eleven
I was just about to check out at Henrickson’s Market the following Friday, my little red basket burgeoning with requests from Gigi, when my phone buzzed with a new text.
Gigi had added another item to the list, her fourth addition since I’d arrived at the grocery store twenty minutes before. I turned on my heel and headed back to the shelves, screwing up my face as I stared at her message.
It read, Paste. Thank!
Pasta? I assumed she didn’t need any Elmer’s, so I headed for the small selection of noodles. After brief consideration, I tugged a box of penne off the shelf. On my way back to the front again, my phone buzzed. I groaned out loud.
Two more things, Grace. I’m sore sorry! Please pick up a brunch of asparagus and Gaelic. Making paste for dinner tonight!
I rolled my eyes on my way to Henrickson’s produce section. A paste of asparagus and Gaelic something-or-other. Sounded perfect.
I neared the produce, thinking about my growling stomach and that I might need to stop at the Chickadee for a midafternoon cinnamon roll, when I stopped short. Tucker stood by a display of raspberries and blackberries, talking with two women who stood with their backs to me. He was turned so that he couldn’t quite see me, but I could tell even from my compromised angle that he was blushing as he spoke to the women. When I recognized Erin Jackson, I realized why.
I hadn’t seen her since our brief interaction the morning I’d started my job search at the Chickadee, but if my instincts were correct, Tucker was just as unhappy to be cornered by her in a grocery store as I would have been. When Erin’s unmistakable, high-pitched laugh rang out and I saw Tucker flinch slightly, I set my jaw and started their way. We might have been new to the whole friendship idea, Tucker and I, but I was sure friends did not let friends agonize through conversations with a frustrated prom decor queen.
I reached them and put on my best faux-surprised expression. “Well, hello,” I said, forcing them to widen their little circle as I stepped between Tucker and Erin. I smiled at the three of them, making quick eye contact with Erin, Tuck, and a woman I didn’t recognize. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything, but I had to stop over and say hello.”
“Hello indeed,” Erin said, with more enthusiasm than I’d thought she’d have for seeing me. “Grace, I don’t think you two have met.” She turned to the woman at her side and said, “Natalie Connors, this is Grace Kleren.”
I put out my hand to shake Natalie’s impeccable manicure. Natalie. One glance at Tucker’s blush and I knew this was that Natalie. I stared at her a beat, unaccustomed to seeing such a polished look in Silver Creek. Natalie had long, glossy chestnut hair and huge brown eyes that were tastefully lined and shadowed. She wore a fitted black dress topped with a cropped black jacket and absolutely covet-worthy black heels. She saw me staring and laughed easily.
“I suppose my attire is a bit out of place,” she said. Her smile showed an impressive two rows of straight and white teeth. “I was in court this afternoon, and I stopped by Silver Creek on my way back to Des Moines. I typically don’t shop for groceries in heels, but Erin insisted I tag along so we could chat a bit before I went back.” She turned to Tucker. “And then we had the happy surprise of running into this guy.” She reached out and touched Tucker’s arm, and I found myself glaring at her touch and at Tucker’s level of comfort with leaving those red nails right where they were.
I swallowed. Hard. Gripping my basket more tightly, I said, “Court appearance, eh? Got caught doing something illegal? Money laundering? Tax evasion? Meth?” I laughed weakly but the three of them just stared. Tucker frowned.
“Grace,” Erin said slowly, as if talking with someone who needed extra time to process, “Natalie is an attorney. A very good one, actually. You probably saw her name in the Register a lot last year when she won that case that returned millions of dollars to health care fraud victims.” She turned to Natalie, admiring. “You helped so many innocent people get justice. Our state is so lucky to have you.”
I must not have agreed fast enough because Erin looked at me pointedly.
“Wow,” I stuttered. “Right. Great work. It sounds like you’re a real world changer.”
Natalie, still smiling, tilted her head at me. “Wait. Are you Grace the former New Yorker? The fashion designer?” I could feel her taking in my own ensemble and knew a graphic T-shirt and my oldest pair of jeans were not exactly screaming “Fashion Week.”
