thirteen
Tucker pulled slowly into the sprawling parking lot of Triad Fabrics and Textiles and found an empty spot in front of what looked like administrative offices. He tugged the keys from the ignition and turned to me. “We made it.”
I had to stifle a sigh of relief, and not because we’d covered the last mile between Silver Creek and Omaha. We’d made it through almost three hours of polite conversation, a feat I didn’t know I could repeat on the return trip. It turned out that being friends with this man required an attention to detail I hadn’t known I possessed. Turning to him, I forced eye contact and said, “I’m really grateful for this kindness, Tucker. I know you had to rearrange all sorts of stuff to make this happen today. So thank you.”
He broke our gaze but not before I saw a smile form. “I know it’s hard to believe, but spending time with you is a step up from drywall repair. Even if it’s going to Nebraska.”
I laughed, rolling my eyes. “You Midwesterners are so elitist.” I pulled open my door before Tucker could point out the hypocrisy in those words coming from a recent New Yorker. We covered the distance to the front door, my pulse starting to quicken as I got closer to the next step in building my nascent business.
A woman with a pinched expression sat behind an oversize computer monitor. “May I help you?” she said. Her hair was impressive in its height. I must have stared too long because Tucker cleared his throat.
“Yes, we’re here for some, um, fabric.” Definitely the first time he’d uttered those words in his life, and I stepped in to rescue him.
“Yes,” I said. “I believe my friend Luca Beneventi from Milano called? We’re here to pick up the entire Ibiza collection.”
The receptionist was smiling at Tucker, who had taken off his ball cap and was combing his fingers through a messy mop of hair. The effect seemed to mesmerize her.
“All of it,” I said, too loudly, in an effort to make the woman look at me and not the hunk of burning love next to me. “Two hundred bolts, if I’m not mistaken.”
The large number had the effect I wanted. She tipped her face to me, her expression skeptical. “The Ibiza? Are you sure you have the right name?”
“I’m sure,” I said, smiling. “I know you’ve had it awhile, but I’m happy to take it off your hands.”
“That’s a whole lot of fabric for an elementary teacher or a 4-H project or whatever you’re thinking.” She pursed her lips and clacked a bunch of keys on her keyboard. She shook her head. “I’m going to need you to submit a written request for such a large comp order. My guess is your Luca person talked with my sub, Lorraine, who had no authority to make this decision.” She raised her eyebrows and stared me down, willing me to defy her. I opened my mouth but Tucker intervened.
“Ma’am, I appreciate that you’re doing your job. I own my own company and I know how important it is to have someone I can trust, particularly in your position. The face of the company, that is.”
The face of the company looked up at him and batted every one of her mascara-heavy lashes.
An hour later, we were back on the road, all two hundred bolts snug and protected under the tarps in the back of Tucker’s truck.
I shook my head again. “You were shameless with that woman.” I took another lick of my ice cream. We’d stopped at Ted and Wally’s, and I was happy to report the breathless hyperbole we heard from locals at a nearby gas station was based in truth not hype. My balsamic caramel blackberry was changing how I felt about the world, and Tucker’s scoop of smoked salted bourbon Ho Hos (yes, Ho Hos) was making even a broad-shouldered construction king swoon.
Tucker swiped a spoonful of blackberry and swallowed thoughtfully. “Nah, not shameless. Just polite. People appreciate good manners these days.”
My laugh wasn’t dainty but it made my point. “Manners and eye candy. A deadly combo.” I grinned at him. “Thanks for using your chiseled jaw to help me avoid paperwork. It was very gallant of you.”
He scratched his head and looked pained. “You’re welcome? Is that what I say to that? Good grief, Kleren. You can make a man blush.”
I was enjoying watching him squirm. “I believe you have a forever fan in Blanche of Triad Fabrics.” I returned to my ice cream and tried for a cavalier tone of voice. “The list of women who’ve fallen for Tucker Van Es gets longer by the day.”
He polished off the end of his ice cream. “My list is actually pretty short.” He stole a glance at me before shifting his gaze back to the road. “And stubborn.”
