Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Four days.
Not that I was counting or anything. That would be pathetic, and I was definitely not pathetic. I was a grown woman who owned her own business, sourced goods from over seventeen different artisans across three counties, and had, on one very memorable occasion, given birth to a baby in a snowstorm.
I was not the kind of woman who counted days.
Except for the fact that it had been four days since Adam Beckett kissed me on my porch and replaced red for blue as my favorite color, and today was the first day he hadn't called.
I shifted my grip on Polly's bags and resisted the urge to check my phone again as I walked out of her restaurant and into her parking lot. Then I resisted checking for missed calls when I was at the stop light on Alder. But at the stop sign on Foxglove, I peeked, and still nothing.
Fine.
Totally fine. Normal even. Who called somebody every single day? That was a lot. Everyday was borderline excessive. I certainly hadn’t asked for daily calls. Hadn’t required them.
No. Stupid me, I had merely, apparently, become accustomed to them without noticing. I was an idiot.
The sensible thing, obviously, was to call him myself.
I was going to do exactly that. Right after I got back to the shop and distributed lunch, because I sure as hell didn’t need Ernie listening in.
I turned onto Main Street and started looking for a parking spot, which in Jasper Creek on a Thursday was either a total non-issue or an extended exercise in patience, depending entirely on whether the garden club was meeting anywhere nearby.
And then.
Right in front of Gathered. Front-row, parallel-park-free, gift-from-the-universe parking.
I didn't even hesitate. You do not pass up a parking space like that. It's a rule. Possibly a law.
I eased in, cut the engine, and climbed out, hooking Polly's bags over both wrists and shouldering my purse.
I started up the sidewalk toward the shop, and I'll admit I got a little distracted, the way I always did when I was coming at the storefront from this angle.
The sign over the door caught afternoon light differently depending on the season, and right now, in the particular gold-tinted way April moved through Tennessee, it looked excellent.
The logo had clean lines—one connected image that somehow managed to say handmade and curated and you can trust what's inside here all at once, without saying any of those words.
I'd gone through six versions with the designer before we landed on this one, and every time I saw it, I felt the same small, satisfied click of yes, that.
Polly's bags were fine. Their logo was cheerful. Mine was better.
I was in the middle of this extremely important aesthetic assessment when something moved in my peripheral vision, and I looked up, and there was Adam.
Coming toward me from down the street, James walking beside him in a mimicking stride. It was cute as hell. Adam was in his work clothes—dark pants, boots, that jacket he wore on jobsites. The afternoon light was doing him the same favors it was doing my sign—they both looked excellent.
He hadn't seen me yet. He was looking down at James, saying something, and James was nodding with great seriousness. Then he looked up.
The smile that crossed his face was the kind of smile that made a very strong case for four days of phone calls not being excessive at all.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi yourself." The bags were swinging from my wrists, and I had my purse halfway off my shoulder and I probably looked like a very disorganized pack mule, which was fine, he was still smiling.
James looked up at me and then at the bags. "What's in those?"
"Lunch."
His eyes went wide. "What kind of lunch?"
"The good kind."
"Dad." James turned to Adam with the wide eyes of significant discovery. "She has the good kind of lunch."
Adam reached past me and opened the door.
Of course he did.
I didn't say anything about it. I just walked through it.
Ernie and Leslie both looked up when we came in.
"Oh good, you're back," Leslie said, already moving toward me for the bags. Then she registered Adam and James and her entire expression recalibrated into something that was trying very hard not to be delighted. "And you brought company."
"I didn't actually bring—" I started.
"We ran into each other at the door," Adam said.
"Mm." Ernie was looking between us in a way that suggested he was doing substantial math. "That's lucky."
"James," I said, "this is Ernie and Leslie. They work here with me."
James looked at them each in turn. "Hello," he said. "She has the good kind of food."
Ernie snickered.
"So, I got the bacon cheeseburger for myself which I’ll save for later," I said, setting the bags on the counter. “Ernie, yours is the pineapple burger with onion rings—"
“Onion rings?” James piped up.
