Софи Райан: Buy А Whisker

Elvis and I had breakfast in my second-floor office while the workroom warmed up, and he managed to mooch two bites of Swiss cheese. After I ate, I grabbed my dust mask and left him there washing his face.

It was a busy morning, and I didn’t go back to my office until it was time to leave to meet my friend Jess for lunch. Wrapped in my heavy parka, I cut across the parking lot and stepped inside the old garage we used for storage, tugging on the soft gray hat that my grandmother’s friend Rose had knitted for me. I pulled my gloves out of the pocket of my jacket.

“I’m leaving,” I called to Mac. “Can I bring you anything back?”

Mac was in the far corner of the building, gloves and jacket off, working on the knot that kept a pair of old brown blankets wrapped securely around two ladder-back chairs.

Mac was the proverbial jack-of-all-trades. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix as far as I’d seen. Second Chance may have been my store, but Mac was more partner than employee.

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe a turkey sandwich and some soup.” He looked in my direction then and held up one hand, feeling for his wallet with the other.

I shook my head. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll get it when I get back.”

He smiled. “Thanks.”

Mac was tall and strong with close-cropped black hair and light brown skin. He’d been a financial planner, but he’d walked away from his high-powered job to come to Maine and sail. It was his passion. All summer in his free time he had crewed for pretty much anyone who asked. There were eight windjammer schooners that tied up at the North Harbor dock, along with dozens of other boats. Eventually Mac wanted to build his own boat. He worked for me because he said he liked doing something where he could see some progress at the end of the day. He was an intensely private man, so I didn’t know much more about him now than I had when I’d hired him a bit more than six months ago, but I’d always been able to count on him and I trusted him completely.

He rubbed his hands together and blew on them. “Tell Jess I should have a couple of boxes for her at the end of the week.”

I nodded. “I will. I should be back in about an hour.”

I walked across the parking lot, happy to see several cars parked there. January was a slow month for pretty much every business in North Harbor, but it hadn’t been as quiet as I had expected. Maybe that was because we were a resale shop. Our prices weren’t cheap, but they were reasonable and on most things I was willing to dicker.

I’d backed my SUV into the last space at the end of the small parking lot—which was even smaller at the moment, thanks to the mountains of snow that flanked it on two sides—so only a little snow had drifted onto the front window. As soon as the engine was running, I turned on the heater and got back out to brush the snow off my windshield. When I’d bought the used SUV in the fall, Liam had tried to convince me to choose a vehicle with seat warmers. I was starting to think I should have listened to him.

I had no trouble finding a place to park when I got downtown. North Harbor sits on the midcoast of Maine. “Where the hills touch the sea” was the way it’d been described for the past two-hundred-plus years. The town stretched from the Swift Hills in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the south. It was settled in the late 1760s by Alexander Swift, and it was full of beautiful, historic buildings and quirky little businesses. Not to mention some award-winning restaurants. The town’s year-round population was about thirteen thousand people, but that number more than tripled in the summer with summer residents and tourists.

North Harbor was very different in the middle of winter than it was in the summer and fall. I wouldn’t have been able to park just a couple of doors down from McNamara’s in August, and there would have been more than three tables occupied inside the small sandwich shop. Jess was at a table to the left of the main counter. Her hands were wrapped around a heavy mug of what I guessed was hot chocolate, and she was deep in conversation with Glenn McNamara.

Jess had grown up in North Harbor, but we really hadn’t been friends as kids, probably because I was a summer kid and she was a townie. We’d gotten close in college, when I’d put an ad on the music-department bulletin board at the University of Maine, looking for a roommate. Jess had been the only person to call because, it turned out, she’d taken the ad down about five minutes after I’d put it up.

Jess had been studying art history and I’d been doing a business degree and taking every music course I could manage to fit into my schedule, but we’d become fast friends. It was impossible not to like her. She had an offbeat sense of humor and a quirky sense of style.

Glenn caught sight of me first. “Hey, Sarah,” he said. “Has it gotten any warmer?” He was tall with broad shoulders and still wore his blond hair in the brush cut he’d had as a college football player.

I shook my head as I pulled off my gloves and hat. “No,” I said. “According to Rose, it’s cold enough to freeze the brass off a bald monkey.”

Glenn laughed.

Rose Jackson wasn’t just one of my grandmother’s closest friends, she also worked part-time for me at the shop, along with another of Gram’s friends, Charlotte Elliot. Rose had been a teacher and Charlotte a school principal. I’d known them my whole life, so working with them meant I got mothered and gently—or sometimes not so gently—instructed on what I should do a lot of the time.

I loved them and I knew they loved me and only wanted me to be happy. We just didn’t always agree on what that was.

I pulled my hands through my dark hair. I kept it in long layers to my shoulders. Without the layers it would have stood up all over my head in the dry air when I pulled off my hat.

“At least we dodged that storm that came down from the Great Lakes,” Glenn said with a shrug of his shoulders.

Jess and I nodded in agreement. My grandmother, who had grown up in North Harbor, said that there were only three topics of conversation in town during the winter: the blizzard that had missed us, the blizzard that was headed our way, and the blizzard that we were standing in the middle of. She was more or less right.

“What can I get you?” Glenn asked as I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of my chair. The little shop smelled like fresh bread and cinnamon.

I glanced at Jess.

“I already ordered,” she said.

“I’ll have a bowl of whatever the soup of the day is and a cheese roll, please,” I said.

He nodded. “Coffee, tea or hot chocolate?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jess swipe a dab of whipped cream from the edge of her dark blue mug and lick it off her finger.

“Hot chocolate, please,” I said. “But no whipped cream.”

“I’ll take hers,” Jess immediately said, holding up her mug.

Glenn smiled. “It’ll be just a couple of minutes.”

I sat down opposite Jess, loosening the scarf at my neck. “So how was your morning?” I asked.

She took a long drink from her hot chocolate before she answered. She was wearing a deep-blue V-neck sweater over a lighter blue T-shirt, and her long brown hair was pulled back in a low ponytail. She was my height—about five six—and her eyes were blue where mine were brown. Jess had the kind of figure that people described as curvy, where I was usually described as looking athletic.

“Busy,” she said. “I have twenty-five choir robes to alter, plus three bridesmaids’ dresses and a cape to finish before Valentine’s Day.” She held up a hand. “And I’m not complaining. I’m not usually this busy this time of year.”

Jess was a seamstress. She could and did do everything from hemming a pair of jeans to designing and sewing some spectacular gowns. What she enjoyed most was reworking vintage clothing from the fifties through the seventies. She had a funky, off-beat style and was a whiz with a sewing machine and a pair of scissors. Just about everything she restyled ended up in a little used- and vintage-clothing shop down on the waterfront that she shared space in with a couple of other women. And she made one-of-a-kind quilts from recycled fabric that we sold for her on consignment in the store. The three-quarter-length cocoa-brown hooded coat tossed over the empty chair to her left had originally been a full-length wrap coat with shoulder pads so wide it could have been worn by a linebacker for the Patriots. Jess had reworked it into something that would have been at home on the pages of a fashion magazine.