I saw the half smile on his face and felt my stomach flip. “Well, I’m grateful that you didn’t let our sordid past keep you from doing me a solid today. Thank—”
“Grace,” he said firmly, taking his eyes off the road to seek out mine. “If you thank me one more time, I might have to toss my cookies. And I don’t want to do that, Grace. I just ate some incomprehensibly good ice cream, and I’d rather not ruin it.”
I laughed at his intensity, which only made him scowl. “All right. I get it,” I said. “As long as you know I’m grateful. I mean, you don’t exactly owe me anymore. Now that we aren’t a thing. Or not that thing, anyway. Now that I’m off the list.” I cringed as soon as the last word was out of my mouth. I stared straight ahead, wishing my old tendency to ramble was one I’d left in New York.
A few moments into my self-berating, I realized Tucker’s shoulders were shaking with laughter.
“What?” I demanded, still stinging with my utter failure to keep the conversational plates spinning.
“I just can’t get over this new Grace. The one who is so careful with her words and worried she’ll say the wrong thing.” His eyes brimmed with mischief when he stole a glance in my direction. “It’s a little odd, I must say.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “This is not the new me,” I said, defensive. “This is the new Grace-with-Tucker-but-not-dating-Tucker me. I’m trying it out.”
“How’s it working?” He didn’t even try to hide his grin.
I pursed my lips. “It’s exhausting.” I slumped in my seat while he laughed. I just let him have his moment. My dignity was in shards anyway. After a minute or so, I said, “At least I have one consolation.”
“What’s that?” he asked through a smile that hadn’t faded.
“At least I know my name was stubborn on that list of yours.” I shrugged. “It feels pretty good to be a legend.”
“Oh, I didn’t say you were a legend necessarily,” he said breezily as he changed lanes. “Just stubborn.” He didn’t turn to witness my frown but I was pretty sure he knew it was there. “Crazy stubborn. And I tried all sorts of things, I’ll have you know.”
“Like what?” I turned to watch Nebraska fly by my window, my heart picking up a bit of speed. I thought of Natalie the grocery goddess and her perfect figure and glossy hair and wondered where Tucker placed her on this list of his. I tilted my head and waited for his response, my body language conveying more bravado than I felt.
“Oh, let’s see.” Tucker sighed. “I went through a long angry-country-song phase, trying my best to replace any remaining hope that Stubborn Girl would find her way back to me with the more realistic emotion of anger. No dice. She stayed on the list.”
I turned back to my window, watching the bright green of spring fields rush by in a wash of color.
“I tried hypnosis—”
I snapped my gaze back to his profile. “You did not.”
He laughed. “You’re right. I didn’t. But I did pray a lot.”
“You really did?” I said, curious.
“Sure, I did,” he said easily. “I pray about most things, so stubborn women definitely make the list.”
“Why?” I said, a little roughly. I tried more gently. “That is, why do you pray? What do you get out of it?”
He raised one eyebrow when he looked at me. “We’re going there, then?”
I shrugged. “We have about three hours left in the car. Might as well tackle God while we’re at it.”
He chuckled. “Three hours might not do it, but we can take a stab at it.” He stretched out a bit in his seat. “I pray to continue a conversation.”
“A one-way conversation?” I said, not liking the bitterness that crept into my voice but deciding if we were doing this, I might as well be honest. “The last time I tried to pray in earnest, it felt distinctly one-way.” A snapshot of myself curled up on my pink bedspread, my teenage self racked with grief, settled in my thoughts, and I felt anew how lonely one could feel when waiting for a distant God to break His silence.
He nodded slowly. “Sometimes it feels one-way. Often it doesn’t.” He paused. “Gracie, when was the last time you went to church?”
I looked out the window, rethinking my decision to be honest. The last time I had been inside a church was for my parents’ funeral. The idea of walking through those doors again still made me feel sick. A God that would let the best people I’d ever known die was a God I wanted nothing to do with. I decided to dodge the question. “You don’t have to go to church to believe in God, you know.”
