Return to Heartland: A Heartland Cove County Romance

by Jacquie Gee

  How could she be keeping so much from me?

  I look up. Maybe she hasn’t. Maybe she just can’t remember to tell me.

  I need to talk to Aunt Penny. I glance over at the store. Heartbeat Bridge Souvenir and Gifts stands to the right of the bridge if you come into town from the North. It’s stood there ever since my great-grandfather arrived in this place. Built it up from selling goods out of the back of his wagon.

  My gaze lingers on the building that now stands in that very spot. When my great-grandfather first started, it was basically a souvenir rock and popcorn stand. After that, he expanded the business by selling my great-grandmother’s home-churned ice cream, and it grew from there. Enough to build them a fine house across the street. Mom and Aunt Penny run the business now. Ever since Dad died.

  I smooth back my hair and straighten my shirt, and stare out over the river again, tears brimming fast in my eyes. I’d better pull myself together before I go see Aunt Penny. She doesn’t need my crap.

  Aunt Penny’s not really my aunt. Not in the conventional sense. She’s the love child of the town's then-minister and my mom's oldest sister, Helena, who gave birth to her in her teens. Her pregnancy was kept a secret, and when Penny was born my grandparents quickly adopted her to kept the secret going. She was raised as my mother’s little sister, and the rest of the town was never the wiser. Well, at least my grandmother liked to think so. Grandma kept the lie going until her dying day.

  Funny how never-talked-about secrets have a way of getting out.

  Even it if is only in the form of backhanded gossip.

  Meanwhile, the minister stayed married and had eight children with his wife who remained completely clueless, so they say. Though some think she knew, and only feigned ignorance.

  Because seriously, who wouldn’t in her position?

  Helena ran off and got married and Grandma went to her grave, leaving poor Aunt Penny to wear the scarlet letter of all their mistakes. After all, you can’t have the town preacher accused of creepy things like adultery and child molestation, now can you?

  Gotta love a small town.

  One day, not long after Grandma’s death, Helena returned. Just showed on the doorstep, out of nowhere, dressed to the nines, gift in hand, and publicly demanded her child back. Penny was sixteen by then, on the eve of going on her first, and final date, who unfortunately stood behind her as the explosion happened, and Penny’s life as she knew, it was blown to bits.

  Aunt Penny ran off, and no one could find her for over a week. When she returned, no one ever spoke of it again.

  Mother reminds me all the time not to bring it up.

  Aunt Penny was never the same.

  Personally, I don’t care how Aunt Penny got here, I’m just glad that she did. She’s always been one of my favorite people. They named her Penny because she was born premature. My mother and she became sisters and fast friends. I pause my thoughts, glancing over my shoulder at her tiny apartment attached to the back of our family’s gift shop where she lives. That much has never changed.

  “What the—”

  My attention is drawn to the sound of air brakes. A great gust of them is released, piercing the silence of the day. I whirl about just in time to see a Greyhound bus sailing past me, rumbling down the center of Main Street. The wind from its tailings blows back my hair. Dust billows in my face. All the birdlife along the river’s edge screams into flight. It’s as though someone set off a rocket in the heart of Heartland Cove.

  Driveway stones pop under hot bus tires as the thing abruptly turns and pulls to a gasping stop, right in front of the door of my mother’s gift shop. It parks, and I check my watch. One forty-five.

  “Welcome to North America’s second-largest still-operational covered bridge,” a voice squelches out over a loud microphone, coming from the bus's interior. He then repeats it all in what I think to be Chinese. “This stop is twenty minutes.” The voice makes another squelchy announcement. “Washrooms are on the right of the building.”

  The what?

  I look to see a row of newly erected porta-potties. At least, they’re new to me.

  “Enjoy the scenery, and don’t forget this is a twenty-minute stop!”

  The door of the bus cranks open and a pile of people file out—a hundred plus hot and tired travelers, the men dressed in business attire and the women in high heels and skirts. Not your typical Heartland Cove travelers wear, that’s for sure. I squint at the fancy lime-green lettering on the side of the top-notch luxury tour coach. Ginran Lee Tours. See Canada as it was meant to be seen. In all its natural glory.

