Love through everything.
– E.C.
On a cool Tuesday morning one year later, Abigail turned the Open sign to Closed, and then locked the door of the store. She packed a picnic lunch. She put on her favorite red polka-dot dress and pulled her hair back. She put on lipstick and a new red angora lace cardigan she’d just finished making.
She’d lose money today. Tuesdays were usually good days; customers having missed her on Monday tended to wait impatiently for the next open day. But that would have to be okay.
She got in her blue Nissan pickup truck, the replacement one, and drove up to the barn. Tom and Cade were in the rafters, rigging ropes for something they were doing down below.
“’Lo, boys!”
“Watch out below,” hollered Cade, and then he slid down a rope, his gloved hands smoking a little as his legs hit the ground.
“Show-off,” she muttered, and kissed him.
“Get a room!” yelled Tom as he slid down the rope. When he got to the bottom, he said, “You should tell Janet I just did that. That’s cool.”
“Tell her yourself tonight when you go home.”
“It’s better if you tell her how cool I am. Sliding down a rope.”
Abigail raised her eyebrows at him.
Tom grinned, and then asked, “How’s the book going?”
“I’m done. I just finished right now! I just typed ‘The End.’ And it’s time to celebrate with my guy.”
Cade smiled, but he said, “Honey, I still have to—”
“No, you don’t. You get two hours off.”
“Who says?”
“Your wife. Come on, I have something to show you.”
“This gonna at least be rated R?”
“Cade!”
Tom laughed. “See you later, boss. Have fun.”
Abigail drove, Cade complaining good naturedly the whole way.
“I bet you didn’t even bring the turkey sandwich I like.”
“Brought it.”
“And the Hershey’s kisses?”
“You can have my kisses, if you want.”
“I always want. They taste better, anyway.”
He threaded his fingers through the fingers of her non-steering wheel hand.
“Are we almost there yet? I want some of those kisses.”
“Almost,” she said.
A few minutes later, “Here.”
A beat later, Cade said, “Oh.”
The newly reconstructed bridge gleamed in the sun, the long flat curves angling away from them.
Cade pulled the russet Guernsey over his head as he got out of the truck. It was the first sweater she’d knit for him, and it was still her favorite on him.
“It’s been a year?” he asked.
Abigail nodded. She knew he’d get it. “One year exactly. Come on, let’s eat on the edge.”
“Doesn’t make you nervous?”
“Nothing could today.”
She took his hand. God, he was gorgeous. Look at him. He belonged in the movies, on a billboard, advertising saddle soap or something. Instead, he grinned at her, and walked with her, and loved her, every minute of the day. Even in the middle of their squabbles, she felt his love, all the time.
She was so lucky.
And they were getting luckier by the day.
Abigail led him to the edge of the bridge, to a little metal piece that was wide enough for both of them to sit on. She swung her legs over the edge. The fall sunshine danced on the water below.
They ate their sandwiches, leaning comfortably against each other.
He kissed her, and she kissed him back.
“You taste like onions,” he said.
“Yep.”
They sat in silence, looking down. Most of the metal had been cleared out during construction, but they hadn’t yet removed the bumper from her old pickup truck, and it shone in the sun below.
Cade cleared his throat and pushed his lunch away. He put both arms around her. “Worst day of my life.” He kissed her again, and her heart beat faster, as it always did. “And the best day of my life.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
Cade held her tighter. The handspun merino was soft under her cheek. “So, you finished the book! Eliza’s book?”
“Our book.”
“When will I get to read it?”
“Soon.”
“Is it about me?”
“No. But you’re definitely in it.”
“The knitters will love it. Big day! I wish I’d have known. I would have brought champagne.”
“I wouldn’t have had any.”
Cade laughed. “Yeah, right.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“You love champagne. And I love how giggly it makes you.”
“No alcohol for me for a while.” Abigail smiled at him, the biggest smile that she’d ever smiled in her whole life.
“I don’t get it.”
She raised one eyebrow and kept smiling.
“Oh, hot damn!” yelled Cade. He scrambled to his feet and whooped, then he grabbed Abigail, and led them both back to solid ground. Then he picked her up and swung her around and around and around.
Abigail’s head spun in a good way.
He kissed her. She kissed him back and felt him stirring against her.
“We do need to celebrate, though,” she purred. “Can you think of any other way we can do it? Champagne aside?”
“Strangely enough, I think I can.”
