Just Right

by Jessie Gussman

  “No. Unless you count my mother. But Kristen never really warmed up to her.”

  “I don’t get that. Your mother is the nicest person I know.” Gator’s arms around her had warmed her up enough her teeth had stopped chattering.

  “Kristen is pretty focused on getting what she wants and isn’t too interested in people.”

  “But you married her anyway.”

  “We were pretty much the same. But I think I might have grown up some, and she just got greedier. That’s my side of the story, anyway. Maybe she has a different one.” Gator’s shoulders moved against hers in a shrug.

  “So, you have no idea why she’s in town.”

  “I’m guessing she wants something. I don’t have any idea what it could be, and I’m not interested in finding out. Was hoping if I avoid her, she’ll have to leave before she corners me long enough to tell me.”

  Avery snorted. “I see. You’re not a little curious?”

  “No.”

  She shut her mouth. Talking too much was a fault she’d been working hard on overcoming. That and prying into other peoples’ lives. Both of which she was doing just now.

  “Thanks for rescuing me.”

  “Thanks for needing rescued.” The dimple beside his lip appeared as his lips turned up, and she couldn’t help but grin back. She still couldn’t believe that the man needed reassurance that he was strong and capable. It was odd to think of a man—men—as insecure, but maybe that had something to do with the men she knew running off with younger women. They needed that reassurance that they were still desirable or something. But that only confirmed her decision that she shouldn’t have anything to do with Gator. After all, if he were constantly looking for reassurance, he’d be leaving with another woman before she knew it.

  She stepped away and his hands slid off her shoulders. “I think I’ll go get your mom and walk around with her, if you’ve got a handle on the dunking booth.”

  “She’s here. That’s why I was a little late rescuing you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I left her with Jillian. Mom is pretty well respected in town, and I thought Jillian and she got along well.”

  Avery tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. Gator had seen that Jillian wasn’t considered “normal” by the townspeople and had dropped his mother off to help Jillian integrate. She could hardly believe that’s what he was saying.

  But as she met his gaze, she had no trouble reading his expression. He knew Jillian didn’t fit in and he knew his mother could help her.

  “Close your mouth, Avery.”

  She slapped her mouth shut.

  Gator glanced back at the dunking booth where a wet, shivering Kristen sat on the dunking board. “I’d better go relieve Kristen.”

  “If you think your mom is okay, I’ll stand and keep the unruly hoards in line.” She eyed his dogs, then gathered up her nerve. “And I’ll watch your dogs too. Keep them from leaving you for the little people.”

  He laughed and they split up—him to the back of the tank, she to the front where a small boy wearing a Santa hat had just put eight quarters in the slot.

  Kristen didn’t hesitate to climb down, and Gator sat on the board in his wet suit.

  Avery took a moment to admire him. It emphasized his broad shoulders and narrow waist and defined his muscular arms and legs.

  Stepping back to give the miniature Santa room to throw, Avery checked the time. Two hours until the booth closed.

  “Have you and Gator known each other long?” Kristen’s voice came over Avery’s shoulder as the little boy threw his ball. It missed, she noted with satisfaction, dropping in the chute and rolling to the queue with all the other balls.

  “No.” She smiled at Kristen. No reason not to, just because they were different. “I think they were selling hot chocolate with cinnamon sticks over by the court house if you need to warm up.”

  Kristen’s lips were blue around the corners, although she wasn’t shivering. Possibly because she had her jaw clenched.

  “I saw coffee down the block.” Kristen waved her hand.

  “Coffee works too.” Avery smiled at the next person in line—another little boy. A few teenaged girls had gathered at the end, and she figured seeing Gator is what had drawn them to the booth.

  “I thought it was kind of weird that he took your place up there.” She nodded to the dunking booth. “And I thought it was really odd that you let him.”

  That was not a veiled insult, Avery told herself. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You don’t want a man, any man, to think that you can’t do something. It makes the entire gender of women look weak.” Kristen shook out her towel and rubbed it over her hair.