  Ginran Tours? They’re not from around here.

  A group makes an immediate beeline for the porta-potties, while the rest disperse upon the village. Their sharp conversation fills the air. In a matter of seconds, there are mile-long line-ups at both Fenton’s Fry Truck and Sal’s Hometown Burgers. Others race up and down the riverbank, snapping photos. Still more storm the bridge.

  I’ve never seen so many people in Heartland Cove at once. It’s actually quite amazing.

  Workers in all the named establishments riffle goods through take-out windows into awaiting hands at record speed.

  Other merchants flood out into the streets setting out sandwich signs leading visitors in every direction. The town’s gone from tranquil to circus in thirty seconds.

  Well, this’ll certainly be good for business. Business.

  Omigosh. The shop. I glance up at the apartment window. Who’s running it. I look back. Throngs of shoppers stream through the door. Whoever it is she’ll never be able to handle that crowd alone.

  I launch from the bridge, abandoning all thoughts of going back upstairs to make coffee, and race over the road toward the parking lot when—

  “Hey! Hey, you!”

  A man climbs onto the railing of the bridge to get a better picture, in hard shoes no less.

  “Hey! Hey, wait!” My eyes go immediately to the rapids below. “You shouldn’t do that!” I leap toward him, my heart pounding. I race all the way to the end of the widow’s walk where he’s precariously balanced. “Hey!” I wave. “Hey! Get down! It’s dangerous!”

  The man stares at me innocently, his brow rumpled in confusion.

  “It’s not safe,” I say, then I realize he doesn’t understand what I’m saying. I revert to simple English and try again. “Dangerous. Water.” I point. The man glances down at the rapids swirling below him. “Dead,” I add when still he doesn’t seem to get it. Though ‘dead,’ doesn’t seem visitor-friendly choice of words.

  Finally, another man steps up and says something to him in Chinese. The first man’s face breaks into a worried smile. “Ooooooh.” His head tips back and he jumps down from the narrow railing. “So sorry,” he laughs. “Very dangerous.” He points.

  “Yes,” I nod, finally able to breathe. I turn, heading back along the planks, toward Mom’s shop.

  Wow, I hope Mom got that extra slip and fall insurance.

  Racing across the parking lot, I burst breathlessly through the front doors. Customer warning chimes tinkle overhead. Just like the ones I have in my cupcake store back home. Just like the ones Trent has hanging over the front door of my former residence, too, I noticed.

  The shop smells of cheap saltwater taffy and imported plastic. I choke a little on the stench. What happened to the sweet, sugary aroma of hot slab-cut fudge? Aunt Penny must have given up making it.

  I push my way through the crowd of shoppers, trying to make my way to the cash, glancing toward the candy counter, expecting to see boxes of homemade peanut brittle stacked up behind the glass. What's happened to the candy? Why is the showcase full of plastic lobsters? Where’s the soda fountain and the spinny stools?

  Then it dawns on me. Why, in my mother’s front room, of course!

  “Mom?” I say, glancing up at the ceiling, blinded by the glare.

  I always hated those old Tiffany lamps, but LED spots? They look so non-nostalgic.

  A gra
ying head pops up from behind the cash register.

  “Becca!” It’s not Mom. It’s Aunt Penny. Thank goodness, she’s not been alone.

  “Oh, Becca!” She scurries around the counter and off toward me, open arms prepared to hug. “Oh, Becca!” She squashes me into a bear-hugging-dancing-foot-to-foot embrace. “When did you get home?”

  “Just today.” I huff out the breath.

  “And you’ve waited until now to come see me?” She pulls back.

  “I’ve had a little business to take care of. Where’s Mom, Aunt Penny?”

  “Oh, in back. Taking a load off.” She glances toward her apartment at the rear of the shop.

  “Put on a shop smock and help me, will you?” She wipes the sweat from her brow, then whirls around and continues to restack merchandise to the shelf she was stocking, then hands some off to some interested customers. “I didn’t know you were coming to town.”

  “In all fairness, no one did.” I race for the stock room to get a smock. “Except for Mrs. Peterson, apparently,” I mutter under my breath.