“Yes.” I did my best to stand straight, though I was starting to feel the weight of the basket full of Gigi’s requests digging into my palm. “I am a designer.”
“Actually”—Erin drew out the word—“Grace here is back home after a long stint in New York City.” She shook her head, faux concern in full force. “Didn’t quite work out, right, Grace?”
I seethed internally but maintained my smile.
Tucker, who had, until that moment, been silent, mercifully interrupted my downward spiral. “We’re glad to have her back in town,” he said with a curt nod in my direction. “And I’m sure she’s plenty busy. We won’t keep you, Grace.” He locked eyes with me, eyebrows raised.
“Of course,” I said, now the one to blush. Here I had marched over to save Tucker, maybe even ask him to join me for coffee and a cinnamon roll at the Chickadee, and he was the one who had to rescue me.
“It’s lovely to meet you,” I said to Natalie, who said a gracious good-bye. Erin wasn’t as subtle.
“Say hello to your grandma,” she called, a smirk undergirding her words.
I didn’t turn back to acknowledge I’d heard her, though I did hear Tucker’s quiet reprimand. My cheeks burned as I checked out and threw down a bill to pay for my purchases. “Keep the change,” I said to the gleeful teenager, who thanked me for a large tip. I took the bags from the end of the conveyor belt and pushed through the door as if pursued. Get me out of here, I thought as my eyes burned with embarrassed tears, and I knew afresh that I wasn’t thinking only about Henrickson’s. I was thinking about the entire state.
I made it to the minivan and opened the side door, intent on loading the groceries and driving to the refuge of Gigi’s house as fast as I could without getting stopped by the sheriff, when I glimpsed a tower of packages in the back of the car. I moaned, letting my forehead rest against the frame of the van door. In my haste to get out of Henrickson’s, I’d forgotten the reason I’d come to the town square in the first place. The groceries had been a favor for Gigi. I was really in town to mail a stack of new orders.
The post office was only a block down from Henrickson’s. I watched the door to the grocer’s for a full minute before filling my arms with the packages as quickly as I could. I gripped my unwieldy load and worked two fingers free to pull the van’s roller door shut. It was tricky, but I managed to balance the packages as I walked, finally reaching the post office and carefully backing through the door and going up to the front desk. I sighed with gratitude, both for making it to the counter without having the boxes keel over and for the gift of not having to see Tucker and his new girlfriend on my walk down the block.
Miss Evelyn took one look at me and slapped the counter with both hands.
“Grace Kleren, I do believe I’ve seen you more in the last week than in the whole of the last fifteen years,” she said, reaching out to take my packages and setting the first one on the scale. She placed stickers on each package in turn, and then took my credit card from me without needing to ask my shipping preference. “In fact,” she said, looking over her reading glasses so I could catch her eye, “this trip marks your fourteenth time this week.”
I felt my eyes widen. “Fourteen? That’s even more than I thought.” I felt my chest expand with the deep breath I inhaled. Gigi and I had been working like dogs to use every bit of her fabric. We’d settled on three of our favorite designs in order to keep our sanity and to speed up production, but even with that decision, her house had been a whirlwind of activity in an attempt to keep up with the orders that came in steadily from our Etsy shop. Fourteen trips to the post office, with each trip representing at least ten dresses sold—my math was looking awfully promising for a return to New York earlier than I’d hoped.
“I know it’s unusual,” Miss Evelyn continued as she placed the packages in a waiting canvas bag, “but I’ve always had that gift.”
I pulled myself out of my calculator mode and must have looked confused. “Sorry?” I said.
“The counting gift,” Miss Evelyn said, nodding. “I don’t even mean to do it. It just happens. I keep track of how many packages I send or receive for a particular person each week, even when I don’t really want to know.” She lowered her voice and looked around the empty foyer. “And believe you me, sometimes I most assuredly do not want to know. Like Hal Lundstrom’s fixation with that Beyoncé woman. He’s been a member of her fan club for fifteen years, and may I just say that if he refers to her as ‘Queen Bey’ in my presence one more time, I fear I might lose what little composure I still maintain.” She sighed, lips pressed into a thin line. I bit my cheek, waiting for her to inhale, then exhale. When she’d gathered herself, she smiled at me and patted my hand. “I’d much prefer to be of some help to your dress business. Georgina tells me it’s going gangbusters. I’m so happy for you, Grace.”
