Faith shook her head and ripped open another cardboard box. “Give me a break. You were only gone for half an hour. How thoughtful or genuine could he have been? You didn’t have time to notice anything like that. All you could do is look, and you didn’t even do that. You’re no fun at all.”
Hadley laughed. “Maybe I looked.”
“And?” prompted Faith. “Come on. Just give it to me on a scale from one to ten.”
Shaking her head, Hadley picked up a stack of decades-old National Geographic magazines, wrinkled at the edges with water stains. “Not that I was counting,” she said, turning toward the storage room, “but twelve and a half.”
Chapter 5
Fletcher found settling in at the station easier than he would have imagined. His experience with the BLM had prepared him for plenty of posturing, alpha-male-ing, and territory disputes, and those were all elements of the city fire station. He knew it was cliché, but there were valid reasons that firemen had stereotypes.
People expected these guys to be tough. They were, without exception, tough. People assumed they were aggressive. The men defined aggression. But outsiders did not necessarily understand the brotherhood that formed between men who worked together in this sort of career.
Within a few weeks, Fletcher knew the men at the station as well as he knew anyone, how they worked together, how they spoke and stayed silent, and how they responded to any situation.
He picked Chief Grantham early on as the intellectual. The chief had a respectable library in glass-fronted bookcases in his office, which was a nice PR move, but Fletcher could tell the difference between a library for show and one that was used. Chief Grantham read his books.
It was no surprise that the “mom” of the group was Red. Fletcher’s own childhood experiences had shown him Red’s nurturing, caretaking side in lots of ways. Years ago, Red had always been up for playing a game of catch or chess during a slow shift, or later, helping with homework or listening to Fletcher’s stories about classes and girls. Red loved to bake, and had, on many occasions, shown up for work with a tray of pastries he’d created. Fletcher was delighted that this still seemed to be one of Red’s talents.
What he hadn’t expected was that Nick Baxter would be the friendliest of all the firefighters. After their basketball game, and the weekly games that followed, Nick approached Fletcher regularly with sincere respect and a desire to be friends. At first, Fletcher assumed Nick was feeling him out to assess the Hadley situation, to see where Fletcher stood and what kind of obstacle or threat he might pose. But it soon became clear that Nick was just a genuinely nice guy who happened to be flat-out crazy for Fletcher’s ex. It was so obvious that nobody ever needed to mention it.
The closest anyone came to talking about it was Nick himself, who would bug Savanna in the reception room, asking her about Hadley’s donations, wondering if Hadley was coming by the station, repeating something funny Hadley had said.
When Fletcher and Nick had talked about the social scene in town, Fletcher hadn’t been too surprised to find it was scant. Before coming back to Greensburg, Fletcher had wondered how many of his old high school friends were still around. There were a few, but most of those who stayed in town had already married their high school sweetheart and settled into a life that was way outside Fletcher’s experience. He didn’t seem to be reconnecting with anyone he’d been close to in years past. He wasn’t eager to spend every night sitting alone in his apartment by the river while his mom slept off her treatments, so he decided to take Nick up on his offers to play ball and see a couple of movies. There was no real reason not to like him. After all, the only thing the poor guy was actually guilty of was good taste in women. Nick invited, and Fletcher accepted. Before too many weeks, Fletcher considered Nick a good friend.
Then there was Savanna.
Fletcher thought that he could become friends with Savanna and thereby learn about Hadley’s new life without having to actually speak to Hadley again. Ever.
No such luck.
Savanna was clearly biased against him by Hadley, because in all his years, he’d never naturally ticked off a woman like he seemed to consistently, continuously do to Savanna. She was practically allergic to him. Every time he walked through the station lobby, she glared at him then looked away. As she shuffled paperwork, he always got the worst assignments. Deliveries that came for him would mysteriously get shoved in the back of a pile.
She made no secret of her contempt, rolling her eyes at every charming and clever comment he made in the station. She refused to be impressed.