  “At any rate, I’m so very glad to see you!” She hollers above the rising din of the crowd. “The bus is ten minutes late, and still I’m not ready.” She grins.

  “Yeah, about that.” I tie the smock in back and dart back out onto the floor. “When did we get on the bus tour.”

  “Oh, about two years back. Your mother hasn’t told you?”

  “No. She hasn’t.” I guess there’s a whole lot of things she hasn’t been telling me…

  “Three buses, three times a day, at nine-thirty, one-forty, and four-forty-five, like clockwork.” Aunt Penny grins. “That’s how we make our living now. Our newest source of income,” she mumbles, handing a Mountie doll down from a shelf to a waiting customer. “Our only source of income.”

  What’s that supposed to mean? I step behind the register to cash out a customer.

  “You can stay, can’t you?” Aunt Penny raises her head, looking somewhat confused like we haven’t already determined that I will. “I mean, you don’t have something else I’m taking you from.”

  “Of course, not.” I take my place. “I want to be here.”

  I glance down at the ancient keys on the old 1920’s cash register. It’s been years since I worked cash, but I’m sure it’ll come back to me. What choice do I have? I mean, I can’t leave Aunt Penny swamped like this. Tour buses? Why didn’t Mom tell me?

  “Can I help you?” I say to a customer.

  The last time I was home, I didn’t even set foot in the store. Now I wish I had. How could so much have changed in just a couple of years? Okay, three…and a half. I suck back a huge breath. Bad daughter—bad, bad daughter. I swallow down the sobering thought, as I watch Aunt Penny struggle to serve customers, stepping around the mountains of half-unpacked merchandise lying on the floor. I’ve never seen so many bodies in the shop at once.

  I make a mental note to help Aunt Penny organize that after.

  If it isn’t all broken by then.

  I glance back at the old ticket stall, where I stood so many summers prior, selling tickets to customers for carriages rides over the bridge. I gawk out the small framed window at the barn and stalls in back, standing empty. I guess Annabelle’s gone, as well. “Hey, Aunt Penny, where’s the horse?” I shout to her to the back of the room.

  “Annabelle?” she hollers back. “Your Mom put her out to pasture about a year ago, when we stopped selling the rides. As you can see, it’s gotten far too crazy around here to be entertaining such luxuries.” Her eyebrows shift up and down.

  My heart twinges at the loss of the quaintness of the horse and carriage. I hated cleaning her stall, but I did love the horse. Or more, the whole idea of the attraction—the quaintness of it. The old-world flare.

  Again, why didn’t she tell me? Maybe she just couldn’t.

  I sweep out onto the floor, helping two more customers, then back again behind the cash. Customers have lined up in that tiny amount of time.

  “Five more minutes,” an announcement sounds over the bus’s microphone.

  Five minutes? Aunt Penny and I share a look. “Didn’t they just get here?”

  “This is how it goes,” Aunt Penny says, bustling to join me behind the counter, and it’s a good thing because customers start pressing in, in a sort of frenzy—an I-must-have-this-item-now kind of crazy.

  The bus driver announces it again, which ignites a new thrust of tourists through the door. Shoppers stream in as others fight to leave. Insanity breaks out on every level. I doubt we could shoehorn another body into this room, and yet here they come. I worry about the fire code limit.

  What a stupid thing to be worried about right now!

  “Where is Mom?” I look behind me.

  “Resting,” Aunt Penny says, firmly.

  “Resting? Don’t you think she’s had enough rest by now?” The line at the cash register doubles.

  “I told her when she’d had enough, she could fold the towels. I left her a big stack.” Aunt Penny glares at me as if to say ‘don’t even think about challenging my logic right now.’ She accepts a miniature lobster trap from the hands of a delighted tourist child and the money from his father, handing the money off to me. I proceed to ring it through, as she bags the item. “The crowds have become too much for her,” she mummers in a low voice. “Trust me; it’s best this way.”

