Chapter Twenty-Three
Downtown Willow Grove bustled with activity on Saturday morning. The high school’s senior class was throwing their annual school carnival and bake sale, the last big event before tourists took over their little town. Locals came out in droves to support the event, partly for nostalgic reasons and partly to raise funds for whatever the graduating class decided the school needed most.
This year, they wanted a new scoreboard for the football field.
Beatty Park, with its open fields and ample shade, had proved to be the best place in town for an event like this, complete with carnival rides, games and local food vendors who showed up early to aid a worthy cause.
Though Beth was exhausted, she knew showing her face at the carnival was important. These were the same people she hoped would support not only their barn sale, but the farm itself. Besides, she couldn’t miss the carnival. It was a tradition.
She loved the artistic spin the Willow Grove locals put on a school fund-raiser. Off to one side of the park, artists set up easels to demonstrate their skills, surrounded by displays of the original artwork they had for sale. Beth always stopped to browse the paintings, the art lover in her wishing for the chance to hold a brush again.
After days of long hours and sore muscles, Beth told herself she wouldn’t rush through the morning the way she usually did. She’d go slow, talk to the people she knew, people who had come out to volunteer their time and manual labor in an effort to get the farm off the ground. She owed them so much.
Today, she promised herself she’d enjoy the day off.
And true Saturday enjoyment started with coffee.
Up ahead, she spotted the red-and-white gingham bunting of Callie’s bakery booth. She hoped her friend charged a fair price for her pies and pastries. Knowing Callie and her big heart, she was probably giving everything away. But—Callie would have coffee. And right now, that’s what really mattered. Beth made her way through the crowd, and as she finally reached the booth, she saw a familiar profile in line behind an old couple.
Drew.
He glanced her way. She smiled. Her efforts to maintain a professional façade around him had been valiant but flawed. Because everything inside her turned to mush as soon as she saw those eyes.
“You’re out early,” he said as she reached the line.
“So are you. You didn’t want to sleep in?” She knew better. He probably hadn’t slept at all.
Roxie sat beside him, her leash wound through Drew’s strong hands. The dog stood to greet Beth, but one tug from the leash and she sat back down. “She’s not used to being around so many people.”
Beth knelt down and rubbed Roxie’s ears, avoiding the thick tail that pounded the ground beside her.
“Hey, you two,” Callie said, clearly assuming they’d come together. “The usual?”
Drew nodded. “And two apple fritters.” He glanced at Beth. “Unless you’re not hungry?”
“I am, actually.” She rarely allowed herself pastries, but lately she seemed to be living on them. Thank goodness even her simple farm chores burned lots of calories.
Drew took a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and set it on the counter.
“Let me,” Beth said.
“Not a chance.”
Callie gave him his change and grinned at Beth. “Your sister was here already with her new dog.”
Beth groaned. “I hope she had it on a leash.”
“I think it might’ve been the other way around,” Callie said. “But she left me some postcards for the Fairwind Farm Market.” She patted the stack on the counter. “I’ll make sure everyone gets one, and I’ll talk to the vendors I know—some of them came out for this.”
“Thanks, Cal.”
A man walked up behind them, and Drew moved out of the way.
“I’ll stop back before I leave,” Beth said.
Callie smiled, waved goodbye to Drew and then waggled her eyebrows at Beth.
“You guys seem like good friends,” Drew said.
“The best.”
Drew followed her to one of the many picnic tables set up all around the park, opened the bag and took out the apple fritters, setting them on the paper between them.
“You’re lucky.” Drew took a swig of coffee.
She picked at the glaze on the fritter. “You must have some good friends back home.”
“Well, let’s see. There’s Mabel. I guess I’d call her a friend.”
Beth swallowed the bite in her mouth. “Oh.”
“Course, she’s a horse, so I don’t know if that counts.”
She glanced up just in time to see his smile skitter away. “Funny.”
A quiet lull fell between them.
“I feel like you know a lot about me,” Beth dared. “But I know almost nothing about you.”
“You know plenty about me.” He tossed a piece of apple fritter in his mouth.
“You worked at a ranch in Colorado—a ranch that has a web page that doesn’t list its staff, by the way.”
“You checked?”
“Course I checked. The only reason I didn’t call your boss is because I didn’t want to get you in trouble.”
“You’re thorough, I’ll give you that.” He smiled.
Oh, that smile. It was something.
“There’s really not much to tell,” he said.
“Did you go to school?”
“I did.”
“For what?”
“Agricultural sciences.”
“For real? No wonder you know how to do everything.”
He laughed. “Well, working at the ranch taught me most of what I know—more than school in a lot of ways.”