Fletcher knew he was not imagining this animosity, because it was the delight of the entire crew.
Red watched Savanna deliver an assignment to Fletcher one day, and by the time she’d finished, Red was flushed from hairline to neck trying not to laugh. “Boy, whatever you did to ruffle that one, you ruffled her good. She’s usually a real nice girl, but whenever you come onto the scene, her claws come right out.”
Fletcher shook his head. “That was mild. I wondered if she’d given up her crusade to make my life miserable. I actually thought that was her being nice to me.”
Fletcher and Nick were spotting each other in the weight room one evening, and Savanna called in on the intercom to let Fletcher know he was needed in the chief’s office. Her tone was icy, to put it mildly.
Nick asked, “Is it possible that you said something to offend her?”
“I inhale and exhale daily, and she seems to find that inexcusable.”
Laughing, Nick pressed the bar up to full extension. “Okay, but maybe you did something you don’t even know you did.”
Fletcher stood at Nick’s head, spotting him as he lifted. “I don’t know, man. Some people hate tomatoes. Some people hate curry. Savanna Deveraux hates me. Even though I’m obviously the human equivalent to tomatoes and curry.”
“Ice cream,” Nick grunted as he placed the bar in the bar holder.
“What?” Fletcher asked.
“When you do that analogy, you should be ice cream. Instead of tomatoes or curry. Everyone loves ice cream.” He reached for a towel and wiped it over his hair and face.
“Right. Okay. But I think the point is that I wouldn’t really care that Savanna hates me if we didn’t work together. I mean, if she worked anywhere else, she could hate me in her own space and life would carry on without any problem. But here, with her watching me like she’s trying to see if there’s anything she can report back to a friend…it’s creepy.”
Fletcher stopped talking, because as soon as he said those words, he realized that what he meant was that Savanna could report back to Hadley. They were obviously close. And with just an ounce of introspection, Fletcher realized he didn’t want Savanna to tell Hadley his flaws, whether they were real or figments of her overactive, vengeful imagination.
Nick stacked the weight plates in the corner, laughing about how Savanna seemed to hate them all, but for some reason, Fletcher the most. How maybe he reminded her of someone else. “She does seem like she’d happily contract a hit on you,” Nick admitted, “but she’d look gorgeous making that call.”
On Fletcher’s day off one Tuesday, he took his mom to her doctor’s appointment. He’d been with her at dialysis a couple of times, and he found the process fascinating. The fact that machines existed that could literally remove her blood, clean it, and put it back into her body left his head spinning. He asked questions about the science of it, held his mom’s hand, and read her a book as she lay in the clinic’s bed.
Today, Rose Gates had other ideas.
“You’re not coming with me,” she told Fletcher.
He laughed at his mom and patted her shoulder. “Remember how this is why I came back to town?”
She playfully swatted his hand away. “You did not come back here to sit around and flirt with nurses in the dialysis clinic.”
He feigned offense. “How can you say such a thing?” he asked, his hand over his heart. “You’re the only wo
man for me.”
Rose raised her eyebrows. “That had better not be true.”
Fletcher’s shrug was only partly in jest. “Let’s just say that at this moment, you’re my best girl.”
Fletcher was not completely sure he heard her reply correctly, but he thought she’d said something like, ‘we’ll deal with that.’
Time for a subject change.
“If you really don’t want me to come to the clinic with you today, will you at least give me a few more things I can fix for you?” Her honey-do list was keeping his off-hours nights and weekends meaningful, if not actively busy. A lot can fall apart in a thirty-year-old house. She had managed to keep most things in working order since his dad had passed, but there were plenty of small projects that came to her mind as he continued to offer.
“Sure. How about replacing the chains on the porch swing? They’re starting to rust a little.”
“No problem. I’ll drive you to the clinic and then head over to Dawson’s and find new chains. What else?”