  She reaches across me helping the next customer as I ponder the thought, sort of stunned to think what’s been going on here. “Would you like a bag, sir?” I robotically say as Aunt Penny addresses the next. “No, no I’m sorry, no ice cream today,” I say about the old sign hanging above my head. “We should take that down.” I turn to Aunt Penny, riffling touristy gifts into customer bags at top speed now.

  She rolls her eyes. “Does it look like we’ve had time?”

  Mental note: Take down the sign for them.

  I take a stuffed moose from a customer, scan the price, and pass it off to Penny for a bag. “That’ll be nineteen ninety-nine.” He hands me a twenty and I go to make change. “Where are all the pennies?” I say to my Aunt.

  “We don’t have pennies anymore.”

  “We don’t—”

  “Been a long time since you’ve been in Canada, hasn’t it?” Aunt Penny laughs. “Just give him a nickel and be done with it.”

  In the distance, a shrill whistle sounds. “What the heck?” I turn my back.

  “One-minute warning,” Aunt Penny says. “Time to pour it on.” She looks to me.

  What? Shoppers rush the counter stuffing items in our faces.

  “We’ve gotta get all these people rung through and back out bus in less than a minute. It’s time to really move.”

  “Move? What do you call what we’ve been doing?” I grab for items as I roll my eyes. “Some relaxing tour,” I say, cramming maple sugar treats into bags. I punch the sales into the cash register and make fast change, so fast, I’m not even sure it’s right. The buying crowd begins to dwindle. Thank God. How does Aunt Penny keep up this pace?

  One by one, customers drain from the shop, pushing through the front door in a frantic panic to get back to the bus.

  “That was ridiculous!” I turn to Aunt Penny as the last of them leave.

  “This is business.” Aunt Penny shrugs. “As much as we can do in the four short summer months, to cover us for the other eight where we’re buried deep in snow." She leans, exhausted back against the counter.

  A second whistle sounds, calling the stragglers to the bus.

  Penny glances over my shoulder out the window.

  Out of the porta-potty, a customer appears, streaking from there to the door of the bus. A piece of toilet paper sticks to the bottom of her heel. The toilet paper streams along behind her unfurling rapidly from its roll back in the porta-potty, the door flapping in the breeze. The paper flutters along behind her making a trail across the parking lot, connecting the woman to the can. The woman jumps aboard the bus, and the driv
er claps the door shut, breaking the line of toilet paper, and they’re off, in a dogged cloud of black carbon smoke.

  “Did you see that?” I turn to Aunt Penny, laughing. “Did you see how long that unrolled?”

  Aunt Penny nods, holding her belly and laughing so hard she snorts.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it before!”

  The bus pulls a ‘U’ turn at the end of the street, swings around, and comes back.

  "Where are they going?" I lean tracking the bus through the window. "Why are they turning around?"

  “They’ve got to finish the tour.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not complete until they’ve gone through the bridge,” Aunt Penny says, as the bus and its stinky fumes engulf the century old bridge’s entrance.

  Chapter 12

  “So Mom doesn’t work in the shop at all anymore?” I ask Aunt Penny as we clean.

  “I didn’t say that,” Aunt Penny snaps.

  Seems I’ve hit a nerve.

  “She just doesn’t work at high volume times like this one,” Aunt Penny clarifies. “Or when she’s not on.”

  Which is more often than not, lately, I’m guessing.

  “And how often is she not on these days?” I inquire, gently.

  Penny shoots me a strained look. “Your mother and I are doing just fine if that’s what you’re asking?”

  “Are you?”

  She glares back at me, then sets about straightening a shelf of Mountie dolls again.

  “I mean, seriously. Look at this place.” I hold my hands out. The store looks like a small bomb has gone off in here. Shelves are in upheaval. Merchandise lays strewn from wall to wall.

  “We manage.” Aunt Penny draws her brows together, offended.

  “I’m not criticizing; I’m concerned about you.”

  She falls silent, and the room gets small.

  I reach up, placing a maple leaf-shaped bottle of syrup back on the syrup shelf, shifting a couple of others that are out of place. “You know, one of the customers asked me if this came in chocolate?” I waggle the bottle in the air. “Half of them didn’t even know what they were buying—”