Love Finds You in Snowball, Arkansas

by Sandra D. Bricker

  Chapter Thirteen

  IT TOOK JUST OVER AN HOUR TO GET FROM SNOWBALL TO THE TOWN OF Mountain View, and for the last half hour of the drive, Alison read aloud everything she’d learned about the place on the Internet.

  One of the Dream Towns of the area, population less than three thousand.

  Oozing with hand-hewn rusticity, rural charm, and down-home hospitality.

  Fiddling and picking downtown on the square.

  Lucy didn’t want to hate the little town just because Alison had pushed her into knowing too much about it before they ever arrived, but she was convinced that she was really going to have to work against it.

  The good news was, she was wrong.

  The place was so charming that she’d forgotten all about Alison and her traveling Mountain View 101 class the minute they all climbed out of the cars and set out for a walk down Main Street.

  “The activities list was kind to me today, Mattie,” she declared as she pointed toward an antique store across from the square. “Shopping is something at which I can no doubt excel.”

  “And possibly instruct others about, as well,” Matt added with a grin.

  “Wait, wait,” Alison called out, as everyone separated into different directions. “We’re meeting back here on the square at one o’clock.”

  Justin’s enthusiasm bubbled over as he jogged toward a shop with camping gear in the window display. He was like a heat-seeking missile with its course firmly set, and Lucy shrugged as she headed down the street at Matt’s side.

  Meandering through the antique store, they admired a carved, vintage wardrobe and several exquisite sofas and settees. A crystal lamp with a cut-glass dome spoke to Lucy, but she was able to silence the call with one look at the price tag.

  “If I stumbled upon a windfall or something and I could start up my own hotel like the Conroy,” Lucy declared, “I would furnish it from this store.”

  “When you trip over that million,” Matt suggested, “why don’t you buy a B and B somewhere between the mountains and the city, and we can run it together.”

  “It’s a deal. You take care of the books and the business end of things, and I’ll be in charge of creating the style.”

  “A match made in heaven.”

  They were mutually drawn toward an overhead sign that promised fine arts and crafts from local artists, and the pledge did not disappoint. Lucy and Matt didn’t emerge from the store again for more than an hour.

  “Hey, look!” she exclaimed. “Cappuccino. Let’s go over and have one, Mattie.”

  Matt’s cell phone jingled with an arriving text message just as they reached the bistro. “Go ahead,” Lucy told him. “Get us a seat and take that. I’ll grab a couple of coffees.”

  “Latte with—”

  “—a double shot of espresso,” she finished for him. “I know.”

  Lucy had just ordered Matt’s latte and her half-caf skinny vanilla cappuccino when Wendy, Justin, and Tony walked up beside her.

  “Matt and I are getting some coffee. Want to join us?” she asked them.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Justin said.

  “We’re by the sidewalk,” Lucy told them, taking the paper cups from counter. “Come on over when you’ve ordered.”

  Matt was typing a text message when she found the table and sat down across from him.

  “Sedgewick,” he told her as he completed the message.

  “Look who I found.” Lucy nodded toward the counter. “They’re going to join us in a minute.”

  “Good.”

  Lucy leaned back into the padded chair and nursed her coffee cup while Matt finished tapping out another message back to George. He nodded to the others as they approached, and Justin pulled a nearby table next to theirs.

  “We found the sweetest little bookstore down the street,” Wendy said as she plopped an overloaded bag down on the seat of an empty chair. “I spent less than fifty dollars for all of this.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I’ll take you there when we’re through, if you’d like.”

  “Luce, Sedgewick’s got a line on Razorbacks tickets next Wednesday night. Are you in?”

  “You bet.”

  Wendy looked at her curiously. “Razorbacks?”

  “Basketball.”

  “Really!”

  “Yep,” Lucy replied with a shrug. “Who are they playing?”

  “San Antonio,” Justin interjected. “My hometown.”

  “Are you going?” Matt asked.

  “Yeah. Great seats, too. The closest to courtside that I’ve ever scored.”

