Small Town Girl

by Rice, Patricia

  She’d resisted, and hadn’t slept a wink as a result. Still, she figured she’d done him a favor. If he was running the café on his own today, he’d needed his rest.

  And she needed to think about those papers Elise had brought. She had to sign them if it meant money for her mother and a shot at a career. She couldn’t sign them if it meant Flint would lose his café.

  If she were a hard-hearted sort like Elise, she’d worry that Flint had seduced her so she wouldn’t sue. But she’d been the one doing the seducing. He was being a perfect gentleman. Well, as much as a guy like Flint could be gentlemanly.

  She lay there admiring the red and yellow log cabin quilt hanging over the rafter above the foot of her mattress. The sounds of the town waking up were nearly drowned under the hum of the window air conditioner she’d turned on for Flint’s benefit.

  She’d had a hard time at Mama’s last night keeping quiet about Amy and Evan, or the lawsuit papers. She desperately needed to talk to her mother the way daughters did on TV, but she’d known from an early age that her mama didn’t handle disaster well, and now that she was sick, it was unfair to burden her with their problems.

  Mama would be hysterical if she knew what Amy was up to. Marie had never even divorced their runaway father, although during her occasional binges, she would flay his name with acid scorn and tears of regret.

  Nope, Mama would tell her she had no business suing a man who was only trying to make a living. And she’d pitch a fit if Jo told her that Flint was staying in her apartment. Well, most mothers would do that. If she heard that old saw about why should a man buy a cow if he can have the milk for free one more time, she’d kick the next cow she saw.

  Still, for the sake of her own soft heart, she would have to figure out how to keep her relationship with her boss professional. She’d brought back a bunch of her mother’s recipe cards. Once upon a time her mother had been a good cook. Jo couldn’t remember those days, but Amy sort of did. Their parents’ separation had shattered their world early.

  As it would for Amy’s kids. Louisa and Josh loved their daddy, even if Evan was an arrogant prick.

  Not wanting to consider that ugly thought this early on a sunny morning, Jo flung back her sheet and got up. In the cool breeze off the mountain, she didn’t think the air conditioner was necessary. She switched it off and opened the loft window. She hadn’t been comfortable wearing nothing to bed with Flint sleeping below, so she’d dragged out the long jersey knit nightgown her mother had given her for Christmas. A large T-shirt would have covered more, but she had wanted to look as if she owned a nightgown.

  She was balancing on one foot, scratching it with the other, and contemplating the wardrobe she used as a closet when she heard the first frightening squeal of brakes, and her heart gripped.

  The flashing memory of last weekend’s boulder incident sent her dashing to the dormer window overlooking the street below.

  She was just climbing on the window seat when she heard the crash. Wincing, she pried open the screen to lean out. The noise had sounded as if it were directly below.

  She located the Krispy Kreme delivery truck that had been foolishly backing out of the alley onto the narrow road. The semi from the mill had apparently clipped its rear bumper. Both trucks partially blocked the curve in the mountain highway.

  Satisfied the noise was no more than a fender bender, she was about to retreat from the window, when she heard the rumble of a dump truck from the rockslide coming down the hill into the hollow that formed the town. And coming around the curve from the opposite direction was a pickup stacked with poultry crates. Neither vehicle was slowing down.

  “Move them!” she screamed to the truck drivers climbing out of their cabs.

  But she was two and a half stories up, and they were already pulling out their cell phones and couldn’t hear her over their angry shouts at each other.

  ***

  At the squeal of brakes outside the café, half Flint’s customers rose from their seats to check out the action. Since the doughnut truck had a new driver and had been late this morning, Flint didn’t have to look. The driver had pulled into the alley instead of backing in.

  Arms full of doughnut boxes, he couldn’t drop everything at the crash. He cursed himself for not having gone out and directed the truck onto the narrow highway, but without Jo here, he’d had a hectic morning and a shop full of customers and his mind hadn’t been focused on the driver’s ineptitude. He hadn’t been thinking about his customers either. He’d been imagining Jo walking in the door and singing her song about survival. She’d royally screwed his head around.