  Avery kept her smile firmly in place, even if the gratitude she’d felt toward Kristen had been misplaced, seeing how Kristen had only been trying to keep her gender from looking weak. “I didn’t have a wet suit. Even if I did, I have no desire to get dunked into a tank of cold water. Seems to me I’d have been stupid to turn him, or you, down.”

  “Well, I gave our gender a good showing, at least.” Kristen ran a hand through her short, dark hair.

  Avery shrugged, not really caring. It wasn’t a competition between men and women. At least not to her.

  Although, as Kristen walked away, Avery wondered if it kind of was. After all, she had lumped all men in the ‘leaving for a younger, prettier woman’ category. Then she’d promptly quit the game. Not that she considered dating and marriage a game, but she’d quit, none the less.

  The next little boy’s ball went way wide and Avery ducked under the tape to pick it up plus get a few others that had missed the chute.

  “Isn’t Kristen sharing her suit?” Gator asked from the board.

  “I’m sure she would. I never thought to ask.”

  “Smart girl.”

  At that, a ball whizzed by and smacked the lever dead-on. With his lips in an O and his brows raised, Gator dropped into the tank. Water splashed out the sides. He popped back up quickly, a big smile on his face.

  “You play baseball?” he called to the grinning teen.

  “Pitcher.”

  Gator rolled his eyes and asked, “Can we ban people?”

  Avery chuckled. “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s okay. I promised my girl I’d win her a teddy bear on the bottle ring game. But I wanted to dunk this guy first.”

  Gator surged out of the water and onto the board. The play of his muscles fascinated Avery, and she forgot to breathe. Heat curled in her stomach.

  He shook the water out of his hair before he said, “I’ll put a word in with the mayor that you’d like to be in the tank next year.”

  “You do that, mister. My mom would never let me do anything like this.”

  They laughed and he ran off, holding the hand of a dark-haired girl. Avery watched them go. Gator had been young and cocky once, she was sure. And she’d been young and innocent like that girl. Life had a way of robbing your cockiness and your innocence.

  She glanced back at Gator, who was joking with the next ball thrower before her eyes rested on his calmly sleeping dogs.

  Life replaced the things it stole with other things. Like wisdom. Compassion. Forgiveness. Maybe she needed to forgive. Her dad and her ex-fiance. Maybe. It was possible that all men weren’t the jerks she’d labeled them as.

  But backing away from that label meant opening herself up to the possibility of hurt again. The risk wasn’t worth it.

  One dog stretched out on its side, its head coming within inches of Avery’s foot.

  She backed away.

  Chapter Nine

  Gator lined up for the lumberjack competition beside Kristen, facing the huge poles they’d have to climb and the temporary pools of water created exclusively for this day. They competed by twos since the course was only big enough for two at a time. He’d say she was his partner, as fate would have it, but it wasn’t fate. With twelve other competitors, she had either requested him, or Grady
Hanson, Gator’s friend who was running the competition, had thought it would be funny to put them together.

  It was a timed competition, with the three judges who made sure the contestants made it to the top of the climbing pole, and that their logs were chopped the whole way through and that they didn’t cut any corners, but thankfully there really wasn’t any specialized knowledge that the judges needed to know. Which was good, since Mrs. Baker, who retired from the post office before Gator graduated from high school, and who was even now proudly wearing her blue ribbon for best Christmas cookies—which was actually a pretty big deal since the competition for the Christmas cookies was cutthroat—didn’t have any particular knowledge of anything lumberjack.

  Neither did Larry Fountaine, who owned a computer repair shop across the street from the bakery. The third judge was Bradford Jennings, the attorney who had handled Gator’s divorce. From the amused smile on his face, Gator assumed he hadn’t missed the irony of Kristen and him competing together. Grady leaned down, maybe to give the table of judges some last-minute instruction, but more likely to remind them to watch the competition and not to focus on the animosity between the contestants.

