Chapter Eighteen
Rhett
I hadn’t expected Emily to be able to change her father’s mind—not yet, at least. I thought that if anything, he would change his mind later on. He couldn’t see past what he thought was the better situation: Mustang Ridge turned into some version of his old hometown, the old-fashioned slowness of it all gone. I’d known that it was a long shot.
I’d gotten Jeff, Jessica and Nate, Chris and his wife Lisa, and Chelsea to all agree to hold off, for a little while at least, on selling their property. It would give me some time to get the town as a whole to force a council meeting. In the first place, it was against the town’s guidelines for them to make a decision that huge without consulting the members of the town beforehand, and in the second, that was the only way that I could think of to try and convince them to pull out of the deal, or at least convince Emily’s dad to pursue the smaller plan.
It had been a few days since then, and Emily and I had talked on the phone to figure out the next stage of what we wanted to do together. I needed to get the town organized, and we’d talked about different ways to do it, until finally coming up with the idea of making a petition that members of the community could all sign, simply asking the town council for a public meeting about the development. Even the people who had already come out on the side of selling their property should be able to agree to the need to actually have a town meeting to discuss it.
I’d made up the petition, and then sent it to Emily, and she’d edited it and sent it back to me, and I’d printed it out in Mom’s office. It was going to mean that I’d have to spend less time actually working my land, but I could count on Mom to catch some of the shortfall, to help me out on the home front while I took care of things in town.
So, I headed into town proper to meet up with some people who I knew would be getting groceries or running other errands, maybe catching lunch at the diner, and get them to sign. So far, I’d managed to get a handful of people to agree to it—my friends who’d agreed to hold off on selling until after the town council, at least, had already signed, along with a few of the people I’d talked out of selling altogether. There were still some folks on Emily’s list who would be needed to make the project go forward. These were people whose properties were right at the center of where the big company wanted to build. Not all of them had made a decision one way or another, and I hoped I could catch a few of them that day.
I checked to make sure that I had everything as I parked my truck close to the administration building in town. I smiled to myself. Emily was coming into town tonight, and I kind of hoped she’d find a reason to stay over again. Of course, Mom would be home, but maybe we could find some privacy anyway, and it wasn’t as though Mom didn’t know there was something between us. She hadn’t said anything about it, but she’d noticed the few items that had been missing from the kitchen stocks and had said something about how she hoped I hadn’t been the one to make breakfast, because I was always hopeless when it came to eggs.
I checked over the signatures I had. I would need to get at least a thousand signatures to force the town council to meet. There were just over two thousand people total in the community of Mustang Ridge, but some of them were kids. If I could get a thousand signatures, that would be more than half of the adults in the town, and the council had to respond to that—that was the rule. If I could get at least five hundred, then I could maybe pressure them either way.
I had twelve signatures so far, but I hoped that by the end of the day I’d have at least a hundred. That would be one-tenth of what I needed, and Emily could go out the next day, apart from me, and probably get a hundred more, while I worked the people who knew and trusted me most in the town.
I decided to start at the grocery store, and looked in to see who all was out and about. Mr. Jackson was sweeping up around the front door, and I decided to start my stumping with him.
“Hey, Mr. Jackson,” I said, walking up.
“Hey, Rhett! How are things on your end of town?”
I smiled and shook the hand he offered me. “About the same as always,” I said. “How are things going with the store?”
He shook his head. “People are saying this big company is going to come in and put me out of business—you hear about that?”
“I actually came into town today to talk to some folks about that,” I said. “I’ve found out the past few days that there’s a bigger plan afoot—they’re bringing in a whole suite of businesses, including a restaurant. Can you believe it?”
He shook his head more vehemently. “I don’t see how this is going to benefit us,” he said. “I know some of the farmers are talking about selling out to at least get cash value from their land...but something like that?”
“I’m getting together some signatures,” I explained. “I’m hoping to get the town council to meet and talk to us about this—and hear us out on our concerns.”
“You’d be the person to do it, all right,” Mr. Jackson said with a smile. “I’m guessing that’s what those papers in your hands are about?”
“That’s about the shape of it,” I confirmed. “Basically, we’re asking for a town council meeting. Whether things go forward or not, we all deserve to be heard on this. It’s our town, not just the council’s town.”
“I’m behind you on that all the way,” Jackson told me. “Where do I sign?”
I got a pen out of my pocket and showed him where he could sign his name, and asked if I could go into his shop and bother some of his shoppers.
“If you’d rather not, I’ll stay outside and wait for people to come out,” I said.
“No—you go right on in there, Rhett, and see if you can’t get some people to sign for you,” he said. “I don’t mind at all. And if they care about being approached in my store, I care about them abandoning my store for some big corporate giant.”
I smiled and thanked him and stepped into the shop, looking to see who I might find inside.
