Just Fine with Caroline

by Annie England Noblin

  “I need my knitting,” Maureen said, sitting down in the front seat. “Let’s get a move on it. Those taters aren’t gonna cook themselves.”

  Ava Dawn looked over the hood of the car at Caroline, who could only shrug and grin. Some days were better than others, and some days there was nothing else a body could do but laugh when things were funny.

  CHAPTER 9

  CAROLINE WATCHED NOAH INSIDE HIS SHOP. He was pacing back and forth in front of the windows. She knew she ought to go back inside her own shop and mind her own business, but she found herself walking over to him, anyway.

  She knocked on the door. “Noah? Can I come in?”

  Noah looked up, seemingly startled by the disturbance. “Sure,” he mumbled, continuing to pace.

  “Hey, uh . . .” Caroline searched for her words. “I’d like to look at the rest of those pictures.”

  But Noah was already gathering the pictures up and stuffing them down into his jeans pockets. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “Oh, okay,” Caroline replied. It stung a little. He’d been so friendly and eager before. “I’ll just see you later.” She turned and headed for the door. When she got there, she stopped, turned back around, and said, “Hey, can I ask you something?”

  “Uh, sure,” Noah said, not looking up.

  “I saw your grandfather outside with you a bit ago . . .” Caroline paused. She knew she’d told Ava Dawn it wasn’t their business what the two men had been discussing, but she wanted to know. At that moment, she had to know. “Were you two talking about me?”

  “What?”

  “I saw your grandfather point at the shop is all,” Caroline said with a shrug, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “I forgot that people have eyes in the backs of their heads in these little towns,” Noah replied.

  “I wasn’t spying on you.” Caroline was indignant. “You’re right across the street from me. I can see you from my window.”

  “Well, we weren’t talking about you,” Noah said. His tone was curt. “If you must know, I need a new roof, and my grandfather wants me to hire three of my cousins to do it.”

  “Okay,” Caroline replied. She wasn’t sure if she believed him. “What’s the problem with that?”

  “For one, they’re my cousins.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t want to hire relatives,” Noah said as if Caroline had asked a ridiculous question. “It’s not good business.”

  “This business is family,” Caroline replied. “It’s Cranwell Station.”

  “And family ran it into the ground,” Noah spat. “I’m not going to let that happen again.”

  Caroline took a step back. “So if you’re not hiring your cousins, who are you going to hire?”

  Noah shrugged. “I don’t know, and I don’t care as long as I don’t share a last name with them.”

  “Come on.” Caroline motioned for Noah to follow her. “I know a guy.”

  “You know a guy?”

  “Yeah,” Caroline replied. “I can take you into town to meet him if you want. It won’t hurt to close down the shop for a couple of hours.”

  “You don’t mind doing that?” Noah asked. He looked skeptical. “I don’t want you to lose out on any business.”

  Caroline rolled her eyes. “Is business all you think about?”

  Noah grinned, his dark eyes dancing. “Not the only thing.”

  Caroline felt her cheeks redden. “Come on, I’ll drive.” She turned and headed out of the store. Despite what she had said to Noah about closing down the shop, it wasn’t something that she normally did. She probably would miss out on a few sales, but the fishing-pole-stealing yuppies from earlier had been enough for one day. Maybe he had been telling the truth about needing a new roof. It did look pretty patchy now that she thought about it.

  “I thought you drove a truck,” Noah said when they neared the Jeep. “I mean, I can usually hear it clear in the back of the station, it’s so loud.”

  “I do,” Caroline replied. “But it doesn’t have air-conditioning, and I didn’t want my mom to get hot.”

  “You drive that thing every day without air-conditioning?”

  “The windows do roll down,” Caroline replied. “But admittedly, she does need some work.”

  “Some?”

  “The engine is solid.”

  “You know a lot about cars?” Noah asked. He was smiling at her, as if he was genuinely interested and not skeptical that a woman might know how to fix an oil leak or a blown head gasket.