“Back of my truck! Now!” Laughing so hard she almost fell over, Abigail raced for the truck, where she’d already laid out the blankets.
She needed him now. She always did. Always would. She opened her arms, and he held her, and the world spun away, and there was nothing but the two of them, on top of her handspun blanket.
The End
✨
Dearest Reader,
I hope you loved Abigail and Cade’s story!
Now, as another little gift to thank you, here’s an exclusive sneak peek of the next book in which Eliza is (again) a meddlesome and delightful matchmaker: Lucy’s Kiss!
✨
LUCY’S KISS
CHAPTER ONE
If you cast on with joy, your stitches will dance. If you cast on with your eyes to the floor, your stitches will likely run that direction the first chance they get.
– Eliza Carpenter
In the dim light of the bar, Lucy could barely see the sock she was knitting, but it didn’t matter. These were bar socks, meant to be knitted in the dark.
“This is the best kind of night,” said Lucy.
“It’s dead,” said Molly, seated at the next barstool.
Lucy sighed in happiness and took a sip of what she always ordered, a Manhattan with two cherries, no ice. “I know. Just a regular night. It’s perfect.” She liked it quiet. She liked it safe. Surrounded by people she loved. What could be better?
The crash that followed was deafening, the sound ripping through the bar, tearing metal, shattering glass. A hubcap flew in through the open door. It fell to the ground and then rolled and wobbled across the bar, finally toppling over with a clang at Lucy’s feet.
Lucy opened her mouth, but nothing came out, and Molly’s wide eyes met her own. Lucy’s brother Jonas threw his cloth onto the bar and reached for the phone.
With the other bar patrons, Lucy ran outside. A small blue car was crumpled like aluminum foil against a pole. A white car was nose-to-nose with a fire hydrant, and a pot-bellied older man tried to emerge from the driver’s side, saying out his broken window, “I didn’t see her. I swear I didn’t see her.” Blood ran down his forehead.
The blue car hissed and spat as the engine protested its demise and a flame growled underneath the chassis of the engine.
A man in a black leather jacket pulled on the handle of the door of the vehicle, trying to wrest it open while the woman inside struggled with the seat belt. She screamed and looked out at them, her eyes wide, her mouth twisted in pain.
Lucy’s stomach lurched as she recognized first the car, and then the hair through the broken driver’s side window. “It’s Abigail! Oh, God, it’s Abigail MacArthur. We have to get her out of there.” Lucy peered through the back window to look for a child’s car seat. “Do you have Lizzie in there?”
Abigail shook her head and said, “She’s home. With Cade.” She gasped as something under the car made a horrible noise. “Please. Get me out.”
“She’s pregnant,” Lucy said to the man in the black jacket, as if that would somehow help his efforts. “Were you with that driver? Why are you—”
“I saw him T-bone her.” The man put his entire body into trying to get the car door open, but the metal was too bent. A crackle snapped as wires from the pole dangled just above his head.
Lucy’s brother Jonas, now outside, yelled, “Back, all of you get back.” He used his arms and body to push the crowd onto the sidewalk. “Lucy! Get away from that car!”
The pot-bellied man who had caused the accident hollered something about his insurance company.
“Fire department’s on the way,” Lucy’s mother yelled.
“There won’t be time,” the man in the leather jacket said to Lucy. “I’m going to need your help. Don’t move.”
Lucy had no more breath to hold. Under the warped metal at the front of the car, the orange glow of the fire grew brighter.
He jerked his elbow through the rear driver’s side window, shattering glass onto the back seat. Then he reached through, fought with the lock on the door, and pulled until the back door popped open.
“Don’t move her!” someone in the crowd yelled. “She’s injured!”
Leaning into the car, he reached forward and then retreated. “I can’t,” he gasped, putting a hand to his hip as if he’d wrenched it. He looked pale and off-balance. His eyes met Lucy’s, and her heart skittered into overdrive. “Push in,” he said. “See if you can drop her seat backwards. I can’t fit in there.”
Lucy took a deep breath, like she’d done in training exercises. She’d worked car fires before, but never with a person inside, never from this close. “It won’t explode, right?” Her voice shook. They had to hurry.
“It won’t—it’s not like in the movies. You can do it.”
Why is his voice so familiar? Lucy moved forward, into the heat and noise of the crumpled car. She leaned into the back seat area and drove her hand up the side along the front door. She could feel the heat growing beneath the car. What if she got stuck and burned to death along with Abigail? Would it be fast? How much would it hurt?