“So you have a degree from . . . where?”
“Colorado State.”
“Colorado State, and you’re doing this kind of work?”
He shrugged. “I like it.”
She eyed him for a long moment.
“What about you?”
She took a drink of her coffee, wishing that if they were going to change the subject, they could focus on something other than her. “What about me?”
“I assume you have a degree.”
“I do.”
“In?”
“Business.”
“I can see that. And, what, you just love Willow Grove so much you came back home after college?”
She laughed. “Can we walk?”
He balled up the fritter wrappers and tossed them in the garbage can. “Let’s walk.”
She kept her eyes ahead as they wandered down the makeshift rows of carnival games and food booths, smiling at the occasional passerby. He was quiet, most likely waiting for her to elaborate, yet she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to open up to him.
He was her employee, after all.
She glanced at him. His eyes were focused in front of them, leading Roxie through the crowd that had started to gather.
“I actually kind of hated it here.” She kept her eyes straight ahead. “I talked a lot of trash about this town. I guess I just wanted a different life. I mean, did you ever feel like there was something more you were supposed to do? Like you should’ve done it by now?”
Somehow, his silence encouraged her to go on.
“I went to college in the city, and by my senior year, I had this great internship with my dream company. I was in the running for a full-time job there after I graduated, but the job went to someone else.”
“Guess it wasn’t your job, then.”
She frowned.
“I mean, if the door didn’t open, it wasn’t your door.”
She laughed. “Did you read that in a fortune cookie?”
“I might have, actually.” He tugged Roxie away from a box of popcorn someone had dropped on the ground.
“I didn’t see it that way. I was crushed. I graduated and came back here, you know, to figure out my life, and I’ve been here ever since.”
“You might’ve skipped a little bit in there.”
“Like what?”
“Like, why didn’t you go back to the city and get a different job?”
She pressed her lips together, figuring out how to reply. “My dad had a great business here—a manufacturing company. They make two specific parts for lawn mowers. Doesn’t that sound glamorous?”
The corner of his mouth turned up in one of his trademark nonsmiles.
“I worked there in high school, just in the office, so after college, I took a very temporary position. That was seven years ago.”
He didn’t respond, not that she thought he would. What was he going to say—“Wow, that’s kind of pathetic?”
“I was the office manager.” I almost destroyed the whole business.
“Was?”
“I haven’t told anyone, but they asked me to resign just after Molly bought the farm.”
More silence.
“The truth is, if this Fairwind thing hadn’t come along, I don’t know what I would’ve done.” She stopped at a game booth, the one where she could throw baseballs at jars and win something if she knocked them over. It was humiliation, not a desire to play the game, that compelled her to stop there.
She gave the kid at the booth a dollar in exchange for three baseballs.
“Miss Whitaker, let’s see that arm,” he said.
She squared off with the jars, drew in a breath and threw the ball as hard as she could. It smacked against the back curtain with a thud, leaving the tower of milk jars standing perfectly still.
Sighing, she lined herself up again, threw the second ball and got the same result.
She glanced down at the third ball in her hand, turning it over. As she stood there, she replayed the day her father had learned that she’d gone against his wishes and it would cost them dearly, and her eyes clouded with fresh tears. She blinked them back, determined not to let herself cry again in front of Drew.
He put a hand on her back and wrapped his free hand around the baseball she held. “Let me.”
She stared at his strong hand wrapped around hers, their skin touching on the edges around the ball. She didn’t know how to let anyone do anything for her—but standing there, next to him, she wanted to try.
She released her grip on the ball, and he inched it out of her hand. “Here, take Roxie.”
He handed her the leash, and the dog sat at her feet as Drew stepped up in front of the booth. He lined up with the jars, threw one pitch and knocked all of them down.
“You’re not as alone as you think you are.”
Her mother’s words rushed back at her, but she didn’t know how to make sense of them. She was alone.
Drew took a small stuffed-animal prize from the kid manning the booth and handed it to Beth.
“Thanks,” she said.
As he took Roxie’s leash from her, her fingers brushed against his, and her whole body was aware of the touch.
He continued walking in the direction they’d been going before she’d stopped. “What happened? With your job, I mean?”
She looked away. She’d sworn she’d never tell a soul.
Why, then, was she actually figuring out how to put it into words?
Beth weaved in and around people walking in the opposite direction until finally Drew took hold of her hand and pulled her off the path and toward the band shell, where only a few other people sat.
He sat down and ordered Roxie to do the same.
“It’s nothing, really,” she said.
“It’s not nothing.”
She let out an exhausted sigh. “I was wrong.”
