Before he could puzzle it out, she said, curtly, “I have to go”—as if he were keeping her here—and turned away.
He stood at the door listening to her clomping down the stairs that led to the back door of the building. When the clomping stopped, he crossed to the living room window. There was a passageway between the bar and Pie with Pearl next door that functioned as a shortcut between the backs of the buildings on this side of Main, which were otherwise attached to each other, and the street itself. It wasn’t as late as it usually was when Maya left his place, but sometimes people got up to no good in that passageway, so he drummed his fingers on the windowsill waiting for her to appear.
She emerged and crossed the street, digging in her pocket for her keys. She hopped onto the sidewalk on the far side and did another little skip for good measure. She was back to being happy. He somehow knew she was thinking about Holden Hampshire.
The door to her place was an unmarked one next to the entrance to Jenna’s General, which Maya lived above. She spent a long time futzing with the lock, which always gave her trouble. That lock was probably as old as the 1880s building.
Finally she opened the door and disappeared behind it.
He waited until her light went on upstairs before turning away.
Chapter Seven
Unable to get Jason’s house out of his mind, Law went to the bank the next morning, where he had it confirmed that the only way to raise the cash he’d need to buy it was to mortgage the bar building. He hadn’t expected a different outcome, but still, it put him in a bad mood—a mood that was only exacerbated by Eiko’s showing up and insisting that he appear at a “mandatory town meeting” later that evening.
Which could only mean one thing. The old folks had plotted a scheme they couldn’t implement by themselves. No thanks.
“I don’t think there is such a thing as a ‘mandatory’ town meeting,” he said as he dried glasses. “That’s the nice thing about democracy. The government can’t make you do things you don’t want to do.”
“Oh, come on. Where’s your sense of civic responsibility?”
“Who’s the mayor these days?” All the old folks were on the town council, and they seemed to pass the mayorship around—one of them was always running unopposed—and he’d lost track. They always operated as a bloc anyway. “Is it you?”
“Of course not. I can’t be mayor. I’m the editor of the newspaper. That would be a massive conflict of interest. Karl’s the mayor.”
“Right.” He barely refrained from rolling his eyes. Hadn’t Sawyer just referenced Eiko’s “situational” approach to journalistic ethics?
“Anyway,” Eiko said, delivering her closing argument, “this isn’t something I should have to guilt you into attending. You’re going to want to hear the news. We have quite an exciting opportunity for some entrepreneurial young person or other looking to innovate.” She winked.
Hold on. Hold right on.
Did Eiko know about his restaurant ambitions? How was that possible? He’d taken Sawyer’s advice and not spoken to her about it. He hadn’t spoken to anyone except…
God damn her.
And God damn him. He’d been sure he could trust her as she looked into his eyes and shook his hand, there in one of their truce bubbles where the usual rules did not apply.
He should have known better.
He should also know better than to feel hurt.
But this sense he had suddenly of not being able to get a full breath in, almost like someone had delivered a swift, sharp, invisible blow to his solar plexus, seemed an awful lot like hurt.
But that was dumb. He was being melodramatic. Not to mention illogical. Hurt implied a baseline of goodwill available to be breached. He and Maya did not have that. If he’d thought for a minute that last night had meant something, with her snuggling against his hand and kissing him, all he had to do to jolt himself back to reality was remember her saying, “I thought you were someone else.” So yeah, hurt was the wrong reaction. He worked on summoning some anger instead, and oh, look, it turned out he had a well of that to draw on.
“Can you get Maya to come, too?” Eiko asked. “She’ll want to be there.”
“Why would you think I could get Maya to come?” he snapped. He winced. That had come out much more harshly than he’d intended. There was no call to be yelling at little old ladies, even maddeningly meddlesome ones.
Eiko narrowed her eyes. “Because she listens to you.”
“Uh, no, she hates me.”
And right now, it was pretty damn mutual.