“They’re the best onion rings in the world,” Ernie nodded.
“And then the Greek salad for Leslie—"
"Oh." Leslie pressed her lips together. "About that." Her eyes darted to Ernie.
I looked up. “Yes?”
"We were talking while you were gone," Ernie said, not looking at me, very busy with a pressed wildflower frame. "We both decided we actually wanted to go to that new place over on Birch. The one that does the…”
"The soup," Leslie supplied.
"Exactly. The soup," Ernie confirmed.
I stared at them. "You decided this after I left to get lunch."
"It came on very sudden," Ernie confirmed.
I shook my head at their antics. James looked at the greasy white bags with an expression that could only be described as yearning.
Adam coughed. "Zoe, we don't want to interrupt your lunch. James, come on, we'll find somewhere—"
"Oh, but it's already here," Leslie said, warmly and with great innocence. "And you two. I mean the three of you can just eat in the breakroom in the warehouse area. Ernie and I will cover the floor." She patted the counter like she was settling something. "It's no trouble."
"James, do you like bacon cheeseburgers?" Ernie asked.
James inhaled. "Yes."
"Then it’s settled.” Ernie grinned.
The breakroom had three tables and seven plastic chairs. There were only ever six employees at the most, but Ernie said one of us might have a guest. At the time, he’d been planning on a man for Leslie.
I pulled out some of the old plates that I think Trenda had given me at some point, and plated the food.
James took my bacon cheeseburger with both hands and stared at it like it was as cool as a dinosaur.
Adam didn’t seem to care what he had, at least not so that I could discern, so I took the pineapple burger that I wanted and left him with the Greek salad.
I was giving up my bacon cheeseburger, after all.
I did notice him steal half the onion rings off James’ plate, however.
"Things got a little hectic this morning, so when I had a chance for a break, I took it," Adam said, by way of explanation for why James was here at this hour and not in pre-school.
"Hectic how?"
He paused just a half-beat. "Jobsite stuff.” He glanced at James, who was deeply focused on his burger. "I missed talking to you. So, I figured, since I was already in town—"
"You pulled your kid out of school."
"I did." He forked a bite of salad and took a bite, then swallowed. "I missed seeing you.”
Well.
Okay, then.
James looked up after eating a third of a burger, in record time. “Why does that guy have green hair?” He looked toward the front of the store.
“You’ll have to ask him.” I answered.
“Okay.”
“Does it hurt where his ears have holes in ’em?”
“You’re going to have to ask him,” I laughed.
“If it did hurt, why did he do it?”
“Why don’t you finish your burger, then you can spend some time with Ernie and ask him all those questions,” Adam suggested.
“Okey-doke.” James took another huge bite of his burger and sucked down a big sip of sweet tea. He was as serious about his meal as he was with his questions.
When we were done, Adam started gathering wrappers, and James looked up at me with that solemn expression I was beginning to adore. "Can I see the store?"
"Do you want to?"
He nodded. "I want to see all the things."
As soon as we came out from the back, Ernie and Leslie waved at us and headed to the front door.
“Mr. Ernie,” James yelled out. “I have questions.”
“And I have answers. I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Awesome!” James ran to the front door and waved after them.
After that, I took James on what I thought of as the proper tour—not the quick customer sweep, but the real one, the kind where I actually explained things.
He walked with his hands clasped behind his back, which I suspected he'd picked up from Adam, looking at everything with careful attention. He was killing me.
At the blanket wall, I told him he could touch.
He looked up at Adam for verification.
“If Miss Zoe says it’s okay for you to touch, you can touch.” He assured his son.
James reached out one finger and pressed it into the edge of an angora throw, then looked up at me with an expression of pure disbelief. "It's so soft."
"Right?"
"Dad." He turned. "It's so soft. Touch it."
Adam touched it obediently and confirmed that it was, in fact, very soft.
I showed him Henry Sharp’s peach alabaster sculptures—the abstract pieces that caught light in that deep, honeyed way. James stood in front of the largest one for a long moment without saying anything, which from a four-year-old felt significant.