Just as I’d thought, there were about a dozen people shopping. Most everyone I approached was pretty understanding; everyone in town knew me, and nobody was confident enough in what they were doing with their lives to tell me to bug off.
“I just don’t know, Rhett,” Mrs. Harrison—the mother of one of my high school friends, who had actually managed to leave the town for good after getting a degree at UH—said. “With Nicky gone and not likely to come back, I don’t know if there’s even a point in keeping the old home place.”
“I’m not telling you not to sell,” I said. “If you want to sell your land, that’s your right. All I’m asking is for everyone to agree that if this is going forward, we need to talk about it as a whole town—because this doesn’t just affect you, or me, or individual people.”
“So this is just about the town council? Not some statement that I refuse to sell?”
I nodded. “All it is, is a petition to make the council call a town meeting,” I explained. “What the decision is, that’ll be up to the town. But I think it deserves at least a meeting, don’t you?”
Mrs. Harrison considered that for a moment. “I guess I’ll sign,” she said finally. “It can’t hurt to talk about it as a community.”
I handed her the clipboard and she signed, and I thanked her for at least having the town spirit to keep everyone involved and in the loop. Then I moved on to the next person I could spot in the store.
I made the rounds at the grocery store, and then the hardware store, and Sally’s crafts, getting a few signatures here and there. All of the shop owners were more than happy to sign, because they knew that a big corporate complex of businesses would force them to leave the town they’d lived in their whole lives. The folks who were either farmers or the family of farmers were a little harder to convince, which was about how I’d thought things would shake out.
I saved the diner for last, because I knew people would probably be less than thrilled to have their lunches interrupted by a request for a signature. When I stepped into Bill’s, I saw Lucy on her way to a table, carrying a tray of food. Following her with my gaze, I saw that Emily’s coworker—Jacob, I thought his name was—seated at a booth with a couple of the farmers I hadn’t gotten around to talking to yet.
I decided to ignore him; he had his job and I had my work to get done. I waited for Lucy to come back up to the front of the diner and asked her permission to go around with my petition.
“I know Bill will want to sign it,” she said, nodding. “He doesn’t want another restaurant—at least, not a corporate-owned one—coming in, making trouble for all of us.”
“Will you sign it too, Lucy?” Lucy glanced in Jacob’s direction and then shrugged. “Us over them, right?”
I laughed. “Us over everyone, Luce.”
She took her pen out of her apron pocket and signed without even asking to look at the statement I’d typed up. She trusted me—most of the town did.
I started going around the diner then, ignoring the toadie seated in a booth—I didn’t even intend to talk to the people he was sitting with until I could get them alone and explain the situation to them the way I saw it. It wouldn’t do to get into it with Jacob if I could help it. Instead I explained to other people why I was collecting signatures, that signing the petition wouldn’t mean they couldn’t sell out later if they decided to, the same things I’d gone around and around with everyone else.
After I finished up my rounds, I had to walk past Jacob’s table.
“You’d think that Bill’s Diner would have a rule about people conducting business without buying anything,” he said with a sneer.
“Rhett Baxter has given Bill’s Diner enough business to allow him to come in and talk about something important to the community,” Lyle said, looking at Jacob firmly.
“Bill would agree,” one of the waitresses, Stacy, said.
“It’s all right,” I told the people who’d rushed to my defense. “He’s got a right to an opinion, same as us all.”
“You’re getting in the way of me doing my business,” Jacob said, rising from his booth.
“Not at all,” I pointed out calmly. “I haven’t even interrupted your conversation.”
“But these folks can hear what you’re talking about as you walk around the whole place, gathering signatures,” Jacob pointed out.
I nodded to the farmers he’d been talking to; they looked a bit crestfallen to be the center of attention all of a sudden. It wasn’t as if no one in the diner had known what they were there for—but I guess it’s different when everyone’s looking at you, instead of ignoring you.
“They can make up their own minds,” I suggested. “If they want to talk to you, I’m not stopping them, and neither is anyone here. No one was interrupting until you interrupted yourself.” I thought blandly that Jacob was exactly the kind of guy who’d gotten on my last nerves when I’d been at Notre Dame—the one who thought it was a show of how badass he was to try and mouth off to the big, muscled-up jocks, to dare to be an asshole to them. Most of us were good about ignoring fools like Jacob, but every once in a while, one of the linebackers would be pushed over the edge and hit them—usually just once. Once was enough to give the impression about why it was a bad idea to fuck with people who were three or four times your size.
“Let’s take this outside,” Jacob suggested, probably realizing how ridiculous he looked.
I tried not to snort. Suggesting we take it outside meant that he wanted to look like he wasn’t scared of me. In truth, he really didn’t have much reason to be, since I had no intention of beating him up. But it was such a transparent move.
“Sure thing,” I said. “We could probably talk a little more privately out there.” I looked around the diner. “And we wouldn’t be interrupting all these fine folks’ meals.”