Eiko shook her head. “Whatever. Just be there at six. I guarantee you won’t regret it.”
After a jam-packed day that included a lengthy phone call with Holden Hampshire’s manager—Holden Hampshire’s manager!—Maya kicked off her shoes, sprawled on her bed, and stared at her ceiling. Slowly but inexorably, a displacement started to happen. The amazed elation that had been crackling up and down her spine faded in favor of a creeping sense of dread.
This had been happening all day, this cycling of joy and panic. She was on a roller coaster of giddy highs followed by the reality check of free falls that might or might not herald her doom. Holden Hampshire was either going to make the Moonflower Bay Theater Company or he was going to break it.
She blew out a breath and examined her ceiling. It was an ugly, water-stained drop ceiling that was probably forty years old if it was a day. She wondered what was behind it. Ductwork? Asbestos that was slowly killing her? Perhaps a previously undiscovered Shakespeare manuscript worth millions?
She hadn’t told Eve and Nora about Holden yet. She’d been waiting for the end of the day, because she wanted to toast her amazing news. She grabbed her phone. I need to transform my apartment into guest quarters fit for Hollywood royalty. Any ideas?
Well, okay, “royalty” might be a bit of a stretch, but he had some attention for his role in Submergence, and it was getting to the point where people were talking about him as an actor as much as they’d ever talked about him as a musician. Also, come over. It’s happy hour. And I’m happy. And about to cue up “Petal Power.” We have something to toast.
Eve: Does this mean what I think it does?!
Nora: OMG!
Eve: I’ll be right over.
Nora: Same.
Maya rummaged in her purse, pulled out a fortune cookie from the stash her mother had given her yesterday, and crunched it open. A wise man once said do not put all eggs in a single basket.
Well, screw that. She had one giant egg named Holden Hampshire, and into her last basket he was going.
Fifteen minutes later, with her friends installed on her sofa, Maya poured tequila for Eve and made a sad face at pregnant Nora.
“Well?” Eve demanded. “Is he coming?”
“Yes! Holden Hampshire is coming!”
The girls reacted with glee, and soon they were dancing around to “Petal Power.”
“Man, I loved this song back in the day,” Nora said, giving up partway through the song and returning to the sofa and putting her feet up—she’d been complaining about her feet hurting lately.
“Me, too,” Eve said. “Two Squared was kind of known for their whole boys-sing-vaguely-girl-power-esque-songs thing, weren’t they?”
“They were,” Nora said. “But in retrospect, I wonder why we didn’t listen to girl bands singing about girl power.”
“Hello, Spice Girls?” Maya said.
“Yeah, but they were a little before our time. I would think especially yours, Maya.”
It was true that Eve and Nora were older than Maya, but that was no excuse. “So was Mozart. So was Shakespeare. You don’t ignore Shakespeare because he was”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“‘before our time.’”
“Did you just compare the Spice Girls to Shakespeare?” Nora asked.
“What if I did?” Maya winked. “I have highbrow taste and I have lowbrow taste, thank you very much.”
“Maybe yo
u have unibrow taste?” Eve joked.
“Anyway, the point is, Holden is coming and I’ve promised him a place to live. And since I will be paying him every cent I have left, I need to transform my apartment into a small-but-glamorous pied-à-terre suitable for a B-list ex-boy-band member slumming it in Moonflower Bay for the summer.”
“But do you have any cents left?” Nora asked. “You already aren’t paying yourself.”
“I had enough to pay Richard and Marjorie and the mortgage on the theater through the end of September. The September money will now be the Holden money. If my Holden Hail Mary works, it works. If it doesn’t, I figure it doesn’t really matter if I default on the theater mortgage, or if I have to do layoffs a month earlier than I’d planned.” She tried to keep her tone light. Ha ha, failing a month earlier than planned, no biggie! But the thought made her breathless.
“So you’re giving Holden all your money and your apartment,” Eve said. “Where are you going to live?”
