by Ellie Danes
“After our first tour there?” It had been in the works longer than I’d thought, then. Dad shrugged.
“Apparently the fact that they have just that little rink-a-dink town center inspired him,” Dad explained. “So, he got the store on board and showed them how it could be—and I have to admit he wasn’t wrong about it.”
I pressed my lips together and tried to think of a way to stay on topic without betraying how much it bothered me that Jacob had been the one to come up with the plan, that he’d been the one to suggest it—even before getting clearance from Dad. And if Dad fires you, he’s still going to be at the company, being Dad’s protege, I thought bitterly.
“I’m just wondering if you really think it’s what’s best for Mustang Ridge,” I said. “I mean, we’re selling this as something that everyone will win from, you know?”
“Well, the people who sell out to us will have plenty of money to reinvest in the town,” Dad pointed out. “Some of them can move closer to center, some of them will move away to places where they can do something else with their lives—stuff like that.”
I nodded along with him, I wanted him to think I was agreeing—even if I thought he was being willfully oblivious.
“But don’t you think that the company moving in so many businesses at once will put everyone else out of business?” I raised an eyebrow, begging him silently to consider that.
“They can go to work for the businesses that come in, if they want to,” Dad said. “And they can take their skills and business ownership and go somewhere that needs that service for a while—and come back once the town’s come up a bit. I mean, it’s not like Mustang Ridge is going to stay that small forever, if we move this group in on them. People in other little-bitty towns nearby will want to go to the big store, and they’ll bring in more business.”
I could see that my father just wasn’t going to consider the fallout from his plan. To him, progress was always a positive. It didn’t matter who or what might fall to the wayside in the process.
I decided to drop the issue, at least for the moment, before I got into a fight with Dad about his business. I didn’t need to tip my hand yet, and I was pretty sure that if I did, I would end up revealing that I was working with Rhett. I wasn’t ready to do that yet, especially since I didn’t even know if my plans with Rhett would even amount to much of anything at all. I drank my beer, ate my tacos, shared the queso with Dad and let him reminisce about the early days of the business, about bringing me up on his own—more or less—after Mom left him.
When he was gone, I checked my phone to see if there was any news from Rhett. It had been a good four hours since I’d left his place, so I should have heard from him by then. I went through my text messages and finally saw one had, indeed, come from him. I definitely have a good three or four of them agreeing not to sell for a while, he’d sent. I’m going to try and get all of them, so they can’t be pitted against each other, but I might need another day or two. I nodded to myself, smiling. At least one of us had come through.
I messaged him back. Things are more complicated than I thought on this end. I’m going to have to talk to Jacob—apparently it was his big idea to bring in all the companies at once instead of just the one giant.
I sat down on my couch, hiccupping from the beer still fizzing in my stomach. I really didn’t want to have to talk to Jacob about the situation, and I knew that it was going to be difficult to give him a reason for why I wanted him to change directions. But I knew I wasn’t going to get through to my father any time soon, and the only other person who might be able to delay things, or cancel the new plans, would be Jacob.
Dialing his number, I steeled myself against the discomfort and irritation I felt. Jacob would just be getting in from lunch, and hopefully he’d give me a chance to convince him. I didn’t want to meet with him alone, but I didn’t want everyone in the whole office to know about what I was doing, either. If it wasn’t Jacob who ran to my Dad, it would be someone else. Just keep things straight with him. Talk about the town. Make it a personal favor if you have to.
I took a breath and tapped ‘send call’ and waited for him to pick up.
“Hey, beautiful! You’re not about to invite me to join you and Pops for lunch, are you? I just finished,” Jacob said.
I shook my head, cringing at the way he talked to me. “No, Dad’s headed back in already, anyway. I just wanted to circle back with you about this new plan for Mustang Ridge. Dad and I talked about it over lunch.”
“Sure thing, Em,” Jacob said. “Give me a second to get into my office—can’t go letting all the details get out there, you know?”
I rolled my eyes. The whole office would already know about the new plans, if I knew about them and if Evelyn did. There were not that many secrets at Dad’s company, not really.
“Let me know when you’re somewhere quiet,” I said, looking out onto my patio while I waited.
“I’m in,” he said a minute later. “Okay, so what’s up?”
I thought for a second about how to approach the matter.
“So thinking about the big strip mall plans, I’m wondering if it might not be a better overall strategy to go back to the original,” I said. “I mean, that’s a huge investment, and the town doesn’t really have enough people to support an operation like that—at least not that I’ve seen.”
“That’s the beauty of it, though,” Jacob said. “With a big operation like that, they’ll be pulling in people from the neighboring towns.”
It was, I was sure, the same kind of hype that he’d fed to our clients, to convince them to bring in the much larger project complete with business partners.
“But if Mustang Ridge dies out, they’ll be a strip mall in a ghost town,” I countered.
“Not for long. I mean, more people will come into town to work for them, all that,” Jacob said. “Oh no—you’re not going local, are you?”
