by Meg Easton
“Is Eli coming?”
Whitney glanced up to see Macie, the woman who ran Paws and Relax. She shook her head.
“How about Brooke?”
Whitney shook her head again and tried to smile. “The seat’s all yours.” She was glad it was at least someone single who chose to sit next to her. She didn’t think she could’ve handled it if Macie’s sister Joselyn had sat next to her, in all her new family bliss.
As she waited for the meeting to start, Whitney looked down at her hands in her lap. Eli had only been to two Main Street Business Alliance meetings, and she hadn’t even known he was there for the first one, but even so, it felt wrong to not have him there. She hadn’t seen him at all over the past two days, but she’d seen evidences of him being around. The boxes of leaves that they’d gathered from the mountains and stored in his back rooms were now set out and ready for her crew to get to work in the big empty room at Back Porch Grill. He’d even gotten the keys from the town hall and brought all the lights from the storage unit and put them with the leaves. He’d moved the logs, too, in groups alongside the river, so that once they closed off the roads, they could move them to be seats around the fire pits. And he’d done every bit of it without her seeing the slightest flash of him.
“Are you okay?”
Whitney’s head jerked up Macie’s direction. “Oh. Yeah, I’m fine.” She folded and unfolded her hands, trying to figure out what a normal person with a normal heart did with their hands, and looked up at the front, like she was paying attention, instead of letting her mind drift. She tried to think of small talk conversations she could bring up with Macie, but came up blank. Thankfully, Macie spared her from the task.
“Have you met Zeus?” Macie asked.
Whitney shook her head.
“You have to stop by Paws and Relax and see him. Not only is he the cutest thing ever, he’s downright magical at helping to heal—”
Macie stopped, like she was unsure how to delicately finish the sentence, so Whitney finished for her. “At helping to heal broken hearts?”
Macie nodded. “Come anytime. You can even take her home for a night if you’d like.”
Whitney smiled and said, “Thank you. Truly.”
She tried to pay attention as Linda Keetch brought up different business owners and they reported on the advertising that was done, the booths that were going to be going up outside of the businesses on Main Street, and the music— a local band who was going to set up where Center Street crossed the middle of Main.
“Whitney and— it looks like we need to excuse Eli today. Whitney, do you want to let us know how the decorations are coming along?”
The last time her and Eli had been at this meeting, they’d played off each other so well when they’d stood up to give their report. Pangs of missing him stabbed even more deeply as she got up in front of everyone alone.
She took a deep breath. She’d always done everything alone. She was an expert at this. After telling all about what they had planned for the decorations, she said, “I’ve been texting everyone in town, letting anyone who would like to help know to come tomorrow night to work with the leaves in the side room of Back Porch Grill.” She gave a nod to Cole, the owner, and said, “Thanks again, for letting us use the space. Or they can come Saturday morning at seven to help set up Main Street. Sam in facilities has agreed to be ready to help us hang the lights Saturday morning as well. All of you are welcome to set up your booths outside your stores anytime. We’ll work right around you.”
“Where’s Eli?” Ed Keetch asked.
Linda Keetch put her hand on his leg and shushed him, but the question was already out there, and everyone was watching her for an answer.
“He had a work emergency and had to head back to Sacramento, so he’ll have to miss the Fall Market.”
A few sympathetic aww’s sounded throughout the group. The moment the meeting was over, Whitney bolted out of the building before anyone could get a chance to come up and ask her questions about him.
As she was walking back to the paper, thoughts popped into her mind of the last time she’d walked down this path, just three days ago, eating ice cream, talking about everything she was looking at right now. The statue of Mr. Annesley now made her think of Eli. So did Keetch’s next door. This whole street was now covered in memories of Eli. She hurried back to her office more quickly.
Scott and Kara seemed to sense that she wasn’t in a chatty mood, so they left her alone as she took off her blazer, slung it over her chair, and sat down to work.
But her mind was so far away that she couldn’t seem to get it thinking anywhere near the same zone as the layouts displayed on her screen, or the half-finished article she’d stopped writing three days ago that was open in her word processor, or the expenses that needed to be added into her accounting software, or the open order page for her paper vendor. She picked up the napkin swan sitting on her desk, and ran her finger along its side and thought about when they took the canoe out on the lake after dark, looking into each other’s eyes, realizing she loved him, and the lights Eli had installed around the rim of the boat bouncing off the water as the waves slowly moved around them.
She set the swan down and forced herself to think of the million things she needed to do before tomorrow. She pulled out the list of people who said they’d love to come help Friday night and counted. Twenty-one people. That was perfect. Saturday morning’s setup, though— that was a little more iffy. She only had five people who had given her definite yeses. Hopefully every single one of her dozen maybes would show up. And hopefully every box of leaves would cover as much of the street as they guessed it would.