  Dr. Chandra Hamer, the family doctor whose shingle hung two doors down from Larry’s, held the starting gun pointed in the air, waiting for Grady’s signal to start.

  Gator scanned the crowd lining the area. The single set of portable bleachers the town owned had been set up. No other competition or booth drew such immense interest. Gator was used to the attention. In high school, he and McKoy Rodning had spent a lot of summer evenings at Fink and Ellie’s pond, which had been the Bright’s pond back then, practicing standing on a floating log and chopping through another one. It was the hardest skill in the competition to master. McKoy and he had gotten pretty good at it, and since they began entering, no one had ever beaten them.

  McKoy had gone earlier and posted a really good time. Gator hadn’t seen him since he’d come back to town, and hoped he’d get a chance to catch up later. Right now, he didn’t really care about winning the competition necessarily. He only wanted to beat his ex. He supposed that made him a small, petty person.

  Again, he scanned the crowd. This time he saw her. Standing at the end of the bleachers beside his mother, her cat strapped to her chest, his dogs at their feet, even if Avery kept his mother’s chair between her and them. It was closer than she’d have been not long ago.

  It did something funny to his heart to see her there now. Pretty sure she wasn’t standing there to see Kristen.

  She smiled when she saw him looking and bent down, whispering to his mother, who looked over and waved. Gator nodded, but continued looking at Avery for a moment. Studying. He half expected that when she found out she’d signed up for the dunking booth that she’d have refused. He hadn’t been in a huge rush to get there, and he’d been flummoxed when she was already sitting on the board. It wasn’t the first time the fancy-looking woman had surprised him. That would have been when she climbed that light pole.

  He looked away before he allowed himself a smile. His eyes met Kristen’s.

  She closed the short distance between them, bumping him playfully. “Ha. Usually you’re pretty serious before this. You’d better quit smiling or I’ll think you’re happy to see me.”

  He turned his body away, facing down the course. He couldn’t think of an answer that wasn’t rude or nasty, and he’d never been a trash-talker. Not before a competition. Not before a divorce. And not after.

  “Now you’re going all big, silent type on me.”

  “Where’s my replacement?” If all he wanted to do was look at Avery, eating her up, surely Kristen should want to make googly eyes at her husband. He almost laughed out loud at the idea of Kristen making googly eyes. That wouldn’t fit her image of a tough woman, either.

  “He’s judging the tree-trimming contest and is at the meeting right now, getting the fact sheets and guidelines. Since it’s next.”

  That might make it a little hard to win. It was supposed to be a blind competition, but he didn’t know how closely the rules were followed. The town celebration was serious business, but they were also serious about having fun. Hard to tell which way the tree trimming would lean.

  He glanced over at Avery again, pulled by some invisible attraction between them. She had her eyes glued on him, absently stroking her little cat’s head. Her lips turned up, but this time she didn’t bend over to his mother.

  “Are you ready?” Grady called through the hand-held loudspeaker.

  Gator gave a thumbs up.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, our last two contestants. Gator and Kristen Franks.”

  Gator bit down hard on his lip to keep from smirking. Kristen had never taken his name, even when they were married. He had no idea if she’d changed it for husband number two.

  “It’s Pandifino, Grady. Get it right,” she yelled above the crowd. Laughter rumbled.

  “Sorry, folks. This is an interesting pairing since Gator and Kristen used to be married. I’m sure there’s no hard feelings or any extra competitiveness involved today. However, the lady has corrected me that her name is no longer Franks.”

  “It never was, you moron. You know that.” Kristen gestured like she was going to give him the finger, but kept her hand in a fist instead.

  The crowd “ooh’d.”

  “Sorry folks. The lady corrected me again.” Everyone laughed. “Kristen Pandifino and Gator Franks are the last contestants. The judges have confirmed the points of all prior contestants. Currently in the lead, we have McKoy Rodning.”

  The crowd cheered.