“The latch is on the side of the seat,” said the man behind her. “Feel for it and pull up.”
“I can’t find it!” Lucy yelled.
“Please, please, please,” said Abigail, in a strange, sing-song voice.
“Hang on, honey, we’ve almost got you.”
“You can do it.” His voice came from behind her.
There. Lucy could feel the hot plastic under her hand. She pulled and the driver’s seat dropped back. Lucy scuttled backwards and out, away from the heat, away from Abigail’s awful, bloodied mouth and panicked eyes.
He said, “Okay, now we pull.”
“Her neck could be broken, you freaking morons!” someone shouted.
His voice was low in Lucy’s ear. “I know what I’m doing.”
Lucy only hesitated for a split second as a tendril of fear bloomed in her heart. Moving Abigail was against all her training. They had no backboard. No C-collar.
But then something gave a loud bang underneath the car, and it suddenly got hotter. Lucy helped the man, dragging Abigail over the top of her seat, being as careful of her stomach as they could be. They wrestled her out of the car and moved her toward the sidewalk. Lucy’s younger brother Silas was now next to them, and he caught Abigail’s legs.
As they set Abigail safely on the ground in front of the bar, the car was suddenly engulfed in flames that erupted into a fireball. The heat drove the crowd back even farther, some people retreating into the bar to peek out the windows.
Sirens howled and flashing lights reflected against windows even before her fellow volunteers made the turn onto Main Street.
The same drunk guy who’d called them morons for moving the woman was babbling, “They saved her. Didja see that? She woulda gone up in flames, just like a tiki torch. They saved her!”
Next to her, Molly dug her fingers into Lucy’s arm. “You saved her. You saved her.”
Lucy could only stare.
As the volunteers jumped off the rig, the man in the leather jacket moved Abigail into a stable position, running his gaze over her body as if looking for the source of the bleeding. Her brother Silas used his arms to steady her head, one hand over her forehead to keep her from lifting it to look around.
Lucy swallowed, hard. That man. It couldn’t be him, could it?
Owen Bancroft. The man she thought she’d never see again. Holy hell—where had he come from? Lucy looked down the street, and her eyes closed in on it as if drawn by magnets: that damn blue Mustang was parked over by the art supply shop. So he still had that car. Was she really even that surprised?
The paramedics moved in and loaded Abigail into the ambulance.
Captain Jake Keller and some of the local volunteer fire brigade extinguished the blazing car. The street went dark as they shut down electricity to the pole. The only light now was from the moon and the lights on the firefighters’ helmets. The salty smell of the Pacific mixed with the acrid tang of the charred car.
Owen stood with Silas, shoulder to shoulder, their backs to the crowd as the ambulance tore up Oak Street towards the hospital, siren whooping.
The men turned, moving toward the sidewalk. Silas said something and Owen jerked his chin, as if in agreement. Owen’s shirt was ripped, and his arm was bleeding. He was limping.
Lucy tried to breathe around a sudden judder in her chest. She tried to focus on stilling her breath and not on the black spots dancing in front of her eyes.
If it was possible, Owen looked even better than he had in high school seventeen years ago. She willed his dark blue eyes to meet hers, and then didn’t know if she’d be able to meet them if he looked at her. He’d just saved a woman’s life. And he still looked perfect, dammit to hell.
Then Molly pulled Lucy into the bar, and she lost sight of the man she’d never forgotten.
Jonas lit the bar with candles. Lucy peered through the dim light at her knitting, but her hands were shaking too violently to even make one stitch. It didn’t stop her from trying. Always, after working an incident, she got this—the shakes, the queasiness, the sense her body had suffered an interior earthquake. The bodily aftershocks were the worst part of working with the volunteer fire brigade.
“Yeehaw!” said Jonas, slamming down the bar phone. “Captain Keller says Abigail’s fine, and so’s the baby. Drinks on the house!”
Molly said, “Are you sure that’s your cheap-ass brother?”
“I feel like I’m going to throw up.” Lucy fought another wave of nausea. Thank God Abigail was going to be okay.
And Owen Bancroft was back.
“Are you drunk?”
“Didn’t you see what just happened?” Lucy looked around the bar. People were already telling each other the story. The legend was already being crafted. Lucy’s mother held court in a booth, waving her own knitting needles around. Her father pumped his fist in the air, letting out a yell that was drowned by her younger brother Silas’s whoop as he smacked the eight ball into the side pocket. Jonas was behind the bar, moving as if he were in fast forward.
