Chapter 1 #3
“You’re welcome,” she said against my shoulder. “I’m only one call away. Say the word and I’ll be there.”
“You don’t have a car, James. And you don’t drive,” I said.
“I’d make Audrey drive,” she said. “Better yet, Grace. She doesn’t care about speed limits. The point is, you’re less than two hours south and I’ll be there any time you need me. Or any of us. Or all of us.”
I nodded. “I know.”
“As soon as you’ve settled in and I can wrangle everyone, we’ll come down for a weekend visit,” she said. “If you aren’t bored to death living in the country and back on my couch by then.”
I wanted to tell her I wouldn’t be back on her couch but I wasn’t convinced that was true. For all I knew, I’d get there, remember all the things I’d hated about Friendship, and turn right back around.
But I had one year with my step-grandmother’s family farm before I lost it forever. I wanted to squeeze as much life out of that time as I could before I had to forfeit this unexpected gift from Grandma Lollie.
* * *
I didn’t hate Friendship upon arrival but I did have a big problem with the four cow trucks parked in Grandma Lollie’s driveway.
Seriously. Trucks painted like cows. Black with white spots and thick eyelashes around the headlights.
Little name emblems on the driver’s side doors reading Buttercup , Clarabelle , Rosieroo , and Gingerlou .
And they were blocking my access to the house.
I could barely see the old Victorian or its wide, gracious porch that meandered around the front of the house.
The twin turrets—as everything came in pairs around here—reached up into the cloudless sky over the tops of the trucks, which gave off a circus-y vibe that annoyed the hell out of me.
Thomas House was whimsical to its core, the gingerbread-styled exterior painted in shades of green with trim in vibrant pink and purple.
A heart-shaped wildflower garden swayed in the breeze.
I knew I’d find a fairy garden behind the sunflower yellow barn.
If memory served, there was a flagstone path lined with an uprising of rosemary and anise that led straight into the side of the barn.
On the other side of a pair of enormous beech trees with thick, low-slung branches meant for sitting and reading on a summer day lived a rosebush that had completely engulfed an old wrought iron bedframe, forming a literal bed of roses.
And there were acres of tulips planted in swirling, meandering lanes.
Everything here was intentionally wacky.
Cow trucks were not part of the whimsy and wacky.
I rolled down my window to get a better look at the closest truck. “What even the fuck,” I muttered.
The sides were scrawled with Little Star Farms in a light blue-gray, vintage-styled script with a quartet of hand-drawn stars above the words.
I didn’t remember a farm by that name in the area, but even if I did, why would their trucks be parked here?
My first and only explanation was not a charitable one.
I assumed this farm was using Lollie’s land as their junkyard.
I grabbed my phone and searched for Little Star Farms. There had to be a phone number for this place and I’d tell them to move their cow trucks to other pastures.
My thumb hovered over the phone number when I zeroed in on the address. Old Windmill Hill Road. This farm was just up the street.
“Even better,” I said, backing up the gravel lane to the road. “We’ll get to the bottom of these cows in person.”
I didn’t remember every farm and family around here but I did remember Lollie’s neighbors and they weren’t dairy farmers.
Those people had orchards. Apples and berries and stuff like that.
I’d helped Lollie around the farm while I lived here, mostly in the form of working the cash register at the far end of the pick-your-own fields in April and May, but I didn’t know enough about farming to tell whether an orchard could transform into dairy land.
Couldn’t really see how that would work out but who knew?
I sped up Old Windmill Hill toward the parcel of land now known as Little Star Farms, as determined to right this wrong as anyone in all of human history.
When I reached the top of Old Windmill Hill—with the namesake four-hundred-year-old windmill on one side—I turned down the lane marked with a large sign announcing Little Star Farms. A series of smaller signs hung beneath, reading Fresh Baked Bread , Local Blueberries , and Homemade Jam and Wildflower Honey .
The place was bustling with workers. Trucks lined either side of the gravel lane and several greenhouses and large outbuildings stood in the distance, their tall doors flung wide-open.
The old farmhouse was still where I remembered it but it was different now, the footprint expanded and styled into a storefront.
I made sloppy work of parking, half on the gravel, half on the heavily trod grass leading to the greenhouses.
It was the best I could do, seeing as the parking area was packed.
Discovering a line to get into the store only fueled my frustration.
The need to bring bread and jam to the community wasn’t so great that these people could leave their moo mobiles wherever they wanted.
And where the hell did all these people come from anyway?
Instead of waiting in line to speak with someone inside the store, I headed toward the greenhouses.
I passed an outbuilding stocked with machinery and all-terrain vehicles and then another building filled entirely with baled hay.
I tried to get the attention of the workers but they were busy unloading supplies with a forklift or carrying a large section of fencing or barking orders and jabs at each other. They didn’t seem to notice me at all.
If I’d been feeling determined before, I was angry now and that anger was odd.
It was an odd sensation. The longer I stood there, baking in the late afternoon sun and half listening as the workers called back and forth to each other, the clearer it became I wasn’t completely numb.
I’d felt alive since the moment I’d hatched this non-plan to come here, but that was like coming out of a shame-induced coma.
It was that realization that distracted me from registering the man walking up the lane and the little girl stomping beside him. It distracted me hard enough that I missed the girl’s eye patch and the plastic sword she waved with gusto.
It wasn’t until I heard “Ahoy! Land ho!” that I snapped out of my thoughts to take in a pirate girl and the great, bearded mountain of a man holding her small hand.
He had a pink backpack slung over his shoulder and a soft lunch box dangling from his fingers.
A hat with the Little Star Farms insignia and dark sunglasses shielded his eyes, and in that moment, it seemed he was going to walk right by and ignore me the way everyone else had.
“Yo ho ho,” the girl called, sliding the eye patch to her forehead. Decorative, not functional.
It seemed he hadn’t noticed me until the girl pointed her sword in my direction but then he dropped the lunch box, a cloud of dust rising up around it as he muttered something to himself. Then, “What are you doing here?”
“I am here,” I started, high on my newfound anger, “because trucks belonging to this farm are blocking the entrance to my farm and I’ve been trying to find someone who can get them moved. As quickly as possible.”
“Thar she blows,” the girl shouted.
I gave her an encouraging smile and nod because kids just wanted to be acknowledged and she was putting a ton of energy into this pirate bit. Then I turned my attention to the man beside her. “Do you know who is in charge here?”
“Do I know who is in charge,” he repeated slowly, as if I was the one doing the bit. “Yeah, I think I do.”
I flung my arms out. “Can you tell me where to find them?”
He gave a small shake of his head and bent to retrieve the fallen lunch box. He handed it to the girl before crossing his arms over his chest. “Right here,” he said. “You found me.”