Chapter Three #3
After Finn left, making that bell on the door jingle the way it clearly hadn’t when he’d walked in—which Tennessee could tell Dallas was thinking about the same as he was, and filing that information away—they were quiet for a minute.
“I think I like him.” Dallas rolled his coffee cup between his palms. “Though he’s a little too used to getting his own way.”
“Though, so far, using his power for good,” Tennessee said, considering that velvet hammer again. “Not a bad start.”
But he heard the bell from the other side, meaning someone had walked into the diner, so he clapped his brother on the back and got back to work.
He closed the diner in the early afternoon in winter and when it was all cleaned up, he headed out back. Tennessee trudged back across the little bit of land between the General Store and his house, taking the opportunity to breathe in deep the way he always did.
Because no matter how tired he was, he liked to take a moment to appreciate the Montana of it all—another thing he’d learned to do in opposition to his father, who’d made no secret of the fact that he hated it here.
Their family had been here in Montana from the start of Cowboy Point.
And actually even earlier than that, according to the legends of the family.
Ebenezer Lisle had tried his hand at mining wherever he could, but had settled here, winning the General Store in a much-disputed card game from notorious sore loser, Matthew Carey.
Lisles had been here ever since. Sometimes Tennessee thought he could feel that in his bones. Every single hard winter and the golden summers in between, one Lisle after the next somehow holding on strong.
He blamed Matilda for how intense all that history felt today.
He was used to not sleeping much. He’d learned how to get by on only a handful of hours. But not sleeping much and not sleeping at all were two different animals.
And he was irritated that he was thinking about animals as he walked into his house, into his living room that now smelled like the cute little puppies that she’d carted off—with his towels—to sort out medically, presumably at the vet down in Marietta.
Then he was really irritated, because he found himself missing those cute, round little bodies, all the heat they’d given off while they’d slept, and the way they’d stuck their little noses against him like he brought them comfort—
Damn Matilda Stark.
He made his way up the stairs and into his bedroom, where he stripped down and showered off his shift in the diner.
And he did not appreciate it, at all, when his imagination decided to come to play. It was doing entirely too much work conjuring up visions of Matilda before his fire wearing a whole lot less than she had been last night.
He clearly could not let himself go without sleep again.
Tennessee had a few hours before dinner, so instead of getting into his never-ending tower of paperwork, he texted his sister to make sure she knew she was expected to appear at dinner tonight.
He then ignored her response, which suggested he should try inviting people to things rather than ordering them to attend.
Then, before he became a complete and total stranger to himself and started actually keeping a feelings journal that would currently be all about Matilda Stark, he got an hour or two of sleep.
When he woke up, he was convinced he was a new man. Or maybe the man he’d been before Hurricane Matilda rolled through his life last night and this morning. The man he’d always been, since back when he’d had to grow up fast and act like the grown man his father should have been.
He felt like himself, right when he’d been beginning to wonder if he’d been doomed. If Matilda Stark had crossed some wires in him that he couldn’t uncross.
It was already getting close to full dark when he went outside before 6 PM, and sometimes he found that disorienting as the year took its time turning back toward summer. But tonight he welcomed it because it felt like a reset.
And he did not really want to dwell too much on why he felt he really, really needed that reset.
It wasn’t snowing tonight, but the temperature had dropped so low it seemed to kick straight through him.
He welcomed it, rolling his shoulders back in his heavy coat, and was glad he’d shoved a hat on his head before he left the house.
He shoveled a path from his house to the General Store and down to the road every few days, and it was a little packed up again tonight. But he didn’t mind.
He walked through the snow and then out into the main road, where folks maintained sets of tire ruts going in each direction, and didn’t bother much about the state of the road until spring came to melt the snow.
Tennessee made his way across the road, waving at neighbors passing by, and decided he liked the bright glow of Mountain Mama Pizza as he approached it.
He hadn’t been the biggest fan of the Bennett sisters when they’d first showed up in town, but then, he was always suspicious of newcomers.
He liked good ideas as much as the next guy, but new ideas tended to freeze over and die quick deaths in a Montana winter.
But the Bennetts had been here a good five years or so now, he thought.
They’d been the first in a series of other changes—glow ups, his sister would call them—in Cowboy Point, though some of those changes were harder to see in the middle of a cold, dark February.
He peered past the pizza place toward another one of the previously abandoned old buildings that had stood there in varying degrees of disrepair for years.
And where, rumor had it, a group of college friends were planning to open a restaurant.
Farm to table, Shane Johnson had told him, having heard it from the gossipy Sheens in the feed store, in a voice that suggested he did not intend to darken the new place’s door.
But farm to table certainly worked for Tennessee. The kind of farm to table that folks meant when they used that term wasn’t diner food, and that meant there was no direct competition to what he did. That was a good thing, to his mind.
And hell, he might like a nice dinner from time to time himself without having to drive down into Marietta to get it. Though he’d reserve judgment on that until the new owners showed themselves, the restaurant actually opened, and they actually lasted through a winter or two.
He knew that his siblings thought he didn’t like anything new.
They were wrong. He didn’t like to get his hopes up, that was all.
New was great—but he wanted Cowboy Point to thrive.
That was a good thing for everyone. A long line of failed businesses, on the other hand?
That didn’t exactly reel in the summer season tourist dollars.
On the other side of the road, he headed toward Mountain Mama’s brightly lit front door that beamed out into the thick darkness.
In the summer, their patio was hopping with live bands and folks sitting around enjoying the late summer light.
In the winter, they kept the happy lights strung up no matter how snowy it got, because everybody liked a little cheer in the darkness.
Tennessee knew he certainly did.
He was almost to the front door when it flew open and then he found himself face-to-face with Matilda Stark.
Again.
Like she was haunting him.
And even more when she blinked at him. “Oh. Hi.”
She sounded surprised but then she smiled at him, and the smile was so bright that it took him a moment to realize she was holding a carryout pizza box in her hands.
“The puppies are doing great and I’m sure that’s because of you,” she said, in that cheerful, matter-of-fact way that she’d informed him she’d be leaving puppies with him overnight, too. “Thank you.”
But unlike last night, she didn’t wait for him to respond. She kept smiling at him as she sailed past him, leaving him standing there in front of the door to Mountain Mama Pizza like some kind of statue.
A statue who’d been blindsided by Matilda Stark’s smile, that was.
Again.
And Tennessee didn’t have to dive too deep inside himself to understand that somehow, overnight, he had managed to get himself into the kind of trouble he normally avoided like the plague.
Entirely against his will.