  “Contestants, take your marks.”

  Gator adjusted his safety belt and stepped behind the line.

  Kristen stepped beside him.

  “Good luck, Gator. I hope you come in second.”

  He ignored Kristen. Sawdust littered the path ahead from the previous runs. Gator’s old high school chemistry teacher stood on a ladder ready to dump a bucket of sawdust in front of the running fan while they climbed the telephone poles that had been set up first on the course. The sawdust obscured the climber’s vision, causing them to rely on feel to get to the top and grab the star and bag of hot dog buns that had been placed there. They’d be used for the bonfire later. The town organizers believed in frugality.

  “Ready?”

  “Go!” Grady yelled and Dr. Hamer shot the gun with a little ‘pop’ and a lot of smoke.

  Gator took off running. Kristen was lighter and quicker on her feet. She might beat him up the pole. He’d catch up with the parts of the course that demanded strength—the log chopping and the hand saw. They’d be even with the chainsaw. He’d beat her in the burling—spinning a log in water and balancing on top of it. On this course, they had to do it for twenty seconds without falling in.

  He was halfway up the pole and could see through the sawdust out of the corner of his eye that he was higher than Kristen when the image of Avery climbing that light pole the first time he met her entered his head. Avery had scooted up, somewhat clumsily, with strength born of fear. Gator grinned at the image. His concentration gone, his feet slipped and he slid about ten feet before he caught himself.

  The gasp of the crowd and the silence that followed made him cringe. He’d never entered a competition and not done his best. He shoved the image of Avery out of his mind and knuckled down, climbing with a single-minded purpose. Sawdust blew past his face as he reached the top, grabbing the star and hot dog buns in his right hand. There were points off for crushing the buns and if he recalled correctly, Mrs. Baker was quite strict about it.

  Wrapping his right arm around the pole, he slid as fast as he could, seeing that Kristen had already reached the bottom and had just thrown the star and rolls on the judges’ table. He could see from here that her rolls were smashed.

  A few seconds later his feet hit the ground and he raced to the table, taking care to set the rolls and stars down gently. Aside from the time, judging was
subjective, and he couldn’t help but think that he might get a half a brownie point or two for being polite rather than ignominious.

  Kristen was already on her log, spinning it in the water when he stooped to put the special cleats on his shoes. Over the years, as the competition had grown, the coordinators had added stations and designed accessories to accommodate the additions. The cleats were one of the additions.

  They didn’t take long to strap on. He grabbed the hatchet and jumped. In his haste, Gator almost overshot the log which was floating in the four-foot-deep tank. The judges had stopwatches, but the contestants had to time the curling in their heads. Once they’d done it for twenty seconds, they used the hatchet to stop the log, then chop through it. If they underestimated the time, they were docked.

  It was close to impossible to stay on the log the entire time, hence the wetsuits, but this is what Gator had practiced with McKoy in Fink’s pond years ago. In all his years of doing the competition, he’d only fallen once. So when his body started to tilt, maybe confidence didn’t allow him to correct as quickly as he should have. He lost more time as he pulled himself out of the cold water and climbed back up on his log. The rhythmic chopping from the other tank was a sure sign that Kristen wasn’t having any of his problems.

  He ignored the cold and started chopping again. The scent of fresh wood filled the air. A splash indicated that Kristen had made it through her log. Despite his fall, he’d made up a little time since he was stronger and chopped through the log faster. His log broke in two a few seconds later. With the perfect balance he hadn’t had earlier, he pivoted to one log and hopped out of the tank. His feet felt like cold lead blocks. Falling in the water would make the rest of the course more challenging because of the cold. But the race was still winnable.

  He sprinted over to where Kristen had her chainsaw running, slicing through the logs. She was slightly tentative. Other people might not be able to tell, but he knew that Kristen was afraid of the chainsaw. It was her least favorite part. Like most men, he was happier with a power tool in his hand. The fact that it was destructive and dangerous was an added bonus.