Molly said, “I saw. You okay?”
“She would have died. Ten seconds later, if we hadn’t gotten her out of there, she would have been on fire. Her whole body, burning. While she was alive. The baby… And Cade, with little Lizzie at home wouldn’t have even—”
Molly shook her head. “You were amazing. You rocked it, and she’s gonna be fine. I’ve never seen you work—you just usually answer your pager and run out when you’re on call. You get to do that all the time? And that tall firefighter was hot.” Molly reapplied her lipstick, using the metal candle-holder as a mirror.
Lucy clapped her hand over her mouth. She slid off her barstool and dashed past the pool table into the women’s room, where she kneeled in front of the toilet. She just made it.
A few minutes later, she splashed cold water on her face. In the mirror, she barely recognized herself. She was pale—paste-white, really—with high pink spots on her cheeks. Her eyes looked too big for her face. Damn it.
No. She didn’t do that all the time. Mostly car fires didn’t have someone trapped inside. When she took the on-call pager for her four days a month, the medicals she ran were usually older people with difficulty breathing or fall victims. She’d had a couple of failed CPR calls, but they’d been elderly, expected deaths.
Lucy didn’t wrestle her pregnant friends out of the jaws of imminent fiery death regularly.
And he hadn’t recognized her. Of course he hadn’t. She looked like hell. And why would Owen Bancroft remember who she was? He’d left town right after his high school graduation. Sure, he’d kissed her. It was a kiss she’d never forgotten, even though she wished she could, but there was no way he remembered it, not after all these years. Most people had interesting lives, after all.
Lucy grimaced at her reflection and made her way back out into the main room. As she passed the table where her mother was knitting with her friends, her mother stopped her.
“Honey, do you know anyone that wears a size eleven shoe?”
Lucy’s mouth dropped open. “Really, Mom?”
Toots Harrison nodded, her knitting needles flashing. “I got some cowboy boots at the thrift store that are divine, purple and red and green, but I can’t find anyone that they really belong to. They’re so big.”
“Did you see what just happened out there? To Abigail?”
Toots closed her eyes and nodded happily. “It was so good she got out in time. I wonder if she has big feet. Do you think she does?”
Lucy sighed. “I don’t know, Mom. I’ll ask her when I see her, okay?”
“Okay, darling.”
Lucy made her way back to Molly and crawled up on her barstool.
Jonas handed out the last shot from his free tray and leaned across the bar. “You gonna live, kiddo?”
She nodded. “Don’t call me that.” Her voice only wobbled a little bit, but Jonas wasn’t paying attention to her, anyway.
The lights blazed as power was restored. The jukebox kicked back on, blaring “I Will Survive” mid-song. Lucy squeaked, startled.
Silas swaggered by, passing behind Lucy’s barstool. He held up his shot glass and raised his eyebrows.
“You had your round,” said Jonas. “Pay up for the next one.”
Silas flipped Jonas off with his free hand. But they grinned at each other, and Lucy watched something pass between them. Even though Jonas was only a year older than her, there had always been a strong bond between the brothers, something that Lucy was used to being left out of. She looked down into her empty glass and decided against a refill.
Jonas turned to Lucy and said, “That guy that helped out, that was Owen Bancroft, wasn’t it? He was in my class, I’m pretty sure. Do you remember him?”
“Maybe.” Lucy shrugged.
“Bad seed, that one.”
“Oh, my God,” said Lucy. “You sound about a hundred years old. And weren’t you the one who got busted with weed in Mr. Dwight’s shop class, speaking of bad seeds?”
“Yeah, but Owen barely graduated. And don’t forget his dad, with the drugs and arrests, and dying in prison and all.”
Lucy dropped her gaze to the top of the bar again. “Just because his dad screwed up didn’t mean no one could trust him.” She could feel Jonas staring, but she didn’t look up.
“You seem to remember him pretty well, huh?”
“Wait. Are you serious? He’s the one you told me about, right? The one? From high school? Your bad boy?” said Molly, nudging Lucy in the side.
“I gotta go.” Lucy stood, grabbing her knitting bag. She shoved the sock into it unceremoniously, knowing she was losing stitches she’d regret later.
Molly raised her eyebrows but stood with her. “I’ll go, too. I’m on call in the morning, and I hate being woken by the phone.”
Silas was looking deeply into the jukebox. Lucy kissed him on the cheek. He looked surprised, but as usual, he didn’t say anything. Then she went around to the back of the bar and kissed Jonas’s cheek, too. His face relaxed, and he laughed, flicking her with the cloth he was holding. “God, Luce.”
