Janice Johnson - One Frosty Night

Home.

No, she wouldn’t think about it, not right now.

Finally, she stopped to crank up the thermostat, too. The vast, barnlike building did not hold heat well.

The cluster of offices was in the loft: Lloyd’s, her father’s—at least temporarily hers—and the bookkeeper’s. Olivia smelled coffee even before she reached the top of the staircase. Bless his heart, she needed another cup this morning.

He must have heard her footsteps, because he stood in his doorway waiting for her. His keen eyes searched her face. “No trouble getting into town?”

“Nope. Ben Hovik and his son came out and helped me shovel our driveway yesterday,” she said, keeping her tone casual. “Otherwise, the roads were all plowed.”

“You and your mom holding up okay? Anything new?” he asked gently.

She realized that, one way or the other, she and Lloyd had missed each other the past several days.

“Mom has already decided to sell the house,” she told him. Everyone would know soon. Hard to hide a for-sale sign in the front yard. “I didn’t know what to say. She’s...not herself,” Olivia said slowly, and that was the truth.

Well, part of the truth anyway.

“I’m sorry,” Lloyd said, in that same kind voice, and this time she nodded and did succeed in smiling, if tremulously.

“We’ll get through it.”

“Sure you will.” He cocked his head. “Sounds like Stu’s here.”

“Somebody is,” she teased, despite the darkness of her mood. They had this conversation almost every morning. He was ridiculously good at identifying vehicles sight unseen from the sound of the engines, and Olivia gave him a hard time when he was wrong. This time she frowned, realizing it was a car engine she was hearing. “He hasn’t driven his truck in forever. What’s happened to it? Do you know?”

“All he’ll say is it needs work.”

Stuart Dodd’s pickup had been his pride and joy. A Ford F-250, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of years old.

“Shouldn’t it still be under warranty?”

Lloyd shook his head. “No idea. He’s being real tight-lipped, which makes me think he might have wrecked it and doesn’t want to say.”

She laughed despite herself. “That would be a blow to his pride, wouldn’t it?” Stuart had worked for her father since a beam had fallen on his shoulder on a construction project, leaving him unable to do heavy lifting. His experience made him a godsend working with contractors. Olivia guessed him to be in his mid-forties.

Lloyd chuckled. “Yes, it would.”

She let herself into her office and settled behind her desk with a sigh, cradling the mug of coffee in both hands to warm them.

Most days she was glad to be here. Until she’d had to face the realization that Mom might sell the business, she hadn’t let herself understand how much she was enjoying herself. Before Dad’s first heart attack, she’d worked as an account manager at a major Portland investment firm. Dissatisfied, she’d been thinking about making a change, and she had quit without a second thought when her parents needed her. She could take some time off and help her parents, she had reasoned.

At the time, Olivia had expected to be here three or four months, tops. Now—she had no idea what she wanted to do next. She’d begun to wonder if she wasn’t a small businesswoman at heart.

Something else, too. Thinking about what a tomboy she’d been had sparked a minor revelation. It wasn’t like she’d make career decisions based on what she was required to wear to work every day, but...she wasn’t missing having to wear suits and heels, do something elegant to her hair and put on makeup every morning. Jeans, flannel shirts, comfortable shoes, a ponytail—this felt really natural to her.

It’s me, she thought.

She shook off the reflection, in part because, as Ben had pointed out, any possibility of her staying to run Bowen’s Hardware & Lumberyard wasn’t really hers, but also because brooding wasn’t productive. She wanted to make time for sure today to talk to old Mr. Swenson about his plans for the appliance store. No point in starting to dream if it turned out he had a long-lost nephew planning to move to Crescent Creek to take over his store or already had a buyer.

Olivia spent the morning working the floor, as she frequently did, answering questions and helping people find the screws and bolts they asked for, pick out the best caulking material or identify the washer needed to stop that drip from the kitchen faucet. She loved the old building, with wood floors that creaked and weren’t entirely level, those high ceilings and the cold drafts that came every time someone opened either the front or back entrance doors. Given a spare moment here and there, she considered the layout and eyed stray corners, trying to envision how she could expand the stock without aisles becoming claustrophobic or displays too cluttered.

The cash registers were the old-fashioned kind, although the credit-card machines weren’t. Dad had modernized only as he had to.

“Nobody in Crescent Creek is interested in hurrying,” he liked to say. In general, it was true. Like she’d told Ben, standing in line at the hardware store was as good a place to gossip as any.

This morning, passing by the short line at the front of the store, Olivia heard Bernard Fulton saying, “That damn wife of mine thinks we’re going out to dinner tonight. Why can’t she cook seven nights a week, I ask? She says, God didn’t work seven days a week, either. I say, but this isn’t Sunday—it’s Monday. God liked Sundays, she says, I like Mondays.”

Olivia stifled a laugh. June and Bernard had eaten at the Crescent Café every Monday night for as long as she could remember, and most Fridays, too. So did all their friends. Most of the men had once worked at the lumber mill. Lloyd and his wife would be there, too, just as they’d play bingo at the grange hall every other Saturday and plant their butts in the same pew every Sunday morning at the Grace Lutheran Church. Bernard and June were Presbyterian, if Olivia remembered right. Pete Peterson, currently listening tolerantly to Bernard, was Baptist. If your inclinations were for anything else, you had to drive at least as far as Miller Falls. Not many locals did.

Was this really what she wanted? she asked herself with some incredulity. By the time she’d graduated from high school, the predictability of every day, of everyone she knew, had begun to drive her crazy. She’d yearned for something different. For adventure. For a future different from the one that had been her dream, when it had included Ben.

And now here she was, taking a ridiculous sense of comfort from the very predictability that had once been such an irritant. Not minding gossip, because...oh, because it meant people were genuinely interested in each other’s doings. Intrigued by the mystery of why Stuart wasn’t talking about what was wrong with his Ford F-250, when her eighteen-year-old self would have pretended to be interested while really thinking, Who cares?

Discovering she did care gave her a funny ache beneath the breastbone, one that didn’t want to go away no matter how busy she got.

CHAPTER FIVE

AS YET UNNOTICED, Ben leaned one shoulder against the end of the bleachers and watched the boys’ basketball practice.

Even though the weekend had been unexpectedly relaxed where Carson was concerned, he still felt the prickly grab of the burr that was his worry about him.

During the Friday night game, Carson had mostly sat on the bench with his elbows braced on his knees and his head hanging, his eyes downcast. His body language shouted, I don’t want to be here. When he went in, he was a step too slow. Ben could see why McGarvie had benched him. The coach had probably had no choice. Ben had also seen the distance Carson was keeping from the stars of the team. Even when McGarvie called the team into a huddle to talk about strategy, Carson stayed on the outskirts, a careful arm’s length from anyone else.