  “We should organize a drive out to Fayetteville together then.”

  “That works. My buddy has an Explorer. I’ll get him to drive.”

  Lucy’s heart began to pound. She could kiss Matt for that!

  “I’m a little surprised that you’re a fan of basketball, Lucy,” Tony commented.

  “Oh? Why? It’s not like I have to watch from a hot air balloon.”

  They all burst into laughter.

  “As long as the seats don’t make my nose bleed and there are no bats hanging in the rafters, I’m good.”

  One thirty had come and gone, and Matt was still watching for Lucy and Wendy to emerge from the bookstore and meet up with the rest of them in the square at the center of town.

  He checked his watch again. 1:57.

  Alison and the rest of the group had set out for Joy’s Main Street Café, and he was going to wait for the stragglers. Just about the time he thought he might have better luck walking down to the bookstore and dragging them out, he noticed Wendy and Lucy weaving through pedestrian traffic half a block away.

  Lucy was beaming and talking a mile a minute, an overstuffed bag in each hand. It struck him that she had become pretty good friends with her competition, and Matt was happy to see it.

  When she spotted him, Lucy lifted her bags and waved her arms, and she and Wendy closed the rest of the distance at a jog.

  “I’m sorry; we lost track of the time,” Lucy told him. “Where’s everyone else?”

  “They gave up on you and went down the street to eat.”

  “But you didn’t give up on us,” Wendy exclaimed. “You’re our hero.”

  Wendy took one of his arms, Lucy looped the other, and the three of them crossed the street.

  “Wait until you see everything I bought,” Lucy told him. “We found this darling little vintage shop, and I got an amazing lavender sweater with all this pearl-and-bead detailing on it.”

  “Oh,” Wendy interrupted, “and she found this chocolate parka with faux fur around the hood. It looks so good on her.”

  “And they had this retro crocheted scarf in a really pretty rust color with lots of fabulous fringe. You should see it with the parka.”

  Matt raised an eyebrow and stared Lucy down.

  “Okay. I get it. Enough.”

  Turning to Wendy, he said, “This is why God brought the two of you together. I have a limit to how many vintage sweaters and retro scarves I can hear about before the ‘overload’ alarm goes off.”

  Wendy’s laughter crackled, while Lucy’s was sweet like a song. Matt found himself right smack in the middle of something there, and he realized how many years had passed since he’d been privy to this kind of unfiltered interaction between women.

  As Lucy and Wendy chattered on about their purchases and then about some romance book they’d both read, Matt meandered along between them, feeling somewhat reminiscent about the days when he used to sneak down the hall and listen outside Lanie’s bedroom door for some hint at the intricacies of female thinking. There was a whole other world that women belonged to, and there he was in Mountain View, Arkansas, accidentally knee-deep in it.

  “Pay attention!” George would have said if he’d been there. “You’re getting a microscopic view into the molecular anatomy of estrogen.” George was always hinting at some secret society that existed among the female segment of the population, and he was a t
rue believer in man’s ultimate mission to somehow crack the code.

  When they reached the restaurant, Matt held open the door for them both. Lucy smiled at him in a way that crinkled her nose.

  As she passed him, she said, “Mattie, I’m starving.”

  “I know. Me, too. Shopping really burns the calories and works up an appetite, doesn’t it?”

  Lucy giggled in reply.

  “We thought we’d lost you three,” Alison stated as they joined the others at two large round tables that had been pushed together.

  “They were shopping,” Matt said, and all of the men nodded, seeming to understand the unspoken.

  “What did you buy?” Brenda asked, and Matt knew these four words were sure to bring female-speak to full fruition.

  “Look at this,” Lucy replied with excitement, pulling the parka out of the bag and slipping into it. “I’ve been freezing the whole time I’ve been here. But now—” Producing the scarf, she wrapped it around her neck several times and then modeled it for them all with a dramatic flair. “I will be warm and dry, as well as stylish.”