I resisted the urge to sigh. “No, I’m not,” I said. “I just feel like this is a lot of development that the area doesn’t really justify. And besides, it’s likely to actually kill the town.”
“You really want to go back to the plan we had before? With just the one shop going in?” Jacob had an edge in his voice, and I didn’t know what he was going to make as a condition for helping me, but I knew I wasn’t going to really like it.
“I think it’d be better for all of us,” I said. “I mean, after all, if this falls out over time, it’s going to damage the company’s reputation as developers.”
“As long as you’re not going to tell me you want to cancel it altogether,” Jacob said playfully.
“No, I’m still committed to developing Mustang Ridge,” I insisted. “I just think we need to do it the right way.”
“Well, I could think about going back to our previous plan, even though we’ve already got the contracts worked up and signed,” Jacob said. “We could tell them that there was pressure from the town council, that they were going back—something like that.”
“I think it would work out best,” I said.
“I’m willing to think about it, but I’d need a bit of quid pro quo,” he said.
I pulled the phone away from my mouth so he wouldn’t hear me sigh. “What do you want?”
I wasn’t about to agree to it just for the sake of getting a “win”—I wanted to know what I was going to be trading.
“Dinner. You and me, at the Westwood Golf Club, Friday night.”
I grimaced. I knew I should have expected something like this, but just the thought of Jacob taking me out to some kind of flashy, overpriced dinner at a country club in exchange for lifting a finger to go back to the original plans was repulsive. Especially thinking about Rhett who was waiting to hear from me in Mustang Ridge, and thinking about what we’d done the night before. Even if I wasn’t sure this was anything more than a fling, I couldn’t and wouldn’t bring myself to go on a date with someone else.
“Sorry, I can’t,” I said. “But
just...just think about it, okay, Jacob? I shouldn’t have to bribe you to think about something.”
“It’d be a great night,” Jacob said. “You don’t know what you’re missing, Em.”
“I’m not going to go to dinner with you, Jacob. We work together. It would just be wrong.” I sighed. “Anyway, thanks for hearing me out at least. I need to get back to work.”
I stayed on just long enough to be polite and then ended the call.
What were Rhett and I going to do next? I wasn’t able to get any traction with my father, and Jacob clearly wasn’t going to help. I had to hope that things in Mustang Ridge would work out better. And I had to hope that when my father found out about my part in Rhett’s end of things, he wouldn’t disown me.
Chapter Eighteen
Rhett
I hadn’t expected Emily to be able to change her father’s mind—not yet, at least. I thought that if anything, he would change his mind later on. He couldn’t see past what he thought was the better situation: Mustang Ridge turned into some version of his old hometown, the old-fashioned slowness of it all gone. I’d known that it was a long shot.
I’d gotten Jeff, Jessica and Nate, Chris and his wife Lisa, and Chelsea to all agree to hold off, for a little while at least, on selling their property. It would give me some time to get the town as a whole to force a council meeting. In the first place, it was against the town’s guidelines for them to make a decision that huge without consulting the members of the town beforehand, and in the second, that was the only way that I could think of to try and convince them to pull out of the deal, or at least convince Emily’s dad to pursue the smaller plan.
It had been a few days since then, and Emily and I had talked on the phone to figure out the next stage of what we wanted to do together. I needed to get the town organized, and we’d talked about different ways to do it, until finally coming up with the idea of making a petition that members of the community could all sign, simply asking the town council for a public meeting about the development. Even the people who had already come out on the side of selling their property should be able to agree to the need to actually have a town meeting to discuss it.
I’d made up the petition, and then sent it to Emily, and she’d edited it and sent it back to me, and I’d printed it out in Mom’s office. It was going to mean that I’d have to spend less time actually working my land, but I could count on Mom to catch some of the shortfall, to help me out on the home front while I took care of things in town.
So, I headed into town proper to meet up with some people who I knew would be getting groceries or running other errands, maybe catching lunch at the diner, and get them to sign. So far, I’d managed to get a handful of people to agree to it—my friends who’d agreed to hold off on selling until after the town council, at least, had already signed, along with a few of the people I’d talked out of selling altogether. There were still some folks on Emily’s list who would be needed to make the project go forward. These were people whose properties were right at the center of where the big company wanted to build. Not all of them had made a decision one way or another, and I hoped I could catch a few of them that day.
I checked to make sure that I had everything as I parked my truck close to the administration building in town. I smiled to myself. Emily was coming into town tonight, and I kind of hoped she’d find a reason to stay over again. Of course, Mom would be home, but maybe we could find some privacy anyway, and it wasn’t as though Mom didn’t know there was something between us. She hadn’t said anything about it, but she’d noticed the few items that had been missing from the kitchen stocks and had said something about how she hoped I hadn’t been the one to make breakfast, because I was always hopeless when it came to eggs.
I checked over the signatures I had. I would need to get at least a thousand signatures to force the town council to meet. There were just over two thousand people total in the community of Mustang Ridge, but some of them were kids. If I could get a thousand signatures, that would be more than half of the adults in the town, and the council had to respond to that—that was the rule. If I could get at least five hundred, then I could maybe pressure them either way.