“At my parents’ house. Unless…” She made puppy-dog eyes at Eve. She loved her parents, but she did not want to move back in with them.
“You can stay in the pink room if you want,” Eve said.
Yes! “I was hoping you’d say that.”
The pink room was a tiny room at the top of the Mermaid that had not been included in Eve’s recent renovation. It had been Eve’s room as a girl, when she’d come to spend summers with her great-aunt. It had also briefly been home to Nora when she’d needed a place.
“Jamila can lend you furniture for this place, I’m sure,” said Nora, whose stepmother-in-law was an avid antiques collector. “We could go full-on Victorian with the furniture and juxtapose that with your exposed brick and the loft-like atmosphere of the place.”
“That would be awesome.” Maya looked around at the dump she called home. “Though ‘loft-like’ is kind of a stretch.” There was an exposed brick wall along one side of the main room, but it was less “industrial chic” exposed brick and more “the wall is crumbling” exposed brick.
Her no-good slumlord, a guy named Harold who had retired to Florida while he let his real estate holdings in Moonflower Bay go to pot, refused to turn the heat on until December first or to fix the stove when it crapped out. But he was also ignoring the fact that she was currently behind on her rent, so she wasn’t exactly occupying the moral high ground with him.
Still, she was pretty good with a paintbrush. “I’m going to treat it like a stage set. Make it look good on the cheap, and it only has to be superficially good. It doesn’t have to last. Richard is going to help.” Her tech guy had embraced the challenge even though she hadn’t told him how high the stakes were. Somehow she hadn’t found a way to say, Help me fix up this apartment or I’m going to have to lay you off.
Ugh. And here came the panic part of the cycle again.
“Jake and Sawyer can help, too,” Eve said.
“I’ll get Jamila going on furniture,” said Nora.
“We can store your stuff in the basement of the inn,” Eve said.
Maya took a deep breath. It was going to be okay. It had to be. “Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do without you guys.”
“What did you say to me a few months ago?” Nora asked. “It takes a village, and we’re your village?”
“Yeah, but I was talking about your bun in the oven.” Maya pointed affectionately at Nora’s baby bump. “It takes a village to raise a child.”
“Yeah,” Eve said, “but it also takes a village to attract and retain a B-list Hollywood ex-boy-band member, am I right?”
Maya was flooded with love for her friends. She might be poor when it came to money, but she was rich when it came to the things that mattered. “You guys are the best.”
Nora preened. “We really are.”
“How long do we have?” Eve asked.
“Three weeks. He’s coming the last weekend of July. We’ll do a month of rehearsals, which I sincerely hope and pray will be enough. I’m going to open the show a week earlier than usual and do two mini runs. I’ll do the Saturday and Sunday of Mermaid Parade weekend like usual, but I’m also going to do Thursday through Sunday the week before.”
“Six shows!” Eve exclaimed. “You’re leveling up.”
“I’m banking—literally—on Holden being a big draw. I figure if I do the right kind of advertising, I might even be able to attract people from Toronto.”
“So this means Holden arrives Raspberry Festival weekend?” Nora asked. “That’s kind of cute—his time here will be bookended by the two festivals. In with the raspberries, out with the mermaids.”
“I guess he will arrive during the Raspberry Festival.” Maya hadn’t thought of that, but it was good. It would paint the town in a positive light—and not a light that included her being mermaid queen. She wanted to present herself as a serious theater person, not an aquatic beauty queen, which was why she’d struck that deal with Benjamin.
It was strange to think she wasn’t going to be queen this year, though, to imagine someone else on that float, wearing her tiara.
No, not her tiara. The tiara. She was getting what she wanted here, so there was no need to feel wistful. “Speaking of the Raspberry Festival, I need to show you guys my plans for the sandcastle competition this year. Benjamin is going down.” She hopped up. “Hang on, I’ll get them.”