Rose shrugged. “Quite a few things have changed on that block of Main Street. Maybe you should wander around and see what’s new.”
When Fletcher escorted his mom into the clinic and saw her comfortably in a chair, he kissed her on the cheek and headed out the door.
The sounds and smells of Dawson’s Hardware took him back to his childhood as much as living in his mom’s basement did. He recognized the fresh-cut lumber scent mingling with paint fumes and engine smells from the repair center at the back of the store. He remembered being small enough that the shelves of tools and parts and bolts seemed to rise up into the sky. Now he could recognize that the whole effect might be a little shabby, but he was glad to be there, in a place he’d spent so much time when he was a kid.
He had no idea when he’d turned into an eighty-year-old man, but all this nostalgia fit him like a button-up sweater.
He bought a new chain for the porch swing, and wire and nails to hang up an IKEA print he had bought for his living space in the basement. The guy at the counter smiled and thanked him without asking any questions, which was a nice change from his usual interactions in Greensburg. There were a lot of people in town—old friends of his parents and parents of his old friends—who seemed to care what Fletcher was up to.
He tossed the chains in the bed of his truck and walked the block partially to see what was new in the neighborhood, but mostly because his mom had told him to, and he was just no good at all at disappointing his mom.
There was a new Mexican restaurant, and he wondered as he always did how their guacamole was. For a guy who didn’t like guacamole, he spent a fair amount of time thinking about how different Mexican places’ guacamole ranked on a scale from “fine” to “outstanding.”
It was a holdover from the years he dated Hadley. They had eaten uncountable numbers of tacos in those years. And she was somehow rendered unable to eat a taco without an order of chips and guacamole.
He humored her for a few months, but finally he had to ask her why she insisted on eating something that looked like it was delivered from the back end of a goat.
She’d gasped. “Take it back. You can’t mean that.”
“Oh, I can mean that, all right.” He loved the way her eyes crinkled when she was trying not to smile at him.
“You’re a monster,” she said, looking at him as though she’d never seen him before. They were on school lunch break, and they had to be back at Hilltop High before Mr. Reynolds’s English class started. “Everything those other girls said about you was true. This is so disappointing.”
She’d shaken her head and scooped a blob of guacamole into her mouth by way of a chip that was no more than a vehicle. With small noises of appreciation that made him want to kiss her, she completely ignored him and focused on her slimy green food.
He could not take his eyes off her mouth back then.
And somehow the idea of finding a perfect guacamole had never quite left him. He smiled at the memories of the good years. And they had been good.
But none of that lasted.
He shook off thoughts of Mexican food and kissing Hadley’s perfect mouth and pushed open the front door of a bookshop he’d never seen before. Maybe this was where Hadley was working. The window display held a huge cardboard tree, and the piles of books artfully stacked around it evoked fallen leaves in shades of gold, brown, and red leather. Hand-lettering on the glass invited passers-by to “Fall in Love with an Old Favorite.”
Well that was a coincidence, he thought.
Fletcher walked inside accompanied by the sound of a cowbell. A high-school-aged girl looked up, gave a half-hearted wave, and refocused her attention on the box in front of her.
Looking around, Fletcher saw a dozen danger signs. He knew this building; it had been here forever as one thing or another, and so he knew it had a second exit door at the back, but in an emergency, nobody would be able to get to it. The shelving units weren’t actually teetering, but he wondered how stable they were, plus they were much too close together. Not to mention the fire hazard of so many old books. If someone so much as wore a wool sweater in here, the sparks from the static could take the place down.
Not that he couldn’t see its charms. It looked like the kind of place his mom would shop at with its knick-knacks and eclectic offerings. He loved a bookstore as much as the next guy. More, maybe. In the five years he had been fighting fires in the Rocky Mountains, his mom had sent him a book every couple of months. He’d created a library in the BLM barracks with those books. That little library had been a refuge for him. There was always plenty of work to do, and in some seasons, he barely had time to sleep between calls to work the forest fires but knowing that those books waited for him gave him something other than destruction to focus on.