I had twelve signatures so far, but I hoped that by the end of the day I’d have at least a hundred. That would be one-tenth of what I needed, and Emily could go out the next day, apart from me, and probably get a hundred more, while I worked the people who knew and trusted me most in the town.
I decided to start at the grocery store, and looked in to see who all was out and about. Mr. Jackson was sweeping up around the front door, and I decided to start my stumping with him.
“Hey, Mr. Jackson,” I said, walking up.
“Hey, Rhett! How are things on your end of town?”
I smiled and shook the hand he offered me. “About the same as always,” I said. “How are things going with the store?”
He shook his head. “People are saying this big company is going to come in and put me out of business—you hear about that?”
“I actually came into town today to talk to some folks about that,” I said. “I’ve found out the past few days that there’s a bigger plan afoot—they’re bringing in a whole suite of businesses, including a restaurant. Can you believe it?”
He shook his head more vehemently. “I don’t see how this is going to benefit us,” he said. “I know some of the farmers are talking about selling out to at least get cash value from their land...but something like that?”
“I’m getting together some signatures,” I explained. “I’m hoping to get the town council to meet and talk to us about this—and hear us out on our concerns.”
“You’d be the person to do it, all right,” Mr. Jackson said with a smile. “I’m guessing that’s what those papers in your hands are about?”
“That’s about the shape of it,” I confirmed. “Basically, we’re asking for a town council meeting. Whether things go forward or not, we all deserve to be heard on this. It’s our town, not just the council’s town.”
“I’m behind you on that all the way,” Jackson told me. “Where do I sign?”
I got a pen out of my pocket and showed him where he could sign his name, and asked if I could go into his shop and bother some of his shoppers.
“If you’d rather not, I’ll stay outside and wait for people to come out,” I said.
“No—you go right on in there, Rhett, and see if you can’t get some people to sign for you,” he said. “I don’t mind at all. And if they care about being approached in my store, I care about them abandoning my store for some big corporate giant.”
I smiled and thanked him and stepped into the shop, looking to see who I might find inside.
Just as I’d thought, there were about a dozen people shopping. Most everyone I approached was pretty understanding; everyone in town knew me, and nobody was confident enough in what they were doing with their lives to tell me to bug off.
“I just don’t know, Rhett,” Mrs. Harrison—the mother of one of my high school friends, who had actually managed to leave the town for good after getting a degree at UH—said. “With Nicky gone and not likely to come back, I don’t know if there’s even a point in keeping the old home place.”
“I’m not telling you not to sell,” I said. “If you want to sell your land, that’s your right. All I’m asking is for everyone to agree that if this is going forward, we need to talk about it as a whole town—because this doesn’t just affect you, or me, or individual people.”
“So this is just about the town council? Not some statement that I refuse to sell?”
I nodded. “All it is, is a petition to make the council call a town meeting,” I explained. “What the decision is, that’ll be up to the town. But I think it deserves at least a meeting, don’t you?”
Mrs. Harrison considered that for a moment. “I guess I’ll sign,” she said finally. “It can’t hurt to talk about it as a community.”
I handed her the clipboard and
she signed, and I thanked her for at least having the town spirit to keep everyone involved and in the loop. Then I moved on to the next person I could spot in the store.
I made the rounds at the grocery store, and then the hardware store, and Sally’s crafts, getting a few signatures here and there. All of the shop owners were more than happy to sign, because they knew that a big corporate complex of businesses would force them to leave the town they’d lived in their whole lives. The folks who were either farmers or the family of farmers were a little harder to convince, which was about how I’d thought things would shake out.
I saved the diner for last, because I knew people would probably be less than thrilled to have their lunches interrupted by a request for a signature. When I stepped into Bill’s, I saw Lucy on her way to a table, carrying a tray of food. Following her with my gaze, I saw that Emily’s coworker—Jacob, I thought his name was—seated at a booth with a couple of the farmers I hadn’t gotten around to talking to yet.
I decided to ignore him; he had his job and I had my work to get done. I waited for Lucy to come back up to the front of the diner and asked her permission to go around with my petition.
“I know Bill will want to sign it,” she said, nodding. “He doesn’t want another restaurant—at least, not a corporate-owned one—coming in, making trouble for all of us.”
“Will you sign it too, Lucy?” Lucy glanced in Jacob’s direction and then shrugged. “Us over them, right?”
I laughed. “Us over everyone, Luce.”
She took her pen out of her apron pocket and signed without even asking to look at the statement I’d typed up. She trusted me—most of the town did.
I started going around the diner then, ignoring the toadie seated in a booth—I didn’t even intend to talk to the people he was sitting with until I could get them alone and explain the situation to them the way I saw it. It wouldn’t do to get into it with Jacob if I could help it. Instead I explained to other people why I was collecting signatures, that signing the petition wouldn’t mean they couldn’t sell out later if they decided to, the same things I’d gone around and around with everyone else.