“We’ll have to look at them later.” Eve looked at her watch. “I forgot to tell you. There’s a town meeting tonight. Pearl accosted me on my way here. She said it was mandatory.” She turned to Maya. “She made a big deal about you in particular needing to come, actually.”
Maya groaned. “No way. I have way too much to do. I’m not going to a town meeting tonight.”
She went to the town meeting.
After arguing with Pearl for a solid five minutes—Pearl had called four times in a row until Maya finally picked up—Maya decided that sitting through the meeting was the path of least resistance. She could cruise Pinterest for apartment-makeover inspiration while the old people talked about whatever was their latest thing.
“Hey, it’s my king!” she said to Jordan as she and the girls squeezed by him along a row of folding chairs set up in the multipurpose room at the community center. He nodded good-naturedly as they settled next to Jake and Sawyer.
And then Benjamin arrived on the other side of the guys.
Benjamin. She had been so busy—and gleeful—all day that she’d managed not to think about him. Well, that wasn’t totally true. She’d started to think about him a lot. Specifically about how his hand had felt on her cheek, all callused and rough, but in a strangely nice way. But then she’d think about the reason she knew what his hand felt like: she had, in a moment of sleep-addled insanity, snuggled into that hand. And then she had kissed him. It was mortifying. So she’d shut down those thoughts.
In truth, her stated reason for not wanting to come here tonight—she had too much to do—had been an excuse. Really, she hadn’t wanted to face Benjamin. What had possessed her? It had been so long since she’d truly relaxed, but there, on his sofa, she had conked out. Had been in the middle of a dream, in fact, that she was lost in a field of flowers. Which for most people would probably be a pleasant dream, but not for her, given that she was about to lose her flower-shop safety net. And then she’d woken…sort of. She’d jolted from dead asleep and dreaming into a moment of insanity when her defenses were down. He was just so handsome, and she’d been so relieved to have escaped the flowers.
She’d wondered suddenly what it would be like to kiss him, and then, to her horror, she hadn’t been just wondering, she’d been doing it.
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. She really didn’t want things to be weird. What if he wanted to talk about it? She was a little surprised he’d let her go last night without making a federal case of it. What if he—
He glared at her—glared. Wow. This felt way more intense than their usual showdown-style staring.
Well, okay. At least he didn
’t want to talk? She glared back. Or tried to. It was a little unsettling how much animosity was radiating from him.
“Wow, huge turnout,” Sawyer said, twisting around to look at the crowd.
“They said it was mandatory,” Eve said.
“I don’t think that’s a legally compellable thing, is it, Sawyer?” Maya asked, trying to turn the conversation to something benign so as to get the Look of Death to stop.
“No,” Sawyer said, “but it’s easier to do what they want.”
That was often the best strategy for dealing with the elderly meddlers of Moonflower Bay. Stand there and let them talk. Let it all flow in one ear and out the other like you were listening to the teacher talking in a Charlie Brown cartoon. A week ago, she would have said she was glad her own parents were a generation younger and still working and therefore not part of this crowd. Now? She fully expected her dad to join up.
Karl came to the podium, and Maya glanced at Benjamin. He was no longer looking at her. That was a relief.
Right?
Somehow, she didn’t feel any less uncomfortable without his attention.
“As you all know,” Karl said, “the Anti-Festival in the fall is so named because it’s our annual festival just for us. We have fun and raise money for local town causes. The library and the food bank have been the traditional beneficiaries of our generosity, but this year we’ve decided to take a different approach.”
Blah, blah, blah. She tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling. They were in the community center so it was just acoustic tiles, but she suddenly thought of the ceiling at Lawson’s Lager House, which was an old-fashioned tin one. That would be a good idea for her apartment. There must be somewhere to get cheap fake tin ceiling tiles. She got out her phone.
“The town council has voted to fund a downtown economic development grant. At this year’s Anti-Festival, we will be awarding one Moonflower Bay business owner a one-hundred-thousand-dollar grant.”
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