  “A little.” Caroline shrugged. “I keep it up enough to get me from place to place, but that’s about it. It was my brother’s.”

  “Why doesn’t he help you keep it up now?” Noah asked.

  Caroline took a deep breath and let the air rush back out of her before she said, “He’s dead.”

  Noah’s eyes widened, and he looked down at the dirt. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was a long time ago,” Caroline replied. “It was before I was even born.”

  Noah cleared his throat, avoiding eye contact with Caroline. “Okay, so who are we going to meet?” He slid into the passenger’s seat.

  “His name is Smokey.”

  “Smokey?” Noah asked. “The roofer’s name is Smokey?”

  “I think it’s more of a nickname than an actual name,” Caroline replied.

  “What’s his actual name?”

  “Beats the hell outta me.”

  “You’re telling me you want me to hire someone whose real name you don’t even know?”

  Caroline took her eyes off the road long enough to catch Noah’s eye. “Well, it ain’t Cranwell.”

  The Jeep went silent. Noah was staring out the window, almost as if he was in some far-off thinking spot in the back of his mind. Caroline couldn’t tell what he was looking at. All she saw were hills and trees. The same scenery on repeat every day of her life. She wondered if he was bored seeing the same thing every day, especially since he’d spent so much time traveling around. How could somebody like him be happy in a place like this?

  “So this is what you do?” Noah asked. “Run the bait shop for your family?”

  Caroline couldn’t tell if he was just curious or if he felt sorry for her. “My parents are getting older. My mom was forty-two when she had me.” Caroline curled her fingers around the steering wheel as they rounded a curve. “They needed my help, because of my mom’s, you know, illness.”

  “I was five when we left,” Noah said. He was still looking out the window. “My mother and me.”

  “And that’s when you moved to New Jersey?”

  “First we lived in New York State for a while. My mom married a mechanic. Then after they divorced, she moved me and my two younger sisters to New Jersey to live with family.”

  “You have sisters?”

  “I do.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Lenore is twenty-two and Claire is twenty.”

  “Do they live in New Jersey, too?”

  “No,” Noah replied. “I haven’t seen them in a long time. They went back to New York with their dad a year after we moved to New Jersey.”

  “Didn’t they come visit?” Caroline wanted to know. “Didn’t you go visit them?” She couldn’t imagine having a sibling and not seeing them. Even though she’d never gotten to meet her brother, his presence was all over her house. In pictures and in the things of Jeremy’s her parents kept.

  “No.”

  “And you didn’t get to visit them?”

  “No.”

  Caroline waited for him to continue, but Noah didn’t offer any more explanation, and something told Caroline not to push the issue. He wasn’t looking at her and he wasn’t looking out the window. Instead, he was looking down at his hands, his jaw muscle clenching and releasing with each bump on the road. It was easy to believe he’d been in the military. Everything about his exterior looked hard, from the square jaw to the thick neck muscles bulgi
ng beneath his T-shirt, all the way down to the way his hands rested on his jeans, everything was crisp, starched, and at attention. There were no soft lines.

  Except, Caroline thought, for his eyes. There was softness in his eyes that appeared when he talked about the siblings he never saw, and it had been there the first time he bent down to scratch Yara behind the ears. She doubted he wanted anyone to see it.

  “My brother, Jeremy, was eighteen years older than me. I never got to know him,” Caroline blurted. She wasn’t sure why she was telling him this, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I always wished for more family. It’s always just been me and my mom and dad and my cousin Ava Dawn. Everybody else has moved away or died, and my mom, well, she’s still around, but she’s not at the same time, you know?”

  Noah was looking at her now.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I told you that,” Caroline added. “It’s not usually a conversation I like to have with strangers. ‘Hey, my name’s Caroline. I have a dead brother; my mom has Alzheimer’s. My family is basically broken. Nice to meet you.’”

  “Do you just say everything that pops into your head?” Noah asked finally.

  “Lord, no. I’d be in prison if I said half the things that cross my mind. Besides,” Caroline continued, “most everybody around here knows my family dynamics. I don’t have cause to talk about it much.”

