Picket Fence Promises

“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.