Lucy waved at her father, but he was already back to watching the game.
Her mother was with the knitters, their needles flashing as their heads bobbed, still rehashing what had happened. Lucy blew her a kiss. Her mother reached up, grabbed it, and mimed putting it in her pocket, and then blew one back.
At the crash, police officers were filling out forms, and a tow truck beeped as it backed up toward the car.
“How are they possibly going to move that?” Lucy pointed.
“That’s what they do.”
“What if Abigail was still in there? What if she’d been—” She couldn’t even say it.
“Then they probably wouldn’t be towing it yet,” Molly said. “It’s all fine, okay? It was exciting! Different! Weren’t you just complaining it was too quiet? And then you had to work on a day you weren’t even scheduled to volunteer. But you loved it, didn’t you?”
Lucy didn’t say anything. The damp ocean air was cool. In the distance, the surf crashed in a rhythm that Lucy knew like her own heartbeat. She wrapped her scarf more firmly around her neck, bringing it up over her nose.
“So, Owen is the guy you told me about from high school,” said Molly. “Didn’t you say he was in San Francisco?”
Lucy shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it.
But Molly wasn’t going to be put off, just like that. “He was your bad boy crush. The only one you ever had.”
It hadn’t felt like a crush then. It had felt bigger than that. Oh, kids were dumb. “Yep, not like you. You chew up bad boys and spit them out for breakfast.”
Molly laughed. “I like a challenge. Or three.”
“He never knew I was alive.”
“Not true,” said Molly. “You said he kissed you. And that you saw stars.”
It hadn’t been that simple. “Why do you like jerks, again?”
Molly shrugged. “They’re just more interesting sometimes. They need more. And they give a lot, too. But I do end up going through them quick, that’s for sure.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes. Then Molly veered sideways and nudged Lucy’s shoulder with her own. “Some calls are harder than others, and when someone you know is involved, it’s always worse.”
“Wait, you’ve had to handle calls with people you know?” How did Lucy not know this? “Were you scared?”
“Yep.” Molly worked for a language translation line, translating Cantonese into English for 911 centers around the country. “I recognized my aunt’s voice even before I heard the client ID. My uncle wasn’t breathing, and I couldn’t even tell my auntie who I was, who was helping her. I just had to translate the other dispatcher’s words and translate my aunt’s words back.”
Lucy stared. “Did he make it?”
Molly shook her head, her eyes searching the darkened dunes.
“I’m so sorry.”
Molly shook herself like a dog after the rain. “Oh, hell, girl, now I don’t even have to stop stirring the chili while I’m translating, you know that.”
Molly’s old Victorian loomed in front of them.
“Any home sales recently?” asked Lucy. Anything to change the topic. She felt raw.
Molly grimaced. “Someday I won’t have to have two jobs, right? Nothing in a month. But Cypress Hollow is a beach town. That’s why I moved here. It’ll get better.”
“Yeah, so you say. And anyway, you moved here so you could live in Eliza Carpenter’s hometown. I know the truth.”
“It’s the knitting vortex. It sucked me in. Now go home. You’re in a mood, and I’m tired of you. Love you, though.” Molly wrapped Lucy in a bear hug. “You’re fine, honey. You did good tonight. Okay?”
Lucy nodded and hugged her back. She stood at the gate and watched Molly run up the porch stairs and heave open the massive front door.
Then she kept walking.
She turned her head to look back down the hill at the moonlight reflected off the ocean, and smelled smoke in her hair. The fear rose again, threatening to bring with it the nausea.
Home. She wanted to be home, on the couch, her fingers wrapped around her bamboo needles, the merino flying through her hands, a book balanced on her knees, safe, with Grandma Ruby’s sweater around her. That was the only good place for her.
CHAPTER TWO
Sometimes a knitter needs the familiar feel of her favorite bamboo needles in her hands—the ones worn and bent. Like favorite shoes, they fit no one else but her.
– E.C.
The next morning, Lucy walked past the bar on her way to open the bookstore. The power pole was still leaning. Most of the glass from the crash had already been cleaned up by the streets department, but shards still glittered by the storm drain.
Abigail almost lost her life at this spot. Lucy almost saw her die.
For one second, right where Abigail had been lying last night on the pavement, Lucy’s knees refused to lock the correct way. Her gait felt wrong, as if she were drunk. She looked down to steady herself, and there, next to a dropped matchbook, was a stain. Abigail’s blood.
