Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
“Okay, Winnie, you can do this,” Winnie muttered to herself, hoping that positive self-talk would help where things like pacing, bouncing her knee up and down, and staring at her computer screen until her eyes went blurry had failed. “Ideas. Ideas. You have good ideas.”
Alas, encouraging words were destined for the fail pile along with the many other things she’d tried.
She glanced out the window. It was bright and sunny outside today in that quintessentially autumnal way, all golden light filtering gently through orange and red leaves. The aggressive bluster of the last few days of the week had gentled into a soft breeze.
It was like something out of a movie. Winnie would have to be a fool to miss out on this kind of weather. Goodness knew that there were too few days of it before the frigid bite of winter started to settle in.
Not to mention it was lunchtime. Nobody ever had good ideas on an empty stomach.
With this in mind, she grabbed her lightweight trench coat, a garment she loved and which she had, quite honestly, spent far too much money on, given how short a period she got to use it each year.
It was a gorgeous camel brown though, and when Winnie wore it, she felt like the heroine in a Nora Ephron movie, even if she had only been to New York City a handful of times in her life.
She paired it with her red plaid scarf and began the short walk over to Anchor Bistro, not bothering to hurry.
She sucked in a lungful of the crisp autumn air.
This was the best part of living in New England, in Winnie’s opinion. She hadn’t lived anywhere else, but she’d visited other places in the fall, and they had always made her glad she made her home in Massachusetts.
She opted to take the long route. She was still thinking about the fundraising conundrum, so this technically still counted as working.
This route took her through a residential neighborhood, and as she strolled along the sidewalk, leaves dancing around her feet as the wind carried them, she noticed a large flatbed truck that was half filled with…
Well, it didn’t seem nice to call what was clearly someone’s possessions junk, but yeah. It was junk.
As she got a little closer, she realized that she recognized the guy loading things into the truck. Garrett, Eleanor’s boyfriend, from the hardware store. A few paces closer and she noticed that she knew the homeowner too.
“Miriam, hi,” she called out to Miriam Landers, the oldest member of the book club, who was standing on her porch, looking conflicted.
When Winnie had first joined the book club, Miriam had been the person who had intimidated Winnie the most. Miriam suffered no fools and she spoke her mind.
But that same quality reassured Winnie now, because she knew that whenever Miriam was friendly, it was because the older woman wanted to be, not because she was trying to be polite or because she felt obligated.
Winnie wouldn’t have said that they were close, not necessarily, but she felt as though she understood the woman’s motives. Miriam did what she wanted. That was a huge relief to Winnie.
All of this made Winnie feel brave enough, when Miriam offered her a small smile and a wave, to approach the porch.
“Everything okay, Miriam?” she asked when the older woman’s face immediately fell back into something that held a hint of sadness to it.
It felt a little scary, even reaching out so minorly like this, but Winnie reminded herself that fortune favored the bold.
And besides, she couldn’t expect to build a community for herself if she didn’t make overtures, right?
“Oh, yes, everything is fine,” Miriam said, flapping a hand. “I’m just… having a little feelings moment, I suppose.”
Winnie looked over at the truck as Garrett loaded in what seemed to be a broken easel.
“Having to do with spring cleaning?” she asked. “Or, autumn cleaning, I guess?”
Miriam’s expression grew a little lighter at Winnie’s quip, and Winnie felt very proud of herself, indeed.
“Yeah, exactly,” Miriam said. “I was just going through my attic, and you would not believe the kind of nonsense that accumulates in a place when you’ve lived there for thirty years.”
Winnie grimaced playfully. “I’m a historian, which is sometimes just a fancy term for pack rat,” she confessed.
“I can absolutely believe that you could accumulate a lot of nonsense in a few decades. I’ve only been in my house maybe four years now and I need to spring clean every year, or else it gets chaotic in there.
It’s what I get for getting a little crazy at estate sales. ”
Miriam arched an eyebrow at Winnie. “Okay, we will be revisiting that, because I too, love an estate sale,” she said. “But I’m going to pretend that I’m not going to get new stuff while I’m literally still in the process of getting rid of the old.”
Winnie felt a spark of excitement at discovering that her bravery was being rewarded with the suggestion that she and Miriam might go to estate sales together sometime. This encouraged her to probe, very gently, a little further.
“Well, it does look as though you got rid of quite a lot,” she said. “That’s something to be proud of.”
Miriam sighed. “Yes, I suppose so. I just… well, you’re young, so it’s hard to explain that it feels rather tragic when I do things and find that they take me so much longer than they used to.
And I’m still cross at myself for needing to call Garrett to haul it all away, although goodness knows he was a dear about it. ”
“As if Eleanor would ever allow him to be anything but,” Winnie quipped.
Then she laid a hand gently on Miriam’s arm.