  “Well, if it makes you feel any better, most families are basically broken.” Noah gave her a smile, the tiny lines around his eyes crinkling.

  It didn’t make Caroline feel better, but she smiled anyway.

  THE TOWN SQUARE had once been the heart and soul of Cold River, a place where beauty and commerce came together in a way most people would call charming. Through the years business had grown up and away from the courthouse, but the townspeople worked hard to keep the square thriving. It had been the place where Caroline’s grandparents opened the shoe repair shop, and although the family business was replaced with a restaurant called Sissy’s in the ’80s, the owners had kept the original hardwood floors and every time Caroline went inside she was reminded of her grandparents and the hours they must have spent repairing the shoes people wore all over town.

  Just like the shoe store, most of the old businesses had been replaced, but the buildings were there, and once a month, the shops hosted a Stroll Around the Square, staying open later in the evenings so that families could mill around downtown with their children.

  Caroline drove around to the back parking lot of the Cold River Bank and Trust, parking as close to the bank’s alleyway as she could. “You can just sit here if you want to. I’ll be right back.”

  “The roofer works at the bank?” Noah asked, sliding out of the passenger’s seat. He followed Caroline to a steep set of steps on the opposite side of the alley.

  “What?” Caroline replied. “Oh, no, not at the bank.” She pointed down the steps. “He’s at the bar beneath the bank.”

  “The bank has a bar?”

  “The bank doesn’t own the whole building.”

  “So the guy you say can put a roof on my station is at the bar?”

  “Yup.”

  “At 11 A.M.?”

  Caroline sighed and placed her hands on her hips. “You got any more questions for me, or can we go get this over with?”

  Noah shrugged, shoving his hands down into his jeans pockets. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Caroline bounded down the steps, taking them two at a time. Just above the entryway, a faded sign read, “Mama’s.” When Caroline opened the door, she and Noah were greeted with a gust of stale air.

  It took Caroline a minute for her eyes to adjust to the dim lighting, but it didn’t take long for her to zero in on Smokey. He was sitting with a group of three other men at a table full of empty beer cans and cigarette butts. They were the only ones there taking up the biggest table in the middle of the bar. They had the run of the place, and they liked it that way.

  When Smokey saw her, he stood up, wobbled slightly, and then crashed back down into his chair. “Carolina!” he rasped, his voice barely audible above the jukebox warble. “Carolina, what are you doin’ here, girl?”

  “Looking for you,” Caroline hollered. “I’ve got a job for you.”

  “What needs doin’?”

  “A roof.”

  Smokey nodded, then for a second his eyes drooped and he appeared to be asleep. When he opened them again a few seconds later, he said, “You need a roof where? The shop or the house? Didn’t I just put a new roof on that shop last spring?”

  “You sure did.” It never ceased to amaze her how well Smokey could carry on a conversation even when he was drunk as a skunk. “It’s not for me,” she said. “It’s for a friend.”

  “Who?”

  Caroline turned around to find that Noah was no longer beside her. He was standing at the bar, talking to the surly woman behind it. To Caroline’s surprise, the woman, also known as Big Mama, was smiling. Big Mama never smiled. “Noah!”

  Noah turned around and waved.

  “Get on up,” Caroline ordered Smokey. “Let’s get out of here and get you something to eat.”

  “Aw, come on now, Carolina, just one more drink?”

  “Absolutely not.” Caroline crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you want this job or not?”

  “You know I do,” Smokey replied. He stood on wobbly legs. “Let me pay my tab.”

  “You ain’t never paid nothin’!” Big Mama hollered from her position behind the bar. “Don’t pretend like yer gonna start today!”

  Caroline handed Smokey off to Noah, who looked both terrified and amused by what was taking place. Then she placed a twenty dollar bill into Big Mama’s beefy palm. “Will this at least cover today?”

  Big Mama snorted, which made her sound so much like Yara that Caroline almost laughed. “I reckon this’ll do,” the woman replied. “Bring that one back next time,” she nodded over at Noah, “and drinks are on the house.”