He wandered through the shop, looking up at tilting shelves crammed with old paperbacks, antique magazines stuffed into wooden apple crates, and around a corner to the children’s section, where new books stood side by side with stories he’d loved as a kid. It was charming. And the wiring behind the shelves looked ancient. Big trouble.
Fletcher bent down to inspect an electrical outlet on the wall next to an overstuffed chair. As he was folded over, he heard a quiet voice, inviting but not intruding. “Help you find anything?” He stood, turning, his head full of the dangers of the little shop, and found himself face to face with Hadley.
Again.
So this was where she worked.
As soon as she saw it was him, the smile slid off her face, and without waiting for his reply, she turned and walked away.
“Hadley, wait.”
She stopped walking but did not turn back to face him.
“Who’s in charge here?” he asked. His voice sounded sterner than he’d meant it to, and louder.
“You’re looking at her,” she said.
“You’re the manager?” he asked, aware that he sounded surprised. He tried to cover. “Cool.”
She nodded, then shook her head. “Owner, manager, bookkeeper, custodian, maintenance crew, you name it.”
“This is yours?” he asked. His voice had taken his surprise and turned it to shock. He hesitated. Hadley’s role as bookshop owner made his mission slightly more complicated. She wasn’t going to like what he had to say, but she was going to like it even less because it was him saying it. Still, fire safety was his job. He couldn’t say nothing just because he didn’t want to make his ex-girlfriend uncomfortable.
“Hadley, this place is a disaster waiting to happen. You can’t have wooden crates full of paperback books that close to a radiator. And your light fixtures look like they’re ready to blow.”
Her face held just about every negative reaction.
She must not have understood him. He went on. “Your wiring must be close to a hundred years old, and there are no sprinklers in the ceiling. Do you even have extinguishers? Because I can’t see one. The aisles are way too crowded and close together. And I can’t even imag
ine what you’ve got going on behind those walls,” he said, pointing to the left.
“No,” she said. “You can’t.” With a forced smile and a brittle sound in her voice, she added, “Make yourself comfortable,” and stepped around a shelf that hid everything but her hair. He watched her stand there, her back to him, and tug at her red curls the way she always had when she was feeling overwhelmed.
Well, of course she felt that way. There was so much to rebuild and repair.
It wasn’t his fault. He was only the messenger. Anyone who knew what he knew would have delivered the same message.
Didn’t she know he was only trying to help?
He could fix this. He could make it right and bring everything up to standards.
He followed her around the shelf and saw that she stood there with her back against a stack of books, eyes closed and mouthing words to herself without making a sound. Her hands tugged at her hair until she threatened to do some actual damage.
Fletcher reached out and touched her elbow.
“Hadley?” he said, his voice quiet. “You okay?”
She dropped her arms to her side and straightened up, putting on a polite if disinterested face. “Are you really asking me that? I’m fine.”
She appeared less than fine when she bumped a shelf with her elbow and a stack of books came crashing down to the floor, burying her feet and ankles in a pile of paperbacks.
The Hadley he had known years ago might have reacted to that moment with a maniacal laugh, as though she wanted to take credit for the small act of destruction by the power of her will; like she could knock things down by merely thinking about it. Her laugh might have turned to a fit of uncontrollable giggles, something that became a recurring event during college. Or she might mutter curses under her breath. He had learned enough to wait for her response before allowing himself to show any reaction.
He simply waited, saying nothing, withholding any change in his expression. For a sliver of a moment, her face released its mask of cold politeness. She didn’t look angry. She didn’t look annoyed. Her expression softened for a breath of vulnerability. For the first time in many years, Fletcher saw Hadley exposed in a way she never allowed herself to be and his heart pounded in response.
Always You: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Collection Books 5-8) Page 22