Everything went dark. She sucked extra air in through her mouth and touched the outside wall of Jonas’s bar. It was fine. Everything was fine. It was a great morning to be alive, wasn’t it? If she could keep the fluttering in her stomach to a minimum, and if she didn’t pass out right here and now, it would be an even better morning.
Come on, now. A member of the prestigious Cypress Hollow Volunteer Fire Brigade didn’t act this way. Lucy knew that. She could handle blood. She could dress a wound and apply pressure to a hemorrhage and hold people down in the back of the ambulance, even when they were begging and screaming bloody murder. For quiet old bookstore Lucy, someone who normally flew under the radar, Captain Keller always said he was impressed with how she came through under pressure.
So, what the hell was this about?
Her brother’s bar was shut up tight. Jonas would be in soon, though—even in Cypress Hollow, some people drank in the morning. When he’d bought it, he’d changed it from a seedy run-down bar filled with old men and a perpetual cigarette smoke haze into a clean, friendly gathering place. Drinkers and teetotalers alike met at The Rite Spot to have Trivia Night, to play board games, to toast weddings and mourn deaths. On Friday nights, Jonas hired live bands to play and on Sunday mornings he opened early so the book club could meet over donuts and coffee. Lucy’s mother’s knitting group met there on Thursday mornings, and if some of them added a little Baileys to their coffee, no one ever complained.
But for now, it was still closed, and no one would mind if Lucy leaned against the post next to the front door and pretended to be reading the list of bands lined up for the next month. The words swam in front of her eyes, though, as the images from the night before played against her eyelids: Abigail’s open, bloody mouth; Owen’s hands, working against the metal frame of the car door; the flames underneath the engine.
It was okay. Goosebumps raised along her arms and legs, and her heart raced again as she looked at the stain on the sidewalk, but she told herself it was all right. She pulled the yellow sweater her grandmother had knitted for her so many years ago tighter around her and kept walking to work.
Lucy walked past Tillie’s Diner, the perennial town favorite. The main room, mostly booths, was already full of patrons, and she peeked in the plate-glass window to see all the ranchers in the side room. They gathered after their chores in the morning, as if they’d been there forever in their cowboy hats and lived-in jeans, gossiping about girls walking past the windows and the price of hay, and she tried not to think about the fact that every year, there were one or two fewer of them in the room.
She avoided looking at the old art deco movie theater, its red and yellow sign curving out over the street and back in again. The windows were boarded up, and it broke her heart to see. And she hated how it matched the other closed-up, battened-down businesses that hadn’t weathered the recent financial storms.
The Book Spire was across the street. After she unlocked the huge front door with the biggest key on her key ring, she flipped on the overhead lights. Originally a small Gothic Revival church built at the turn of the twentieth century, its central stained-glass window used to showcase a dour Jesus. When Lucy’s grandmother Ruby bought the desanctified church, she’d had the Lord removed and replaced him with the stained-glass image of a pen breaking a sword over a tower of brilliantly colored books. Ruby had kept some pews as seating, lined with cushions. The nave and narthex held dark wooden bookshelves now instead of hymnals, but the air was still scented with the ghost of incense and lilies.
Lucy moved into the coolness of the store, flipping on the standing lamps and three space heaters, trying to shake the images of the downed power pole and broken glass out of her mind.
Owen Bancroft was back.
Starting the coffee, that was the most important thing now. Besides the books, the shop was known for it, strong and dark, but never bitter. She ordered a special blend of beans from a roaster up the road—pricey, but worth it.
She counted out fifty dollars’ worth of change left over from the woefully slim deposit yesterday, enjoying the everyday sound of paper money whispering and the coins clinking. She placed the till in its drawer and then swept. Blessed normalcy. It soothed her.
Until a rap at the front glass made her jump.
Already? It wasn’t even nine yet. But Elbert Romo looked like he couldn’t wait. He jiggled the handle of the door and tapped again.
“I’m coming!” Lucy unlocked the door from the inside and swung it open. “Jeesh, Elbert. You’re early today.”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I’ve been at Tillie’s since six this morning. And you know that I—”
“You hate their bathroom.”
“They don’t clean it. Not so it smells clean. Not like yours.”
Elbert had already pushed past her, and his voice trailed off as he bolted into the bathroom. Lucy didn’t hear him lock it. Why would he? Elbert was one of a group of customers who treated her store as if it were their home. Elbert wouldn’t lock his bathroom door at home—why should he do it here?