  Flint lowered the doughnut boxes to the counter and started toward the door.

  “Damn, that’s the semi from the mill,” George Bob shouted, already at the entrance. “I’ve told Evan they drive too fast through town—”

  Massive brakes rumbled with a more protracted roar than the semi’s quick squeal. Something with a heavy load was trying to miss the accident in the middle of the highway.

  The resulting collision shook the entire building with the force of a bomb.

  Flint dived to keep the dish cabinet from falling into Sally and Dave at the counter.

  An ominous creak followed the crash, and in seconds, the big picture window with its shelf of rainbow plates imploded in splintering shards and a cloud of dirt.

  With the cabinet steadied, Flint vaulted over the counter at the explosion of glass, throwing himself between the window and a couple of Sally’s church ladies. Flying debris hit his back as he shoved his coughing customers beneath a table.

  While he waited for the roof to fall and kill them all, the air—and his shop—filled with dust and rubble spilling from the overturned dump truck. From somewhere above, like a choir of angels over the steady patter of debris, Jo’s soprano screamed curses and worried questions.

  Propped up on an elbow to keep from crushing the old lady half under him, Flint rubbed his brow and tried to reorient himself. Jo. Upstairs. He cast a glance to the stamped tin ceiling. A corner had peeled away at the front where the wall sagged, but Jo’s apartment hadn’t fallen on their heads. Yet.

  “Flint! Are you in there? Is everyone all right?” The cackle of frightened chickens followed Jo’s frantic cries.

  Okay. He could do this. He was still alive. He was about to be sued for the rest of his life, but he had to make certain everyone was okay first so they could make it to their lawyers.

  Apologizing to the old lady who looked more dazed than crushed, he crawled out from under the table to survey the damage.

  “George Bob needs help,” Sally told him, dusting off her skirt and reaching down to help the women he’d knocked down.

  Dave was leaning over the insurance agent, pressing a handful of paper napkins to George’s forehead. Flint reached over the counter for some clean towels, handed them to another of the church ladies to press against the wound, then made the rounds of the room, righting chairs and tables and customers, mouthing reassuring phrases while he tried to figure out what the hell had just happened.

  The frame of his front window was filled with a mountain of rock and dirt. The lively Fiestaware was crushed into dust. His door was lying on the floor. More gravel and dirt blocked the entrance.

  Several of his customers were shouting back at Jo on the outside. Even he couldn’t imagine how Jo might have instigated this disaster.

  He was in too much shock to do more than operate on automatic. Jo was okay. His sons were safely back in Charlotte with his parents. That’s all he needed to keep going. He righted another chair and helped a frail old man he thought might be the county judge into it. Great. A judge as witness that his shop was unsafe and had caused grave injury and shock to the town’s leading citizens.

  Flint wanted to get down on his knees and give thanks that no one had been seriously injured, but he wasn’t as comfortable as Jo in talking with the Man Upstairs. He let Sally and the church ladies take care of that for him. He wished J
o were in here to sing a hymn. That’s what he needed right now. Jo’s voice.

  As if she’d read his mind, she called, “Coming through!” over the rising murmur of frightened customers. Every shell-shocked and dirty inhabitant of the café turned to gape as pink high-heeled mules and long brown legs dangled from the top of the dirt mound in the doorway. The doorframe cut off the top half of her, until she slid down the pile in what appeared to be a long rose-pink T-shirt that revealed every enticing curve.

  A white hen slipped down the mound with her, squawking all the way.

  “Hey, y’all,” she cried, scanning the room with the efficiency of a kindergarten teacher on the first day of school. Relief rose in her eyes as even George Bob sat up to show all was well. When her gaze met Flint’s, his world shifted back in place. Everything would be fine if Jo was smiling. The realization ought to shock him, but he was too busy fighting his urge to hug her.

  “It’s high time we planted our summer annuals anyway,” she announced, to Flint’s bafflement. But his customers laughed, obviously understanding her joke.