  Caroline fought the urge to laugh as she and Noah led Smokey silently up the steps and out to the Jeep. She pulled the tailgate down and ordered Smokey to “get in.”

  “I ain’t fit to start a job today,” Smokey protested.

  “Don’t worry,” Caroline replied. “I’m just taking you to the clinic. My dad will get you all fixed up. You don’t have to worry about startin’ a job until tomorrow.”

  Smokey mumbled a response, but neither Caroline nor Noah could understand what it was since he was lying down, belly first, his face planted into the backseat of the Jeep.

  “This is the guy you think I’m going to hire to finish my roof?” Noah asked, his tone incredulous.

  “He’ll be fine once he sobers up,” Caroline said. “He’s the best roofer in three counties.”

  “Somehow I doubt that.”

  “It’s true. I wouldn’t be wasting my time dragging his drunk ass out of a bar before noon if it wasn’t,” Caroline replied. She motioned for Noah to get into the Jeep. “He’ll do you right or I’ll pay for the next roofer myself.”

  “Is he going to be okay flopping around in the back like that?” Noah turned around to stare at Smokey who was still facedown. “He looks like a fish that jumped out of his bowl.”

  “We aren’t going far, he’ll be fine,” Caroline said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “My dad’s working down at the free clinic today. He’ll keep an eye on him until he sobers up enough to go home.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Yeah, my dad,” Caroline replied. “He’s a doctor. Well, he’s retired now, but he volunteers down at the clinic a few days a week.”

  “So I’m going to meet your dad?”

  “Yes?” Caroline gave him an odd look. “Is that okay?”

  “I guess,” Noah replied. “I just hadn’t planned on meeting him today, that’s all.”

  “Well, he’s not going to bite your head off or anything,” Caroline said. “He’s a nice guy.”

 
“Is this something you do a lot?” Noah wanted to know.

  “Is what something I do a lot?”

  “This.” Noah waved his arms around the Jeep.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Fine, this is totally normal behavior,” Noah replied.

  “It is when the town drunk is also the best roofer in three counties.” Caroline pulled into a small strip mall two blocks away from the bar. She parked in front of a door that read “Cold River Christian Clinic. Walk-ins Welcome.”

  “This is it?” Noah wanted to know.

  “This is it.” Caroline flung the Jeep into park, and Smokey hit the back of the seat with a muted thud. “Help me get Smokey out of the back.”

  Noah obliged, pulling open the side door and helping the man out of the back. “You alright, man?” he asked.

  Smokey’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and then he attempted to focus on Noah. He staggered into him and half whispered and half yelled, “Sometimes I think that girl is tryin’ to kill me.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it once or twice,” Caroline replied before Noah could speak. “Now put one arm around me and one arm around Mr. Cranwell, here, and let’s try to get inside without causing a scene.”

  “Not likely,” Noah said under his breath. He pulled open the door to the clinic with his free hand. “See? They’re all staring at us.”

  Caroline scanned the waiting room. She knew every person sitting there except for an older man in a pair of camouflage overalls. “They’re not staring at us,” she said. “They’re staring at you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they don’t know you,” she replied. She sat Smokey down in one of the orange plastic chairs. “Sit down; I’ll tell Jolene we’re here.”

  Jolene Simpson was awful pretty, and as her father would say, there wasn’t a mean bone in her body. Her perfect petal of a mouth was almost constantly smiling, and absolutely everything about her was perky from her hair down to her feet. Caroline often wondered how she got along with all the rough-and-tumble people who came into the clinic—the roughnecks without insurance, the newly turned out convicts with staph infections, the asthmatic children whose parents smoked with the windows up the whole way there—but she figured that since Jolene had been employed there since the day she graduated from high school, it was working out pretty well. She had a lot of respect for Jolene. “Hey, Caroline,” Jolene said when Caroline stepped up to the reception desk. “I already ran back and told your daddy that you’re here. He says to bring him on back.”