Lucy turned on the stereo. It was a Chopin kind of day. Most Saturdays were.
Elbert came out a few moments later, smiling beatifically, still tucking in his shirt. “That’s better. Man, that was a lot of coffee today.”
He went and poured himself yet another cup from her first pot, which had just finished brewing. Lucy gave the coffee away free to customers, even though she couldn’t remember the last time Elbert had bought so much as a postcard.
At eighty-four, Elbert was no spring chicken, but he still had some of his hearing, and all his own teeth. He reminded Lucy of a seed catalog: colorful, cheerful, simple. His eyesight, he was happy to tell anyone who would listen, was just fine, and he was sweet. He hummed sometimes, without knowing it, and he brought her little presents for the store: a bouquet of local flowers that he’d pilfered out of gardens along the way, or a box of crumbled cookies for her to put out with the coffee.
Lucy turned the sign to Open and rolled out the postcard rack. She’d keep an eye on the skies and rush it back inside if it started to rain, but she wouldn’t roll the clearance cart out at all. Even on sale, she didn’t want to risk ruining a whole cart full of books in a spring shower if she could help it.
As she put out the postcards, she saw Greta Doss and Mildred Elkins turn the corner and approach in her direction. They smiled. Mildred shook a white bag in the air.
Lucy sighed in happiness. She never let herself buy donuts, but if someone else wanted to get her one, well, who was she to stand in the way of their joy? Mildred knew her special weakness was the thick, gooey bear claws. Happy Donuts stuffed theirs with almond paste and raisins, just the way Lucy loved them.
As much as an octogenarian could, Mildred scampered up to Lucy, thrusting the bag at her.
“See? No calories if someone else buys it for you!” Mildred was always pleased when she made this joke, like it was the first time she’d ever used it before. Lucy laughed as hard as always. Small price to pay for a bear claw.
“Come on in, ladies. Elbert’s already here.”
Both Greta and Mildred groaned. They made fun of Elbert Romo behind his back, calling him Elbert Oh-No, and to his face they mocked the fact that he ate every meal at Tillie’s. But Elbert was the oldest surviving single man in town, and the three of them spent enough time together at The Book Spire to qualify them as actual friends, even if none of them ever admitted it out loud.
Elbert stood as Lucy ushered Mildred and Greta inside. He always stood when a lady entered or exited, or when they sat down or stood up at the reading table. His knees creaked and popped ominously when he did, and Lucy told him not to do it, but he said, “That would be like not breathing air, my dear.”
Mildred took a serving plate out from the cabinet below the coffee pots. She ripped open her other white bag and placed four donuts on it, a glazed, two chocolate crullers, and an old-fashioned. Greta took the mugs they always used off their hooks and filled them with coffee, adding cream to Mildred’s and nothing to her own. Then they both moved to the table and sat with contented sighs.
Greta, the younger of the two women, had been a schoolteacher for many years, and had never married. She’d taken care of her mother until she died, thirty years before. Right around the same time, Mildred’s husband had dropped dead of a stroke, and after finding out about some bad investments he’d made, she’d had to sell the house to pay things off. She’d moved in with Greta then, and the pair had been inseparable ever since.
Greta was the quiet one. In Lucy’s mind, she was like an Edwardian novel: leather-bound, tiny print. It might be difficult to turn the fragile pages, but the color plates made it worth it.
Mildred, on the other hand, was a child’s picture book: colorful and loud. She never wore anything that wasn’t bright, and she never wore one color at once. She said that if she wore a pink blouse, she didn’t want to hurt red’s feelings. Today she wore red pants with a purple sweater and an orange scarf at her neck, topped with a green jacket and blue hat.
“Lucy!” Mildred called imperiously.
Darn. Lucy had thought she might get the new magazines out. Oh, well, it would have to wait. She’d never hurt their feelings by ignoring them.
“What’s on your mind, Mildred?” Lucy asked.
“Were you there last night?” Her fingers flashed as she held her knitting in her lap. She was doing something with two strands, knitting with both hands.
Would it help to play dumb? Lucy wasn’t sure. “Is that Noro? What are you making?”
“Does this look like Noro? You’re not stupid, child. Jamieson’s. Sleeve. And don’t give me that. At the bar. Did you see the crash? Did you really get stuck inside? And did Abigail really lose three fingers and a toe?”