  “What is this, Joella and Chickenwoman come to the rescue?” Dave asked, catching the cackling, frightened hen.

  “Oh, y’all are missing the show!” she cried happily, gesturing at the street. “Go on out the back and down the alley. Anybody got a video camera? We could sell this to the news.”

  She made the disaster sound like a circus produced for their entertainment. Flint was torn between yelling at her for her absurdity and kissing her for it. People were already heading for the rear exit instead of sitting dazed and weeping.

  “It’s just a scratch, Georgie,” she crooned, kneeling beside her childhood nemesis and examining the bloody towel George held to his head.

  Flint figured it was more than a scratch to make that much blood, but the skinny insurance agent bravely climbed to his feet under her assurances.

  “If you get out there in time, you can have all the doughnuts you can eat,” she chattered happily to her remaining audience. “And a chicken in every pot, too. I hope you’re not McIlvey’s insurance agent, Georgie. It’s his pickup that sideswiped the Krispy Kreme. I think he had every hen he owns in there.”

  From George’s curses and the way he hurried for the exit, Flint assumed the unfortunate McIlvey was indeed insured. Shifting booths into place as the last of his customers departed, Flint pretended he wasn’t working his way across the room to Jo.

  He knew better the instant he reached her. She looked up at him, and her smiling mask crumpled—just before she flung herself into his arms.

  He needed all those supple curves pressed against him to remind him that life was good and not the disaster it seemed at this minute. He wanted to shake in his boots and swear from fear, but insane as it sounded—with Jo in his arms, all was well in the world.

  He held her tightly, murmuring, “It’s okay,” over and over, while stroking her slender back. The nightgown or T-shirt or whatever she wore was no better protection than air against her nakedness. He could feel her warmth, feel the bones of her spine, feel her heaving sobs as she cried into his shirt. He could easily distract himself with thoughts of sex.

  But that’s what had got him here in the first place—running away from reality. Concentrating on reassuring Jo to keep from joining her sobs, he cradled her against him, kissing her hair, making wild promises to shore up their mutual morale.

  “Is everyone outside all right?” he asked as her sobs slowed to hiccups.

  She nodded against his shoulder. “Not sure about the chickens, but there wasn’t anyone on the sidewalk. I left the drivers screaming at each other.”

  “Then everything is all right.” He rubbed her spine some more, hoping to reinforce his platitudes. “People are more important than things.”

  She nodded, but it was a half-hearted effort. “It will be weeks before you can open again. All your pretty dishes—”

  She threatened to descend into sobs again. Taking her shoulders, Flint propped her at arm’s length and waited until she raised teary eyes. Even covered in dirt, with her golden hair disheveled, she was gorgeous beyond words. Even his Muse couldn’t create a poem as beautiful as Jo. He was a goner, for sure, thinking like that, but she wasn’t looking for flattery and he wasn’t looking for sex while knee-deep in catastrophe.

  “I’m insured, I promise,” he told her. “The policy covers loss of income, not that we can show much of that. I needed a new front door anyway. I’m sorry about the dishes you liked, though. They’re kind of busted.”

  Jeez, he sounded just like her being Little Miss Optimistic. But he was relieved when she wiped away her tears.

  She glanced at the shelves now bereft of their colorful array of pottery. “They were ugly anyway.” She hiccupped. “I just thought they livened the place up a little.”

  “Liar. Where are your Nikes? You can’t walk in this rubble in those things.”

  Jo glanced down at her pink mules and managed a smile. “I think these are a stylish way to face disaster. But I’d better find real clothes before I go out again. Let me run upstairs while you take a look at the fun. You might as well enjoy the circus.”

  Flint accompanied Jo outside and watched her safely traverse the stairs, then strolled out to face the disaster that would probably wipe his livelihood off the face of the map, despite all his brave words.

  ***

  “I left the kids with mama and came as soon as I could,” Amy said breathlessly after running down the street from the upper parking lot.