Which of course, made her think of her and Eli up on the mountain, filling the boxes. Their almost kiss when they’d first come up with the idea, and their actual kiss when they were collecting them, amidst the leaves falling down from the tree. She stood up, nearly knocking her chair over. What was up with her? She was a thirty-year-old woman, not a high school kid. With all the experience she had not dating, she should be able to not date Eli right now and be just fine. A distraction was all she needed, and with how much she’d been moping over the last few days, her to-do list was filled with plenty of those.
“Scott,” she said as she walked to a stack of a dozen boxes of past issues that she had been meaning to take into the storage room. “Are you busy?”
He jumped up and said, “Nope— not busy at all,” so quickly that he either was hating the article he was writing, or was a little too eager to do anything he could to get her out of her morose mood. “Want some help moving these?”
They had just picked up their third load of boxes when the door opened.
“Honey,” Sherry said, out of breath and standing in the doorway. “Have I got a story for you!”
A gust of wind burst in the room just then, rustling papers all around the room, and picking up the napkin swan and blowing it off Whitney’s desk. Whitney yelped, dropped her box, and lurched for it, but the wind had blown it right under Scott as he was stepping down, the box he was carrying making him oblivious to the fact that his foot came down on the swan napkin, squishing it flat.
As soon as Scott saw whatever look was on her face, though, he moved the box to the side so he could see the ground, then frowned down at the swan before recognition filled his face. “Oh no. I’m so sorry. I know that was important to you.”
Whitney picked up the squashed swan. “Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It’s just a paper napkin.” If it was just a paper napkin, why was she clutching it in her hand so tightly, instead of throwing it away? She turned to Kara. “Do you mind talking with Sherry and taking notes on her story?” Then she turned to Sherry. “I’m sorry, I have to—” She tried to think of a reason that she’d have to hurry and leave, but came up blank.
Sherry walked up to Whitney, gave her hand a squeeze, and said, “You go, honey. Kara and I have got this.”
Whitney grabbed her blazer and
got one arm through the sleeve before opening the door and pushing the other arm in on the way out. She only made it two steps into the alley that led to her car in the lot behind the building before she changed her mind on going any further and slumped down on the pavement, her back against the stone of the building, and cried.
For the first time, she truly understood why her mom had moved away all those years ago. It was painful living in a town where everywhere you looked reminded you of lost love. She pulled her cell phone from her pocket, and typed in a text to her mother.
Go ahead and set up the interview with the Willow Grove Weekly.
She glanced at the text, only pausing for a short moment, before she touched send.
Chapter Twenty
Eli stood in the offices of Rowan Davenport, while the Smithfield Chief Operations Officer watched the training videos that he and Ben had hired a professional videographer to create. The man was all crisp lines and power pose, in charge and forceful, standing in his expensive suit alongside Eli, focusing intently on their presentation. The videos were one of the best promotional materials he and Ben had made, because it showcased so well to potential clients what they did.
When the video finished, the executive directed Ben and Eli to the area of his office with a love seat and a couple of plush chairs. The man sat in the middle of the love seat and motioned to the chairs. “If we signed with you, tell me what your plan of action would be with training my company.”
Ben nodded to Eli, acknowledging that this was his strong suit.
“Well, Mr. Davenport, there’s two ways we could go about this,” Eli said. “We could plan the standard team building routine— kick it all off by meeting with all twenty-five hundred employees in five big groups over the course of a week, then meet one department or team at a time over the next six weeks. Your company’s efficiency will skyrocket, and you’d be very pleased with the results.”
Rowan Davenport nodded.
“Or,” Eli said, excitement creeping into his voice, “we go with the plan that will have the greatest lasting impact, day in and day out, over the long haul.” These were the plans he liked best— the ones tailored to each company, and not the plan the big boss usually thought of originally. “You send us your team or department with the biggest issues. The ones that argue amongst themselves the most and can’t seem to work together on anything or accomplish the tasks assigned to them. You make whatever sacrifices you have to in order to be able to send all of them to us for three full days. Give us your very worst, and we’ll return them being your best.”
“When they come back,” Ben said, “you’ll see the difference. They’ll feel the difference.”
Mr. Davenport steepled his fingers in front of his lips. Eli continued, “Word will spread throughout the company about what the training did for that team, and it’ll make everyone else excited about their own turn at TeamUp. We’ll schedule the rest of the company at this office about a week and a half later to give time for word to travel and excitement to build. Then we’ll do the day-long training with about four or five hundred at a time— whatever works best for the way your company naturally divides. They’ll get a jump start on making improvements, and we’ll work with everyone to build unity and workplace pride among the company as a whole.
“Then, we’ll start taking the rest of the company, a team or department or two at a time, for one to three days each, depending on how well each team is currently working with each other, and depending on whether you’re wanting them to be more unified in general, or if you’re wanting them to also work on being able to work together on creative or intellectual projects.”
The presentation was going perfectly. Eli was adjusting on the fly to the minuscule signs the executive probably didn’t even realize he was displaying. It felt so good to be doing something he was truly good at. He’d been away too long.