  “That is so cute. Where did you get it?” Cyndi asked.

  “We found the cutest vintage shop up the street—”

  Is this the second or third revisit to the cutest little vintage shop? Matt thought, and he shook his head as he tuned out tales of shopping in favor of focusing on the menu items before him. The Fireman’s Grill sandwich: Ham and Swiss with grilled onions on sourdough. That looked promising.

  A few minutes later, having decided on a Colossal Kielbasa sandwich instead, he tuned back in to the conversation at hand.

  “This old guy we met on the square said these are some of the coldest temperatures for October that this area usually sees,” Alison told them. “He says we might even see snow in the next day or two.”

  “Snow!” Lucy exclaimed. “That would be so great. Hey! I could wear my new parka.”

  “It’s not going to snow,” Justin corrected.

  “Oh, you big old party pooper,” Lucy teased. “Don’t rain on my snowy parade.”

  “Fine,” he conceded, sharing a cockeyed grin with Tony. “Maybe we’ll be able to get some skiing in before we head back.”

  “Thank you,” Lucy said with one firm nod, and she added a little “Humph” just for good measure.

  It wasn’t the first time that day that Matt noticed the easy way between Lucy and Justin. Matt wondered if she’d actually listened to his advice about being herself, because there was certainly a lightness to her attitude that he hadn’t seen since their arrival in Snowball. Even the way she interacted with Wendy signaled a shift in her thinking.

  Over lunch, conversations hummed from various points around the table. Alison and Cyndi discussed the local artistry displayed in the café, while Tony, Justin, and Rob conferred about an upcoming Civil War re-enactment they’d seen advertised on the square.

  It was then that Matt noticed Jeff and Brenda, their heads close together and their eyes locked, whispering together and looking for all the world as intimate as a couple. Matt was surprised to see it, but he had to acknowledge that they made a pretty good match.

  Right at that moment, as if she could read his mind, Lucy elbowed him and shot him a sly grin before nodding in their direction.

  “Isn’t that great?” she murmured.

  “When did it happen?” he asked softly.

  “It’s been cooking for a while.”

  Matt should have known that Lucy would be right in the middle of such a development; she loved matchmaking almost as much as the title character of Jane Austen’s Emma. No one loved a good love story like Lucy Lou, after all.

  Matt had often wondered if she would ever have a love story of her own; but now, the way things appeared to be falling into place with Justin, he expected to find those concerns fully eradicated before too long.

  He suddenly realized he’d never taken the time to imagine what would happen to his own relationship with Lucy once she found her match. Somehow, as the speculation began to take hold of him at the big round table in Joy’s Main Street Café, he wasn’t quite as eager for her to find happiness as he thought he should be.

  “Are we all ready?” Alison asked, and the sound of chairs scuffing against the floor answered the question.

  “I wish I wasn’t so full,” Matt heard Lucy say to Wendy as they headed out the door. “Did you see that dessert menu?”

  “Peanut butter chiffon pie in a graham cracker crust,” Wendy replied, her hand pressed to her heart as she swooned slightly.

  “Oh, no no no,” Lucy declared. “There was a brownie something. Brownie trumps peanut butter every time.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  “You know, I’m not sure I can be friends with you anymore if you’re going to talk like that,” Lucy remarked.

  “She takes her chocolate very seriously,” Matt told Wendy as he took one of Lucy’s packages from her full hands. They ambled up the street in several groups, and when they reached the square, Matt noticed that a band of bluegrass musicians had taken their place atop a makeshift stage. There were several banjos and fiddles and oversized basses, and one of the banjo players had a harmonica hooked up to a contraption that allowed him to play both instruments at once.

  They joined the gathering crowd, some of them standing, others finding a place to sit wherever they could. Lucy, Matt, Justin, and Wendy shared a long wooden bench to the far side of the square. The musicians were dressed in overalls and jeans, with ball caps and straw hats. Despite the Mayberry-like atmosphere, Matt found it difficult not to surrender to their charm. Before long, he joined the entire audience as they clapped in time to the music and cheered on the performers.