“Oh, I do know,” he replied. “But church helps. It’s just tough to do all this alone.” Tuck let a long breath out through his nose, like he was trying to decide what else to say.
“What do you talk about?” I said more quietly. “When you pray, that is.”
He considered before answering. “Whatever’s on my mind. I’m better about bringing up problems, stuff with the business, things with my family, stubborn women.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “But I try to remember to be grateful too. I tend to be a spoiled brat, so I’m constantly trying to change that.”
I shook my head. “Tucker, you are the farthest thing from a spoiled brat.”
He sniffed. “That is called revisionist history. You’re not remembering the whole story. Like the boy who waited in his run-down Chevy pickup on the street outside your house until you came home at midnight just so he could get one more kiss before sleep.”
“Pretty much the kind of romance every girl dreams of.”
He waved it away. “Needy and annoying. I know because my needy self sat all alone in that truck listening to Hank Williams and feeling sorry for myself that you had ditched me for your friends that night.”
I giggled. “You sound angry.”
“I still am. What a dork. And what about the time I picked a fight with you because you talked with Dan DePhillips during study hall and you knew Dan DePhillips had liked you since seventh grade?”
I was laughing. “I just saw Dan DePhillips last week. He’s struggling with a receding hairline and a conversion van full of kids. You win.”
“Not the point. I should have been the bigger man.”
“You were sixteen!” I exclaimed. “Your spoiled brat evidence is pathetic. Rest your case.”
“And what about,” he said slowly, “when I let the girl of my dreams walk away and I was so busy nursing my pride, I did nothing to stop her?”
We sat in silence, the only sound coming from the truck as it hurtled us forward, the road slipping away in a long, uninterrupted line behind us.
I turned toward him. “That girl was unstoppable, I’m afraid. The whole stubborn thing was already an issue.” I watched his profile, the flex of his jaw.
He shook his head. “I should have tried. I mean, I did try. Just in the wrong city. Chicago is a few miles from New York. Even a farm kid knows that.” His grin was shaky and we looked at each other for a long time. So long, in fact, that he turned back to the road with a nervous laugh. “Better keep my eyes on the road if I’m going to get you and your fancy fabric back home safely.”
I returned my gaze to the view outside my window, though reluctantly, and we made our way to Silver Creek. Gradually, the tenderness of our conversation faded and we eased into more safe and shallow waters. We listened to Tucker’s beloved eighties mix, even after I made an apparently unconvincing demonstration of the superiority of Spotify in his fully loaded truck. He shook his head when I scrolled through the myriad station options and just reached over to turn up Bon Jovi, who was belting out “Livin’ on a Prayer,” a moment Tucker insisted was serendipity. Culture Club was on when we pulled off the interstate and onto the two-lane highway that would eventually lead us into the town square. We passed three abandoned farmhouses in a row and I reached over to turn down the music. I asked Tucker why there was so much emptiness in the acres we were passing.
“Large corporate farms have been swallowing up these smaller family farms for years,” he said. “Lots of the smaller operations, like the one my uncle owns, need supplementing with other streams of income in order to stay afloat. Or they depend heavily on family to help keep things running.” He pointed to a large long building that had a commercial real estate sign out front. “When the Atlantis factory moved operations overseas, that was another blow. Lots of jobs lost, lots of hurt people who’d worked there for decades, suddenly unemployed. This area hasn’t recovered.”
I stared at the empty building, lonely and vacant, long parking lot empty.
“Makes me sad to see things so lifeless. Silver Creek seems downhearted. I hear it in conversations all over town, and Gigi has talked about it too. The spunk is gone.”
Tucker slowed as we entered town and turned onto Gigi’s street. “We’re not the only ones, either. The same story plays out over and over around here.”
Gigi scurried out to the driveway when she heard the truck. “Did it work? Did you actually get it?”
“Thanks to some charm from Tucker Van Es here, we sure did,” I said.
“Not true,” Tucker mumbled, but Gigi wasn’t listening anyway. She was ogling the fabric under the tarp.