“Then we can get together with you about a week after all the trainings are finished and evaluate how effective it was, and if you’d like it to be a yearly training, and whether or not you’d like to extend the training to the district offices.”
Eli stopped then, waiting for a response from Mr. Davenport, but the executive just tapped his lips with his fingers, studying them. This was the part where Eli had learned not to be nervous; he knew to just sit patiently and show confidence. A few tiny nerves wound their way in, though, when he thought about how powerful this corporation was, and how many employees they had outside of this one office. He pushed those thoughts away as best as he could. This was no different from meeting with a company with ten employees.
After a long moment, where he guessed the C.O.O. was trying to see if they’d crack under his intense scrutiny, Mr. Davenport sat up straight and said, “I’m meeting with the executive team at eleven and with all managers at one. I’ll present this to them then. My assistant will send to you a plan of action and a recommended schedule before I leave for Africa tonight. Then you can write up a contract, get it to my people, and I’ll ensure it gets signed and back to you within three days.”
Eli and Ben both stood along with Rowan Davenport and shook hands with him.
“Sounds good,” Ben said. “We’ll get that contract sent as soon as we hear from your assistant.”
Mr. Davenport walked them to his door, and then they left, walking down the hall in silence, presentation materials in their arms. They stayed silent as they waited for the elevator doors to open. They stayed silent as they waited for the doors to close and for the elevator to descend below the executive floor.
Then they both shouted in excitement, pumping their fists in the air.
“We just got Smithfied!” Ben said. “Smithfield!”
“I can’t believe we did it. This is huge. We pull this off and we’ve suddenly got a power to convince other large companies that we’ve only dreamed of having.”
“We pull it off well,” Ben added, “and we might even end up with an endorsement from Smithfield. Can you just imagine how that would look on our website?”
Eli started thinking through the implications of landing a company like Smithfield, and what that would mean for TeamUp, which naturally led to thoughts of Whitney. He was so proud of himself— between the nerves and excitement waiting in Davenport’s office to giving the presentation, he’d gone a good fifty minutes without thinking of her. About the way her green eyes sparkled whenever she was thinking something mischievous, or how her hair curled forward when she tucked it behind her left ear, the way it felt when his phone lit up with a text from her, or the way her lips looked so soft and inviting and perfect. How had he not kissed her more often while he was there? Especially when kissing her sent such jolts of electricity throughout his body.
“Dude,” Ben exclaimed as they walked out the Smithfield Corporate office building. “How are you not more excited?”
Eli didn’t want to bring Ben down with his melancholy, especially at a time like this, so he tried to push all his heartbreak over Whitney into a corner, and tap only into his feelings about the company. He grinned. “Looks like we’re going to have to grow the business a little sooner than we had planned.”
“What time does your plane leave again?”
“I’m not heading back. Well, eventually, I’ll have to fly back to get my car and drive it home.”
“You’re staying? That’s fantastic!” Then Ben looked at Eli and said, “Oh. It’s not fantastic.” He studied Eli for a moment. “The only thing that could’ve caused your face to do that is Whitney. I’m so sorry, man. What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. What’s on the docket for TeamUp? There’s a group coming this afternoon, right?”
Ben nodded. “The teens from that leadership conference have their afternoon and evening with us. Come help me set up. Then we’ll grab some lunch, and spend the afternoon teaching them how to stand up for themselves and others. I know the teen groups are some of your favorites.”
Eli smiled. “Don’t bring up
Whitney, and it’s a deal.”
They’d already ran the Chicken in a Frying Pan relay race, where they had the teens take turns using a couple of sticks to pick up a rubber chicken and run it across the field to a frying pan. And they had them do an activity called Round Tables, where they split into groups of five. Each group went to a different table filled with seemingly random objects. Only one person in each group had the instructions, and that person couldn’t touch anything— they could only instruct the others to complete the objective before the time limit, and before switching to a new table with a new leader. And they’d fed them lots of snacks and liquids.
Now the sun was getting low in the sky, and the teens were doing the last activity at TeamUp— a game called Tallest Tower, where they were split into two groups, and each group had to build a tower as tall as they could out of blocks of different sizes and shapes that looked like blocks a toddler might play with, but were much bigger, and made of balsa wood. One team’s was well over six feet high, and the other’s was nearing eight.
Ben had stayed true to his word and hadn’t brought up Whitney, but that didn’t stop her from constantly being in Eli’s mind. As the two teams worked on their towers, Eli looked around at the four acres of TeamUp fields. One side was all grass, and the other was dirt. Fences surrounded the property, but so many trees and shrubs were planted around the outside edges for shade that the fences were nearly invisible. A large wooden platform stood in the exact center of the fields where he and Ben could give instruction or use them for some activities. Large storage sheds and their offices sat near the parking lot, and a big covered pavilion stretched out next to it, where they laid out snacks for their trainees. They had worked hard on what they’d built here. Eli loved it, and was proud of what they’d accomplished.