Chapter 17
While I was coming to really like Morgan, I was fighting a growing impatience during each of my bakery shifts. The freedom of the sugar shack made the rigidity of the procedures at Keller’s feel like handcuffs.
I watched the clock like a student watching for the end-of-school bell, removing my hairnet and my apron once it was two minutes past the hour so I didn’t seem too overeager.
“Bye, Morgan,” I said, coming out from behind the counter at the end of my shift on Saturday.
“See you tomorrow!” She waved.
I halted. “I’m actually off tomorrow.”
She blinked. “Oh, right! I’d forgotten—but that reminds me…” She hurried over to a drawer near the register and opened it, pulling out a paper. “Mom and I reconfigured the schedule a bit for the week of the Harvest Festival.” She handed it across the counter to me.
“Oh.” I took it with a little stab of anxiety in the pit of my stomach.
“I finally convinced Mom the bakery should have a booth at the fair,” she said, clearly thinking I’d be pleased with this success.
I glanced over the new schedule for the week, anxiety settling in. It was set up to show who would be covering the morning and afternoon at the bakery and who would be running the booth at the festival. My reduced hours had been unreduced.
I would be covering the booth.
“Does it look okay?” Morgan asked.
“Um, yeah,” I said. “It’s just…” I hesitated. The bakery was my job. My actual employer. What I was doing at Carver Farm was essentially moonlighting and needed to take a backseat to it.
“I hadn’t realized Mom reduced your hours with my arrival in town,” she said. “I figured this would help you—and provide some extra income for the bakery. Win-win.”
“It’s really nice of you,” I said, my stomach twisting.
Was there a way I could make it work helping at both booths?
I needed to sit with the new schedule and think through things.
May insisted she’d help woman the booth, as she called it, but neither James nor I was sure she’d be able to.
She wasn’t supposed to stand for too long, and getting up and down from a seat to help customers constantly would be even worse.
“Looks great,” I said, taking a picture of it with my phone.
I’d figure something out.
There was no sign of James when I reached the maple farm in the truck (with just one stall en route, by the way.) I’d kind of hoped he’d be there to witness my triumphant arrival after yesterday’s lessons, but he was probably on a tour.
I only had a couple of hours before my—apparently strict—sixteen-hour break was supposed to begin.
I still wasn’t quite satisfied with my maple blondies, but I wasn’t sure how to fix that.
Maybe I was trying too hard to set them apart.
A solid, classic maple blondie was nothing to sneer at, right?
Wade had given his official stamp of approval by eating two and stealing three more to “take to coworkers” at the school. He probably meant Ari.
I looked over the product on our displays and in the small fridge in the sugar shack and decided to whip up a batch of cookies, which were selling more quickly than the cream puffs, probably because they kept better.
We’d be welcoming our first Horseshoe Holler trail group on Monday, so I would come back after my break tomorrow to be sure we had enough pastries on hand, then drop some by the inn and candle shop.
It was getting dark by the time I pulled the cookies out of the oven, and still, there was no sign of James. I shrugged off my competing curiosity and a slight sense of neglect. Not a day had gone by without him at least dropping in to check on me and see if he was needed for any taste testing.
A thought flashed across my mind, making my lungs clench.
He’d been different after the hardware store yesterday. He’d tried to make conversation, but I wasn’t fooled. The playfulness I’d enjoyed during the driving lesson and its follow-up had been gone.
Had the interaction with the Rigbys bothered him enough to make him leave?
I picked up my phone and typed Where are you? only to erase it.
He was a grown man, and he certainly didn’t answer to me.
Instead, I went for something a little less aggressive.
Sadie
Guess my break supervisor decided I was trustworthy after all
I waited for any sign of a message being typed back, then set down my phone when there wasn’t.
Maybe I should go up to the house and see May—not just because I was wondering about James. I loved May in her own right. But if James had left, that would change a lot.
Everything, even.
The thought made me a little sick, resurrecting a hint of the angst I’d nearly drowned in during my teenage years.
The door opened, and I whirled around.
“Reporting for duty.” James shrugged off his jacket.
I put a hand to my chest and let out a breathy, relieved laugh. “You scared me.”
“Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t look particularly sorry.
He looked better than when I’d left him yesterday, and it wasn’t just the way his sleeves hugged his arms. There was no frown on his brow. In fact, he looked…excited? And he smelled like campfire.
I suppressed the desire to ask him where he’d been. “So, what now?” I hung a hand towel on the oven handle and turned to him. “I sit here and stare at the wall for sixteen hours while you monitor me?”
“Is that what you want to do for your break?”
I looked at the wall. I wasn’t sure it could hold my attention for sixteen seconds, much less sixteen hours. “Not particularly.”
“Are you hungry?”
My pulse skittered. Was he about to ask me out? Was a supervised meal considered a date?
I didn’t think so.
Either way, I knew my answer. “Yeah…” I said, as if I was wary of what he had in mind rather than happy it would involve him.
The thought of sitting in my apartment for the next sixteen hours didn’t particularly appeal to me.
