests at the Lightning Strike—oops, the Weeping Willow and…
“‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’”
The words blared out of nowhere and I jumped. Charity put a calming hand on my arm.
“Come in and sit down. Murphy and I were just having tea with Mr. Scott.” I glanced at my watch as Charity shuffled past me.
Alex was at my side in a heartbeat. “You have time for tea, right, Bernice?” he whispered in my ear, his fingers wrapping around my elbow.
“Enjoying your vacation?” I whispered.
“Mrs. O’Malley is fine,” he whispered back. “It’s Murphy that I’m not too sure about. But then, he’s probably the reason why you sent me here instead of the Super 8, right?”
“There is no Super 8,” I reminded him under my breath.
“You’re looking very pretty today!” The words were chortled loudly just as we reached the doorway to the old-fashioned sitting room.
“Is he talking to you or me?” I murmured.
Alex’s response was to lightly pinch my arm. I yipped in surprise.
“Murphy, you’re such a charmer,” Charity chuckled.
I looked around the room for Charity’s other guest but all I saw was a grouping of empty watered-silk furniture swathed in plastic.
“‘Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting,’” the invisible Murphy shouted disapprovingly.
“And my beauty fled years ago!” Charity laughed agreeably.
I headed toward an oversize chair by the fireplace but just as I was about to sit down there was a flash of white and a rush of air several inches from my face.
“Blessed is the man who does not sit in the seat of mockers.”
I froze in place and blinked. There was an enormous white cockatoo sitting in the exact spot that I was just about to claim. His feathers lifted to create a huge ruffle around his face and he clicked his enormous gray beak.
“You’re paraphrasing again, Murphy,” Charity said with a disappointed shake of her head. “You’re supposed to be working on the Beatitudes now, not the Psalms. Please concentrate.”
Charity’s noisy bird was apparently not a rumor, after all. I’d imagined something…smaller. Like one of those little blue-and-white parakeets. Something in a cage.
“You can sit over here, Bernice.” Charity patted the cushion next to her. Alex, I noticed, had picked the chair farthest from Murphy.
“I only have a few minutes,” I said, watching out of the corner of my eye as Murphy took little marching steps up the arm of the chair. A bird who had more Scripture memorized than I did. It wasn’t fair. I loved reading the Bible and I valiantly tried to memorize verses—there were three-by-five cards taped to practically every surface in my apartment—but so far all I had down was a whopping three. Annie cautioned me not to make memorization something to beat myself up over—did she know me, or what?—and said to think of them as “grace graffiti.”
“Are you going over to the Golden Oaks, dear?” Charity asked.
How did she know that? Was my daily schedule posted somewhere in town? It was definitely worth looking into.
She lifted a beautiful china teapot and poured hot tea into a cup for me, then carefully refilled the other two on the tray. I’d never been a tea drinker—I drink coffee out of a mug that could double as a thermos—but there was something so quaint and sweet about a dainty cup decorated with tiny violets that I was momentarily swayed.
“What is the Golden Oaks?” Alex accepted the cup she offered and snagged a sugar cookie off the tray on the coffee table to go with it.
“The nursing home outside of town.” Charity answered Alex’s question before I could. “Bernice goes there a few times a month and gives free haircuts.”
“Really.” Alex smiled slightly.
I could read his mind. Future ammunition.
“So how long have you been Bernice’s beau, Mr. Scott?” Charity asked.
“Bernice’s beau!” Murphy repeated, and then made a noise that sounded like he was choking on a cracker.
“He’s not—” Without thinking, I took a quick, very undainty swallow of tea, which burned a path all the way down my throat.
Charity’s eyes were as bright and unnerving as her cockatoo’s as they searched my face. She smiled benignly. “You make a lovely couple.”
Alex lifted his cup and waved at me with his pinkie finger.
I had to run away. But this time, I knew I couldn’t go very far. My roots in Prichett weren’t as deep as some, but like it or not, they were anchored there by my responsibilities and I couldn’t just pull them up, shake them off and relocate to an Alex-less place. But at the very least, I could leave Charity’s.
“I really should go. They’re expecting me by five.” Probably breaking several unwritten laws about proper tea etiquette, I downed what was left in my cup and stood up, smoothing wrinkles out of my skirt that weren’t there. I still hadn’t called Elise and Annie, and I knew they’d be beside themselves with curiosity about Alex.
“‘The Lord bless you and keep you,’” Murphy intoned, then cackled delightedly and belted out, “Bye-bye, baby!”
“I’m going with you,” Alex decided.
“Take your time, Mr. Scott. I’ll leave the door unlocked until ten, then you’ll have to climb through the basement window around back.”
“‘Enter by the narrow gate…’” Murphy began.
I didn’t hear the rest because Alex practically pushed me out of the room.
“You can’t come with me,” I grumbled as he towed me toward the escape door at the end of the hallway. I discovered that digging my heels in on a polished hardwood floor was an exercise in futility.
“I can tell that bird doesn’t like me. Animals never like me.”
I stopped so quickly that Alex bumped into me. He smelled a bit like lemon furniture polish and rose water. “Oh, please. Don’t give me that,” I said, annoyed with him. “Everyone loves you. Babies. Second-graders. Elderly women. You can charm the birds out of the trees.”
“Not all birds,” Alex said darkly. “I won’t get in your way. Scout’s honor.”
“Don’t try to tell me you were a Boy Scout.” I rolled my eyes.
“I played one on TV?”
I wasn’t going to laugh. Laughter led to…Well, in our case it had led to like…and like had skipped right to love. At least it had for me and I had the scars to prove it. Alex was in Prichett on a mission to…to what? Tell me how he was doing? That could be taken care of with eight simple words. I’m fine, Bernice. See you in ten years. No, he obviously had a more sinister agenda.
I slid into the front seat of my car and before I could put it into gear, Alex was buckling himself in next to me.
My car decided to add to my torment. The engine gargled too much gas and quit. There was a ritual that I had to perform whenever this happened and it wasn’t pretty.
“It died,” Alex pointed out helpfully.
I turned on the brights and the radio and the windshield wipers, pumped the gas pedal several times and then turned the key in the ignition again.
Alex leaned across me. “You have over a hundred and fifty thousand miles on this vehicle.”
“And she’s still going strong.” I patted the dash as the engine hiccupped and then settled into a rough purr as I eased the car into the street.
Just as I saw the long row of lights from the nursing home, my cell phone rang from the depths of my quilted purse. Which happened to be in a heap at Alex’s feet.