"What is it?" he finally asked.
"It's whatever it looks like to you," I told him. "That's the whole point."
“I don’t understand.”
“A lot of times people will tell you that you have to look at something and see it a certain way, or feel about it a certain way. The man who makes these, his name is Pop-Pop, he wants to know what you think of his creations. He wants to know how you feel after looking at them and touching them.”
He thought about this. "It looks like when the sun goes behind a cloud, but then it comes back."
Adam was very quiet behind me.
I kept my voice normal. "Pop-Pop would be really impressed by what you saw."
Two customers came in around that point—a woman and her daughter, maybe twelve, who were doing what I privately called the lookers-who-become-buyers tour. You could tell by how they moved, slow and touching things, not the brisk march of someone with a specific errand.
James, who had clearly inherited something from his father about reading a room, positioned himself next to the angora wall while they were looking at blankets and said, conversationally, to the daughter, "It's so soft. You should feel it."
She did.
“Touch it with both hands,” he encouraged.
She did. Then her mother felt it.
Seven minutes later I was wrapping a blanket.
James watched the tissue paper go down with great satisfaction. When the woman had her bag and was heading for the door, he looked up at me and said, "That worked."
I pressed my lips together. "It did."
He nodded, processing this. Then he wandered toward the sculpture corner again, and I followed him, and Adam fell in beside me.
"I'm going to be honest with you," Adam said quietly, "I had no idea he could do that."
"Natural salesman," I said. "He's got the instinct."
James had stopped in front of one of Henry Sharp's smaller pieces—a polished bronze form that threw a warm reflection across the shelf—and was considering it with that same particular stillness he'd given the alabaster.
"This one looks like something that used to be sad," he said, "but now it's not anymore."
I had often thought something similar, with the way the bronze turned downward at the base, but then circled round and then rose up and out at the top.
“That’s a good way to explain that," I agreed. “A lot of time an artist will make a picture or sculpture about how they are feeling. Maybe when he started out making this he was sad, but when he was finishing the sculpture he was happy.”
"You’re a good explainer,” he said to his father. "Miss Angel is pretty," he added, apparently to no one, "but she doesn't know about all the things." He looked back over his shoulder at me. "You know about the things."
"Thank you, James."
He considered this settled and moved on to the next shelf. I had no idea what that was all about, but apparently, I came out okay in the situation, so whoo woo!
James had arrived at a display of hand-stitched ornamental pillows that Leslie had picked up from Judy and Janice last week. They were small, surprisingly intricate, with geometric patterns that managed to be both very old-feeling and very contemporary.
"These are made by two sisters," I told him. "They live up on the mountain. They've been making things together for about forty years."
"Do they like living on the mountain?"
"They love it."
“Are they your friends?”
“Yes, they’ve known me since I was a little girl. As young as you were.”
He absorbed this. Picked up one pillow very gently, looked at the back, set it down. Then he turned and gave me a look of great thoughtfulness.
"I think," James said, "that you make a good girlfriend too."
The air left the room.
I heard Adam make a sound.
"Maybe not as good as Miss Angel," James continued, with schoolyard fairness, "but pretty good. Because you know about the things." He paused. "Also, you gave me the good burger."
"Thank you, James," I managed. I did my damndest not to laugh.
"Dad?" James looked up at Adam. "Is it okay if you have two girlfriends? Because Miss Angel is very pretty and Zoe knows about the things, and probably you need both."
I lost it.
I turned toward the pillow display and put both hands over my mouth and lost it completely, shoulders shaking, trying very hard not to make a noise and failing at intervals.
Behind me I could hear Adam, who was clearly attempting to answer his son with great seriousness, but totally missing the mark.
"James," Adam said. "Buddy."
"What?"
"We'll… We'll talk about this later."
"Is that a no?"
"It's a… We'll discuss it."
James, apparently satisfied with this non-answer, went back to examining the pillows.
I pressed my forehead against the shelf and breathed.
I had been worried I might be falling in love with Adam, but now I knew the truth. I was irrevocably in love with James.