“Holy catfish, that’s a lot of bolts,” she said, suddenly somber. “We’ll be sewing until I’m two steps from the grave.”
I looked at her, hit with a thought. “Gigi,” I said carefully, as if wary of frightening a barn swallow, “how long does it take you to sew a dress—not the kinds of alterations we’ve been doing, but from start to finish?”
Gigi thought, her breath coming out in a forceful exhale when she decided on an answer. “I’d say . . . a month?” She winced. “I never really kept track. I was mostly in it for the social aspect.”
Tucker caught my eye but I ignored his smirk.
“A month?” I felt a blanket of dread descending. “One month per dress won’t work.” I ran my hand over the top bolt of fabric, wondering if we’d just made a long trip in vain. No business could survive making one product a month, no matter how unique the product, how vintage the material.
“Now, I must say,” Gigi added, “I wasn’t exactly moving at top speed. I would mostly work during Sewing Club.”
“Sewing Club?” I asked, hand paused on the fabric. “You mean the ladies from church?”
“Every Tuesday night in the fellowship hall for years, until we decided to take a break last fall after a bad snowstorm. Just never started up again after the holidays.” She looked at Tucker. “We rotated who brings snack.”
Tucker nodded as if this were the most pertinent information. “Sounds fair. Just between you and me, Gigi”—he lowered his voice and looked around the neighborhood—“whose snack night did you do your best to avoid?”
Gigi didn’t hesitate. “Myrna Hopkins. She took whatever was in her pantry and threw it on a plate.” Gigi shuddered. “Any woman who thinks stale Wheat Thins and spray cheese can be dignified as a snack for a group of hungry women is deluding herself.”
I tried to rein in the conversation from spray cheese. “Gigi,” I said, impatient. “We need to troubleshoot here. One dress a month is about fifty dresses too few. Maybe worse.” I held back for a beat, hoping this wasn’t a nail in any sort of coffin to ask Gigi the question that might be too risky. “Gigi. Do those Sewing Club ladies still sew?”
“Of course,” she said immediately. “It’s like riding a bike. Only not as dangerous as one ages.”
I was still processing when I saw Tucker standing with his arms crossed, his smile wide. “Gracie, it sounds like you’ve just found yourself a workforce.”
Gigi’s eyes got wide as the plan dawned on her. “Moses,” she said, the closest she came to cussing.
“It’s a lot to ask,” I admitted, worry already creasing my forehead. “Do you think they’ll do it?”
“Of course they will,” Gigi snapped, her sternness revealing just how sure she was. “You keep forgetting where you are, city girl. Around here, we help each other when help is needed.” She started for the front porch, already feeling in her pocket for her cell phone. “Of course, we also gossip about you and shame you for your spray cheese, but you take the good with the bad, right, Tuck?”
“That we do, Miss Gigi,” Tucker said, laughing.
I bit my lower lip as I watched Gigi let the screen door slam shut. “Oh man,” I muttered. “I hope this works.”
Tucker leaned against his truck and crossed long legs in front of him. I felt a spike of adrenaline watching him, his chin tipped up in thought, one hand running across his day-old beard. “It will work,” he said finally. “Though the fellowship hall isn’t going to be big enough.”
I felt my forehead crease at this new worry. “It’s not? What will we do? Where will—”
Tucker stopped my words with a wide, beautiful grin, a technique I found to be both disconcerting and rather effective. “I’ve got it,” he said. He jogged around to the driver’s side door and turned the key in the ignition. I could hear Bonnie Tyler belting “Total Eclipse of the Heart” as he started to pull away.
“Wait,” I called. I walked toward his moving vehicle. “What about the fabric?”
“Don’t you trust me?” A roguish grin spread across his face.
“Totally,” I said without reservation, then blushed at my ready response. I smiled tightly, glad he couldn’t see the color of my cheeks in the gathering twilight.
“All right, then,” he called back.
“Tucker,” I said over Bonnie. “Listen, thank—”
“Don’t do it, Kleren,” he said in a warning voice before stepping on the gas and driving away.