His eyebrows shot up.
“I was really, really wrong.” Slowly, she sat down in the chair next to him. “My dad had been running his business for years. It was doing really well—like, really well.” She glanced at him. She saw no judgment, only a willingness to let her talk.
“Like I said before, we manufacture lawn mower parts. I thought I’d found a less expensive way to make this one specific part. I went to my dad and told him about it, and he wouldn’t even hear me out.”
She’d been so excited—so sure she’d found something that would save money. They’d streamlined the material, made it more affordable so shops like theirs didn’t have to pay as much. The best part was they wouldn’t have to change what they charged because nobody would ever know the difference.
She worked for two weeks straight on a presentation to take to her dad. Now that she was managing the office, keeping costs within their budget was something she was responsible for, and she wanted nothing more than to do him proud.
She’d hardly gotten through the opening paragraph of her presentation when he held up a hand and stopped her. “No.”
She stood, slack-jawed, in front of his desk. “You haven’t heard what I’m going to say.”
“I know where this is going. I’m not changing the materials in our parts. Our customers rely on us. They know they’re getting the best. This stuff”—he waved a hand across her paperwork—“is not the best.”
“It could save us a lot of money.”
“And it could ruin our reputation. I appreciate your work on this, Beth, but the answer is no.”
She recounted the conversation for Drew, then paused to take a breath.
“It might’ve been the first time in my life I didn’t do what my father said.” She stared at her folded hands in her lap. “And I should have. About six months later, customers started complaining. Because of the change, our clients’ mowers were defective, and three of them got together and sued my dad’s company.”
Beth could feel the tears building behind her eyes. Drew hadn’t moved a muscle the whole time they sat there. He only listened. She supposed men who hated talking were good at that.
“I’d never seen my father so angry,” she said. “Especially at me. At my brother Seth, maybe—but me?”
Beth had been so ashamed. Whitaker Mowers was being sued for the first time, and it was because of her. She’d tarnished the reputation of the company her father had tirelessly worked to build.
“The worst part was that he took the blame.” She wiped a traitorous tear from her cheek and stared at the ground. “He never told anybody it was my fault. And neither did I.” Of course Darren Sanders had found out—a paper trail tattled on her. When he’d confronted her on it only a few weeks ago, she’d almost felt relieved.
Almost. As far as anyone in her family knew, she was still working at Whitaker. How was that for shameful?
“Is that why you work so hard? You’re trying to make it up to him?”
She shrugged. “He died before I could. He had a heart attack. I can’t help but think that was my fault too. I caused so much stress. I broke his heart.” Another tear slid down her cheek. “But a part of me has always felt like I had something to prove.”
“Right, because you’re supposed to do something more.”
She stilled. “More than Willow Grove? Yes. Great dreams don’t come true in places like this.”
“Sometimes they do.”
Slowly, she found his eyes.
“Mine don’t. I’m not like the people who live here. People like Callie. She never had big dreams like I did. She likes this small town. She bakes pies for a living—and she loves it. The only thing missing from her life is a husband and a carload of babies. Once she has that, she’ll never wish for anything else the rest of her life.”
“And that’s not okay?”
“It’s great for her.” Beth wiped her palms on her jeans. “Not for me.” She paused. “I just thought I’d be closer to my goals by now, I guess.”
“You do realize you are one of the people who live here, right?”
She frowned, then looked away.
“And there’s nothing wrong with that.”
He didn’t understand. How could he? He hadn’t grown up here.
He took another drink. “Did you ever think maybe the something ‘more’ you were supposed to do is exactly what you’re doing right now?”
She didn’t even know how to answer that. Renovating an old farm was hardly in her ten-year plan. She was supposed to do more. Didn’t he get what that meant?
Drew’s stare, a little too intent, rattled the cage around her heart.
“You know, for a guy who doesn’t say much, you sure have some smart things to say.”
He hitched two fingers underneath her chin and flashed that lazy grin she’d come to crave. “You can’t corner the market on guilt, you know. We’ve all done things we regret.”
A quiet beat passed between them. “So what’s your story?”
He pulled his hand away and wrapped it around the disposable coffee cup. Something in him shifted.
Perhaps they were more alike than she’d thought.
“Ah, well, that’s a story for another day.” He swallowed his last swig of coffee, then stood and threw the cup in the tall metal garbage can behind them.
She sat, unmoving, feeling like she’d said too much. She didn’t make a habit of unloading her regrets on people—especially strangers—but there was something safe about Drew. Or at least there had been until he’d reciprocated nothing.
Maybe opening up to him had simply been another in a long line of bad choices.