I rushed to change the subject before I heard about anything else the people of this town were ordering by mail. Some things one could never unknow. “That light green box with the tiny polka dots isn’t to ship today.”
Miss Evelyn paused, one hand above the little box. She looked over her half-moon glasses. “You’d like me to hold on to it, honey? Send it out tomorrow or next week?”
“No,” I said, unable to contain my smile. “That box is for you, Miss Evelyn.”
Her eyes lit up with pleasure. Not too many years shy of eighty, and Miss Evelyn still looked like a kid at Christmas when presented with a gift. “Grace Kleren, what have you been up to?” she asked, trying to sound stern but failing miserably. She lifted off the lid of the box and slowly extracted a personalized stamp with a beautifully carved wooden handle. She looked at the example imprint on its side and gasped. “This is my name and home address! I’ve never in my life . . .” She turned to me and reached over the counter to pull me into a hug. “Where on earth did you find such a thing?”
“Online,” I said when she pulled back from our embrace. “I know how much you love letters and stationery, and you mentioned a couple of weeks ago that you hated the boring old return address stamp that your husband has used for your personal mail for years.”
“Ugly as sin,” she declared, still looking at her new treasure.
“I thought a post office matron of all people deserved her own monogrammed stamp. How would it look for Silver Creek if your correspondence didn’t live up to your position?”
She shook her head. “You are too kind, dearie. I’m so glad you’re back in town.” She paused and then said with a knowing look, “I do hope your business continues to thrive. It’s so refreshing to see someone doing well.”
“I’m definitely not out of the woods yet,” I warned. “We’re just starting out, feeling our way.”
“Well, I’m certainly rooting for you.” She placed the gift box to the side and continued weighing and postmarking the remaining packages of dresses. “I’m sure you’ve noticed all the empty storefronts on Main.” She shook her head sadly. “It’s a tough time to be a small business around here, online or otherwise. First Marv’s Hardware, then that little clothes shop that Cassie Velton tried to make a go of, then the bookshop that was in the Harding family for three generations—all gone within the last few years.” She patted the top of the stack of packages and looked me in the eye. “I’m cheering you on, Grace. It’s not easy to do what you’re trying to do.”
I nodded slowly, lost in thought and feeling a healthy dollop of guilt that I too was making my plan to leave Silver Creek and take my business with me.
“Well, I should get back to that company I’m building,” I said, feeling in my coat pocket for the keys to Gigi’s van. “There are two stamp pads in that box, so I hope you go crazy tonight and stamp everything in sight.”
Her delighted laugh pealed like bells. “Oh, Grace, you are too much. I’m just pleased as punch you thought of me.” She covered my hand with her own cool palm. “Godspeed to you, sweetheart. I hope those dreams you’re growing take you exactly where you want to be.” She winked. “And that you send me a postcard when you get there.”
I smiled as I pushed open the glass door, the bell above it announcing my exit. I turned toward the town square, taking a silent inventory of all the shuttered businesses, all the empty real estate. I walked slowly to my car, lost in thought. As I turned the key to open the driver’s side door, knowing Gigi would have thought me a crazy woman to lock the door in the first place, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned and saw Tucker working in Goldie’s yard, loading bundles of dead branches into the back of his truck. He didn’t see me and I stood a moment, watching him leverage his strong arms and back to stack the wood in the truck bed. Goldie talked with him from a spot on her front walk, and I smiled when he paused in his work and laughed, tipping his head back as he did so.
I folded into the driver’s seat, my mind full and processing all the ways Silver Creek had changed and, I noticed as I drove past Goldie’s house and Tuck lifted his ball cap at me, all the ways it remained the same.