“God!” Lucy lost her breath. “No! Where did you hear that?”
“On the news.”
“You didn’t.”
Mildred shrugged. “Okay. No, we heard it from Phyllis Gill, who was there.”
“She’s legally blind,” said Lucy. “And she must have had a few too many. There was a crash. Abigail was trapped. But she got out safely before the car burst into flames.”
Mildred and Greta both looked disappointed.
Lucy shook her head. “Don’t you think that’s exciting enough? Just the way it is?”
“Well, at least you were there,” Mildred said. The most tech-savvy of the eighty-plus set, she pulled out an iPhone and started tapping notes out on it. “What were her injuries? I may talk about it in my podcast later, and I want the details. Was Irene Bancroft’s son really there, too? Back from the city?”
Elbert said, “Never liked Irene’s husband, that Hugh Bancroft.”
“Well, no one minded when he died,” said Mildred.
Greta gasped. “You can’t say that.”
Mildred keyed something into her cell phone with extra force and looked up. “I can. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.”
Elbert nodded. “And if the son is back in town—you know what they say about apples and trees, after all.”
Greta said, “But he became a police officer, didn’t he? In San Francisco. And I think Phyllis said he helped get Abigail out of the car, too.”
Mildred raised her eyebrows and kept staring into her phone. “You really think that being a cop makes him trustworthy? In a big corrupt city like that?” She tapped the screen twice and looked up at Lucy. “So. What was Owen really doing there last night?”
Lucy reached for a pen, but it slipped from her fingers, falling to the slate floor with a small clatter. “Mildred, I have so many things I need to do. I’m going to let you three catch up this morning, and we’ll call the hospital later, how about that?”
She rolled the dolly stacked with magazine bundles to the periodical area. Now was not the time to think about Owen. Lucy kneeled on the floor and reached down to grab some extra Vogue Knitting magazines that had slipped to the very back of the rack. As she hauled them out, she took a moment to survey her store. The lower than usual viewpoint made everything look different. It pleased her, but it took her a minute to realize why.
Then she got it—when she’d first started coming here regularly to help her grandmother, she’d probably been as tall as she was now, seated on the floor. The two enormous front doors seemed even bigger than usual, and the stacks of books looked so much taller, more impressive and exciting. This was what she’d fallen in love with. She’d spent so much time at the bookstore with her grandmother as a child, curled up in various corners reading or scribbling story ideas on scraps of spare paper, that it had been a natural transition to working here through high school. She’d been the one to talk her grandmother Ruby into carrying new books, as well as the used books she specialized in. Lucy had ordered the microfiche from Ingram and opened an account with Baker and Taylor. Ruby let Lucy make the decisions, and Lucy would carefully order one bestseller and watch, thrilled, as it was paid for and carried out of the store. So she’d order a few more authors until she had a good sense of what her customers wanted.
The Book Spire might be mostly used books, but Lucy took pride in being able to order almost anything for anyone. When internet selling had hit the book trade, she’d seen the magic in it from the start. Now, even out-of-print books were available at a price, leaving little she couldn’t track down for her customers.
There. That was the last of the magazines. She looked over at the table. The three of them were still fine. Elbert was trying to talk to Greta about fly fishing, and Greta was staring at a spot on the ceiling just over his right shoulder.
Lucy stayed sitting on the floor.
A spot of sun had broken through the overcast sky, and she was sitting directly in its beam, like a cat warming itself. Her grandmother, had she been here, would have come over and stood in the sunlight with her. Her feet had always been cold, and Lucy had loved watching her follow the stained-glass-colored sun puddles all over the store.
The left door creaked, letting someone in. Lucy didn’t move from her spot. She was half-hidden by the second magazine shelf, and she’d be able to spy on whoever it was. For a moment, she felt six years old.
Owen Bancroft. Carrying a box. She didn’t feel six anymore—she felt sixteen again. Instantly.
That thick brown hair that stuck out as if he’d rumpled it when he arose and hadn’t touched it since—men in magazines paid a lot of money to have their hair look like that. She hadn’t noticed last night how broad his shoulders were. Could they have been that wide in high school? His white skin was tanned, but only slightly.
And he was still limping like he had last night. As he moved forward, his motions were smooth, but there was a distinct hitch to his gait. So she hadn’t imagined it, then.
And his eyes—
When they landed on her in the corner, his dark blue gaze burned into her.
Oh, no.
Keep reading Lucy’s Kiss! (Available everywhere, or directly from the author, at that link)