“Good. Come with me.” Slinging his jacket over his shoulder, he pushed open the door he’d just come through, then used his body to keep it open.
I shot him a glance as I passed, but he looked enigmatic as ever.
It was fully dark out now, and he clicked on a flashlight as he closed the door.
I waited for him to lead the way, and the beam illuminated the path ahead. It skipped past the way to the house, though, and lit up the path that led deeper into the trees. It was littered with leaves, but they padded our footsteps rather than crunching. They weren’t dry enough for that yet.
Especially after the oven-warmed sugar shack, the evening air was sharp with an autumn chill, and the vast darkness that encompassed everything around us made my skin prickle with anticipation.
Where was he leading us?
“I hope the batteries in that flashlight are fresh,” I joked.
James glanced at the flashlight, making its beam shift suddenly. “I found it in the old storage room.”
My eyes widened, and I looked up at him. “Seriously?”
He smiled. He seemed to be in a teasing mood, which made me feel a bit breathless.
“How’s your mom doing?” I asked.
“Pretty well. Always trying to do too much, but tonight she’s having virtual dinner with my aunt—Archer’s mom.”
“Virtual dinner?”
He pushed a branch out of the way, holding it back until I’d cleared it. “They eat what they made while they chat over video.”
I smiled at the thought. “You think she’ll really be up for helping at the festival?”
“Absolutely. Whether she should is the question. But short of physical restraints, there’s no way to stop Mama when she fixes on a plan.”
“She’s a tough woman.”
“She is,” he said, his voice a bit softer.
I stole a glance at him. James’s relationship with his mom was one of the most attractive things about him in a list that was getting longer and longer—impressive when you considered that I’d made an actual bullet-pointed list of his best qualities my freshman year of high school.
“I just found out the bakery decided to do a festival booth,” I said. “Something I’ve been suggesting for years.”
“They finally listened.”
I gave a short laugh. “Oh, it had nothing to do with me. In Mrs. Keller’s mind, I’m still a brace-faced sixteen-year-old.
She only agreed because Morgan suggested it.
Anyway, I don’t even care about that at this point.
The problem is that it complicates our plans.
They scheduled me to run the bakery booth.
” I’d been thinking I’d try to make it work to do both, but walking here with James made me realize how little I wanted to do that.
I wanted to sell the stuff I’d made. “I’m thinking of telling them I can’t. ”
“Don’t do that.”
“But I committed to our booth first.”
“The bakery pays your bills, Sadie. Don’t worry about it. We’ll make it work. I can take over at our booth.”
I thought of James as the face of the Carver Maple Farm booth and wondered how he felt about that, especially if he’d experience more of what had happened in the hardware store.
I hated that thought.
Beyond that, the farm booth was where I wanted to be. Festival week would be the culmination of what I’d been working toward.
But James was right. I couldn’t afford to antagonize Morgan or Mrs. Keller if there was an alternative solution. Morgan seemed to appreciate my value more than her mom did, which meant my future at Keller’s might not be in as much jeopardy as I’d thought.
That could easily change if I did something to show I cared more about my little side project than about the bakery.
“I don’t like foisting all that work onto you—or your mom,” I said.
James stopped in the middle of the trail.
I did too.
The flashlight was still directed at the ground, but against the pitch-black backdrop of never-ending trees, James’s face was dimly illuminated. Without our footsteps and voices, the woods were silent, reminding me how far we’d come and how alone we were.
“You’ve been working your fingers to the bone for this, Sadie,” James said. “You have no idea how grateful Mama and I are.”
My cheeks warmed, and I forced a laugh. “Wait to be grateful until we see whether we sell enough to make it worth it.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
My pulse fluttered.
“You didn’t have to help us—anyone would’ve understood if you’d decided not to. But you did help. You could’ve stopped when you found out I was sticking around. But you didn’t.”
I broke my gaze away, but the only place to look was the dark abyss or the beam of light illuminating the forest floor. “It’s not as selfless as you make it sound.” Had I wanted to help May? Sure. But I’d also been worried for my own future.
I could feel James’s eyes on me, but he didn’t say anything.
He turned back to the path. “We’re almost there.”
I hurried to keep up. “Where is ‘there’?”
He took a few steps before answering. “Dad and I found this spot when we were putting up tubing one year. We decided to come back and fix it up a bit.”
It was the first time I’d heard James mention his dad since he’d been back—since his dad had died, even. After it had happened, he’d been different. Quieter. More withdrawn. He’d even gotten into a bit of trouble with the mayor, who’d been a cop at the time.
I breathed in. The scent wasn’t the fresh, crisp air we’d had so far. It smelled like…food and smoke.
The trees opened up, and the light fell on a pit with smoke billowing upward.
It was surrounded by stones—smooth ones of differing sizes that must have been taken from the river that ran through the farm and Autumn Ridge.
Two camp chairs faced each other across the fire, a blanket draped over the backs.
I breathed in again and closed my eyes. “What is that divine smell?”
James chuckled softly. “Dinner. Come on. Have a seat, and I’ll serve it up.”