“And you’re right that I don’t know what it’s like to be your age, but I will say, youth or no, I wouldn’t have been able to haul this all away by myself.
It’s way too much for one person… unless that one person is a burly hardware store owner, I guess,” she added as she watched Garrett haul a pile of…
something that looked heavy. Old paint tarps, maybe?
“And worse,” Winnie went on, “is that I would have totally dragged my feet about calling someone to help, which meant that I probably would have just stuck it in a pile in my attic for ages before swallowing my pride and giving in.”
Miriam cut her a sidelong glance. “Oh, you know that’s exactly what I did, you little pest,” she said, but the insult was so full of teasing affection that Winnie found that it felt a great deal more like a compliment.
She laughed.
“Fine, fine. That still means we’re birds of a feather, though. It’s not age that makes the difference,” she pointed out.
“You’re a good egg, Winnie Burnett,” Miriam said warmly, placing her hand atop Winnie’s for a moment.
Winnie paused. “I’m sorry, was that a pun on birds of a feather?” she asked as Miriam chortled with delight. “That was terrible.”
“I couldn’t resist,” Miriam admitted.
They stepped to the side of the porch as Garrett, who gave them both a quick nod of recognition but said nothing more, came through with another load of stuff piled onto a handcart. Winnie gave it an absentminded glance, then did a double take.
“Wait a minute,” she said, reaching for the pale wood that was shoved on the bottom of the cart. “Is this a cornhole set?”
“Hm?” Miriam peered in the direction that Winnie was pointing.
“Oh… yes, I think that’s what that game is called.
The thing where you throw the bean bags or the little balls through the hole?
My gosh, I can’t even think how long those have been up there.
Those belonged to Harold, my late husband, and he’s been gone more than ten years now.
And I think he used those several years before he passed too, for some sort of team-building thing at work. ”
Some ideas were starting to click into place in the back of Winnie’s mind. They weren’t fully formed, not yet, but something was moving, making progress…
“Can I have these?” she asked Miriam impulsively. “I mean, I can buy them off you, if you’d like.”
Miriam scoffed, waving away the offer. “Oh, pish posh. I was going to get Garrett to haul this all down to the dump. Honey, if you want them, they’re all yours. I’m not sure they’re in the best condition, though. Like I said, they’ve just been hanging out up in my attic for at least a decade.”
“That’s okay,” Winnie said, her mind racing. “I still want them. I’ll just have to…” She thought, considering. “Okay, let me race back to work, and I’ll grab my car. Do you mind if I leave them here for, I don’t know, half an hour?”
“I can drop them off at your house, Winnie,” Garrett said, startling Winnie, as she hadn’t realized that he’d been listening to their conversation.
“You don’t mind?” Winnie asked. “I mean, that would be amazing, but I don’t want to put you out.”
He shrugged. “No big deal.” Then, he shot her a quick grin, and though Garrett Wilder wasn’t at all her type, Winnie could briefly see what Eleanor saw in the gruff, bearded man.
“Plus, it gives me a good chance to earn some brownie points with Eleanor. I’ll get to go brag about how I was nice to two of her friends in one day. ”
Winnie felt flushed with happiness, both about the idea that was unfolding in her mind and about the casual reference to herself as one of Eleanor’s friends.
“Well, if it’s really not too much of a bother,” she hedged.
“Not at all,” he reassured her. “I’ll stick’em next to your garage.”
“Thank you,” she said emphatically. “That’s a huge help. Like, huge. You have no idea.”
Garrett shrugged, having apparently used up as much conversation as he was willing to share.
Miriam looked over at Winnie, a puzzled frown on her face, although she looked overall more cheerful than she had when Winnie had arrived, as though this development was an interesting distraction from her worries.
“What are you going to do with those old cornhole boards?” she asked.
Winnie, riding high on her success, gave the older woman a mischievous grin.
“I’m still working it out,” she admitted. “But when I know, you’ll know.”
Miriam gave her a faux-outraged look.
“You’re keeping secrets, little lady!” she accused as Winnie skipped down the steps of the porch and prepared to head back in the direction of work.
She’d order lunch to be delivered, since she didn’t have time to take a long walk over to Anchor Bistro anymore.
Not when her mind was buzzing, not when she felt that she might finally be starting to think of something that could work, could get the whole community invested in local history.
“Sure am!” she told Miriam cheerfully. “Stay tuned!”
Even from her distance halfway down the block, Winnie could see Miriam shaking her head… but she could see that Miriam was smiling too. Winnie’s own smile felt broad and joyous on her face.
Maybe this whole business about enhancing historical society events wouldn’t be such a disaster after all. Maybe she could manage to build something she could be proud of, something that would really show Magnolia Shore that she was so proud to be a member of this wonderful little town.