  Matt leaned forward and glanced down the bench just in time to see Justin tilt in toward Lucy and say something that made her toss back her hair and break out in unbridled laughter. It occurred to him that they looked very much like a couple, the way Jeff and Brenda had appeared in the café earlier.

  Gray clouds whipped around in the steel-blue sky as the late afternoon breeze snapped with a slight chill. Justin helped Lucy slip into her new jacket. She wrapped the long scarf around her own neck, and then around Justin’s, as well, with a stream of giggles that traveled down the length of the bench toward Matt.

  The bluegrass band announced that they were taking a break, and Alison began rounding up people and herding them off toward the cars. Lucy and Justin followed Jeff and Brenda, and Matt decided to fall back from them a bit and let Lucy enjoy being part of the group’s coupled population for a change.

  “Hey, that was fun,” Wendy exclaimed as she appeared beside him and tapped his arm. “That old guy on the harmonica was a crack-up.”

  “Did you see that woman in the audience with the hat?” he asked.

  “The one with the tag hanging off the back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes! She looked like Minnie Pearl!”

  “That’s what I was thinking, too.”

  Matt watched Lucy climb into the back of the PT Cruiser, and by the time he arrived, it was already full.

  “Come ride with us,” Wendy urged him, and she tugged on his sleeve as she headed for the Buick.

  Matt gave Lucy a wave and slid in beside Wendy.

  Once they were on their way, Wendy looped her arm into his and gave Matt a smile. “I’m so glad I came on this trip, Matt.”

  “I am, too.”

  “I almost didn’t come. We were having a festival at the school this weekend, and I didn’t want to miss it. But the idea of getting a whole week or more to myself, with adult company and no kids in sight—it was just too compelling.”

  “I haven’t taken a real vacation trip in a couple of years,” Matt told her. “So getting a chance to get up here in the fresh air, doing some fishing and some hiking, I just knew it would be a blast.”

  “Really?” she inquired. “Because I didn’t get the idea that you were interested until the ve
ry last minute.”

  “Well, Lucy didn’t want to come, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to come without her.”

  “Then I’m really glad she decided to make the trip.”

  “I am, too,” he replied.

  The rays of the setting sun turned Wendy’s gold hair to a soft tint of orange, and her smile was wide and genuine. In that moment, Matt found himself wondering if he hadn’t been overlooking something important in Wendy since they’d met.

  Lucy had been in his life for such a long time, and her light was so bright that she consistently outshone every girl who interested him. Her grasp on his heart was as persistent as a bulldog’s, and no one else made him laugh or challenged him like his best friend did. He always seemed to end up in the same familiar place with other women, wondering, Why bother? But as he glanced at Wendy now, he realized there was something exquisite about her, too. Lucy was a double-shot jolt of pure caffeine. But there was also something to be said for the soothing effect of a creamy mug of English Breakfast tea on a cold autumn morning. Lucy and her tea-loving ways had taught him that.

  Maybe he’d have Lucy to thank if this new regard for Wendy turned into something more somewhere down the road.

  What a difference a day makes!

  Thank You, Lord, for making me realize that forcing myself into a Justin-shaped mold wasn’t going to produce a woman he would want. Instead, after my talk with Betty Sue and the things that Mattie contributed, I think You really brought it home for me.

  I had the best time with Justin today. There was hardly a break in the conversation from Mountain View all the way back to Snowball today, and for the first time I really feel like we’re connecting.

  I can hardly wait to see what comes next.

  Love and thank You,

  Lucy

  P.S. And thank You SO MUCH for what’s happening with Brenda and Jeff. I’ve never seen her so happy and content. I think this is really IT for them. High-five for love, Lord Jesus!

  Chapter Fourteen

  “YOU CAN USE ANY KIND OF MEAT, REALLY. THE HEALTHIER VERSION would be ground turkey, but I like a little pizzazz, so I start with a mixture of lean ground beef and some spicy sausage.”