  Standing on the covered front porch of the hardware store, watching Flint and a half dozen other men shoveling rock and debris out of the café and away from the sidewalk so a bulldozer could scoop them up, Jo shrugged her acknowledgment. Her insides were too twisted to do more.

  The café was ruined.

  “Oh, no,” Amy groaned, registering the scope of the disaster. “That’s the mill’s load of new designs! Evan was counting on increasing orders with those tapestries.”

  Jo surveyed the bolts of upholstery fabric scattered across sidewalks and buried under a few tons of rubble. Chickens scratched at brocade tapestries and silk jacquards. Myrtle—feathered sunhat still in place—now sported a purple plaid cloak. The mill had switched the looms to expensive decorator fabrics only recently. A fortune in material adorned Main Street more colorfully than Christmas decorations.

  Remembering Flint’s assurances, Jo tried to make the best of it. “I imagine they’re all insured.”

  “They’re insured at cost, but their profit is wiped out,” Amy said gloomily. “And the designer expo is next month. They’ll lose next year’s sales if the samples aren’t in it.”

  Uneasiness gnawed at Jo’s gut, but she had her own problems to solve. Evan would have to solve his. She just couldn’t stand here and do nothing any longer.

  The boxes of doughnuts had disappeared in a twinkling. Farmer McIlvey was still chasing chickens. The bulldozer could handle dirt. Jo took a deep breath. “Let’s rescue fabric then.” She marched into the street to grab a bronze jacquard bolt from beneath the dented Krispy Kreme van that had started all this.

  A plate-sized oil spot saturated the center of the bolt.

  She set it neatly in the alley, anyway, out of the path of tow trucks and bulldozers.

  Following Jo’s example, Amy grabbed bolts of contrasting gold and yellow from beneath a flock of chickens and set them next to the jacquard.

  Stepping from the sidelines where she’d been watching with half the town, Sally joined them, rescuing a bolt from beneath the overturned semi’s tire and grabbing the pretty purple plaid from Myrtle on her way to add it to the stack.

  Jo knew the cloth was ruined. Oil and dirt and chicken droppings mixed with tire tracks and glass. She simply couldn’t stand there and do nothing, and the fabric was too lovely to throw out. Maybe their mama could sew new curtains or covers for her old couch from the salvage.

  Reluctant to wash down the street until
the bulldozer had removed as much of the dirt as possible and tow trucks had righted the dump truck, the town’s volunteer fire department set down their hoses and joined the women in hauling fabric. A line of people formed from the back of the mangled semi and up the street, passing the bolts to every available doorway once the cloth filled the alley.

  Jo’s muttered “Yo ho, heave ho” soon took an upbeat turn to Disney’s “Whistle While You Work.”

  When enough dirt on the sidewalk in front of the café was cleared for her to traverse, she carried a spectacular bolt of plum and turquoise through the smashed door frame and draped the cloth across the counter. On her way out, she passed Flint, who had stripped off his sweaty T-shirt in the increasingly warm June sun.

  “I like a man who can use his hands,” she murmured, brushing a kiss against his bronzed bicep, thrilling at the sexy smell of musky sweat and heated skin. She had to back off to keep from wrapping her arms around his naked waist.

  Flint had his hands full of shovel and dirt and couldn’t grab her as she sashayed past. But knowing she left him grinning instead of growling made her light-hearted.

  Chickens scattered across the two-lane as a silver Mercedes sedan rolled down the street, not stopping at the parking lot but driving up next to the fire department’s water truck. As a tall, well-dressed pair emerged to survey the damage, Amy stood beside Jo.

  “Lurid Linda,” Amy said, naming the female driver while brushing chicken feathers off her filthy jeans.

  With her shining auburn hair captured in a chignon, wearing an immaculate gray designer suit and white silk blouse, the board treasurer stepped out.

  “And Evan, come to survey the disaster,” Jo surmised, recognizing her elegant brother-in-law climbing from the passenger seat. His dark blond hair was so neat, she had to assume he used hair spray. In contrast to the jeans everyone else was wearing, Evan looked untouched and professional in his blue pin-striped suit, despite the rising June heat.