As far as I was concerned, we’d go outside, Jacob would get his rocks off yelling at me, and I’d just more or less laugh to myself about how ridiculous he was being.
Instead, once we were outside, he took a different tack.
“Do you think you’re going to get Emily this way?” he asked.
I just stared at him. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“I mean after taking her on that tour, and spending so much time with her—don’t think I don’t realize what you have in mind,” he said.
The wide sidewalk was fairly empty of pedestrians at the moment, so all I could look at was either Jacob or the false storefronts across the street from the diner. I’d much rather look at the stores than his ugly face, but I focused on him, hoping to end this conversation sooner rather than later.
“What I have in mind is saving my town,” I told him. “I need to save it from idiots like you who want to pave everything over and put a big box store in where it doesn’t need to be.”
“You aren’t fooling me,” he countered. “I see the way you’ve looked at her. This is about Emily. Well, I have a newsflash for you, bud. You’re not going to get her.”
I almost laughed out loud at that. I didn’t think that I “had” Emily—things were way too up in the air between us—but the thought that I was only protesting the change to my town to get to her was ridiculous. I’d all but kicked her out of my house after finding out what her father’s company was up to. Of course, Jacob had no way of knowing this.
“Oh my god, you are a tool,” I said, shaking my head.
“I might be a tool, but I’m a lot closer to getting into Emily’s panties than you’ll ever be,” he said.
All at once, any humor I saw in the situation evaporated. I couldn’t say why, but something about what he was insinuating just made something snap in me.
“I’d bet you aren’t close to any woman’s panties, with talk like that,” I said. “Whatever you think about how things are between me and Emily, you don’t need to talk about her that way.”
“Oh yeah? What are you going to do about it, big man?”
My hands clenched into fists almost before I knew what I was doing. “I don’t want to beat your ass, but I will.”
“Oh sure, the big bad town hero’s going to beat up the city slicker,” he said, shuffling from foot to foot and looking like a stupid little imp. “How much is Emily going to like you if she finds out you pounded me, big man?”
“How much is she going to like you if she finds out you’re talking to other people about her panties, little man?”
It went back and forth for a few moments like that, and I thought that after all it wasn’t going to come to anything—I’d be able to keep my cool, and just go about my business. But then something I said, I don’t even remember what, made him snap, the same way his comment about Emily’s panties had done to me, and Jacob launched himself at me, shouting.
I knocked him off of me without much effort, because he obviously hadn’t planned beyond throwing himself at me with arms swinging. I grabbed one of his wrists and brought it around to his back, trying to do little more than make him stop for a second. He kept kicking and swinging out the other arm, yelling cuss words, and it probably would have gotten a lot more physical if Emily hadn’t chosen exactly that moment to appear.
“What the hell is going on here?” she demanded.
I stopped, and Jacob went still.
“I was just having lunch with some potential sellers,” Jacob said. “And your friend here picked a fight.”
Emily raised an eyebrow at him, looking from Jacob to me for a moment.
“Why do I have trouble believing that?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Tell me another one, Jake. Maybe this time, try the truth.”
“You believe him over me?” Jacob wriggled free of my loosened grip and scowled at both of us.
“He hasn’t actually said anything yet,” Emily pointed out. “But I’m going to listen to both of you, and I am going to surely know whether either of you is telling the truth. So, what the hell happened?”
“He picked an argument in the diner and I took the bait,” I told her. “We came outside to talk, and he accused me of doing all this”—I took the petition out of my back pocket where I’d folded it up—“to try and get at you.”
Emily looked at Jacob for a long moment.
“You tried to make me bribe you with a date to even think about changing the plans for Mustang Ridge,” Emily said, and I felt pretty justified in what I’d done—little though it had been—to Jacob before she’d arrived. “I’m not about to buy that you didn’t do what Rhett said you did.”
“See? You are siding with him,” Jacob said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe you, Em.”
“Believe that I’m not going to side with you when you’re picking fights with people for no good reason,” Emily said. She turned and looked at me. “You should have known better than to do some outside-the-diner showdown with him, too.”
Jacob looked at least a little satisfied that he wasn’t the only one being told off, but at least I knew that Emily was right. I was willing to take my lumps on that account.
“I was just about to head home,” I said. “I’ll see you around, Emily?”
“You will,” she said. I knew she probably wanted to keep her involvement with me a secret for as long as she could—that meant definitely not letting Jacob know we were working together. “Jacob, I think you need to go back to the office.”
“I’m not done with my lunch,” Jacob said.
“Yes, you are,” Lucy said from the doorway of Bill’s. “Your check is paid. You should go home.”
I tried not to smile, but I couldn’t quite help it. Jacob was going to have a much harder time convincing anyone to sell to him after trying to pummel me in clear view of my friends in the diner.