Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Kell
The checks were pouring in, along with email requests for Kell’s website to take credit cards.
Twenty percent of the quotes had been accepted, and that was only from the batch Rachel mailed out.
The new ones she’d typed up had made it easy for him to email or print and send them.
Two of those had turned into contracts as well.
All those appointments were in his phone calendar now, spring and early summer very, very full.
As he finished his second cup of coffee, Kell was staring at a fifty percent increase in job scheduling for spring, and that was without really trying.
Just having someone do the admin work for him.
Rachel was right.
Rachel was a godsend.
And she claimed it was no skin off her nose.
He’d come home from helping his father, Colleen, Luke, and about ten other volunteers set up all the red, white, and pink lights around town and the common, every tree now sparkling with the favorite colors of Love You, Maine.
It was an annual ritual and he enjoyed it, but this year there had been a tug.
A pull.
A regret that he wasn’t spending time with Rachel.
His apartment had been as tidy as he’d left it. Nothing was different after having Rachel there half the day, except for a new batch of neatly organized documents on his desk. At her request, he’d given her access to his business voicemail and email.
And now he had a printed list of every voicemail.
A printed list of every new invoice she’d created from organizing his emails.
A legend for how she labeled emails and put them into folders.
Another legend for the color coding she used on a new spreadsheet to track incoming leads, with a handwritten Post-it note on top mentioning customer relationship management software he might want to consider.
And then more handwritten notes:
You had 223 unanswered emails in your Inbox. I organized them all, but 22 remain for you to reply to. If it was a request for an estimate, it’s documented in the Estimates to Be Made folder. If it’s asking about invoicing, it’s…
As he read her notes, he couldn’t stop grinning.
She was amazing.
And he felt bad.
Bad that he’d turned Boyce against her. Bad that he’d made it so hard for her to do her job. Bad that he’d been gruff that first day, when her car had broken down.
But mostly, bad that he knew how to do everything she was doing for him, but couldn’t.
It wasn’t that Kell didn’t know how to use a computer, a printer, envelopes, stamps–that wasn’t the issue. This wasn’t willful helplessness.
It was all just hard.
Rachel’s neat, orderly lists looked like she’d spent days getting this all structured, but she swore it was only two hours. Everyone had a different set of natural abilities that aligned with certain tasks. For Rachel, this was easy.
And now he’d asked her out on a date, a real one. That had been easy for him, the way it had all come together another sign that she was meant to be in his life.
More and more of those pointed him in only one direction.
This had to be explored.
A neat stack of mail sat to the right of his phone, and he flipped through it, tossing junk mail. A letter addressed to him, from Markstone’s, made him halt.
Once he opened it, he laughed and laughed, slowly tearing up the check for “roadside assistance” provided to one employee named Rachel Hart.
Sure, it was a huge corporation, and it wouldn’t hurt to take the money. That argument didn’t hold water with the gentleman inside, preparing to take her out for a night of fun.
The check reminded him of the gut-punch in the moment he realized who she was on that logging road, his bewilderment at her sudden appearance in his life after all those years, and the confusing mix of feelings her predicament had generated.
Never, ever would he have guessed that after supergluing themselves to each other, he’d be dating her.
Tackling the list she’d made of callers, he grabbed his phone and his coffee and plunged in. He made seventeen calls, securing six new jobs on the spot and leaving messages for the rest. The work had an order to it; if he had an office manager, that person could handle it.
Results were what Kell cared about, the actual work in the field. Everything else could be taken care of by someone who liked that kind of work. Wasn’t that how life should be? Everyone doing what aligned best with who they were, and making enough money to be happy?
Email was better with Rachel’s system, too, her labeling system so clear and meticulous that Kell followed it easily, tagging the new emails that had come in, sorting out junk, and unsubscribing from old emails he didn’t need anymore. Until she’d tidied it, he’d been overwhelmed.
Now he could keep it all going.
Maybe she could help him interview a new office person. The transitional cost–not money, but his time–had always been daunting, the secret shame of being so disorganized a factor, too.
Not that Rachel would understand that. She was the consummate businesswoman, an MBA. There was no professional failure in her life. For the first time since coming home, he felt a twinge of underachievement.
She was so much more put together than he was, especially in business.
Running his fingers through his beard at the chin, he remembered how she’d touched it when they’d kissed. Was that a subconscious sign that she didn’t like the beard? Didn’t like the long hair? They’d met when he was Urban Kell, clean cut and well dressed.
Now he was Rural Kell, all flannel and furry.
What if she preferred Urban Kell?
In an instant, he made a snap decision, grinning as he did it.
And the next phone call he made clinched the deal.
“Hey, Annabeth,” he said, calling the owner of what she now called Love You Hair, but used to be called Annabeth’s Answers, back when she ran her salon out of her house. “It’s Kell Luview. Any chance you can fit me in for a walk-in today?”
“Hey, Kell! You helping that woman Rachel out? Getting her a hair appointment?” Annabeth was Nadine’s daughter, and one of about ten hair stylists in town. She was the only one who also was full barber certified.
If anyone was going to help him get rid of his beard and go back to a stylish hair cut, it was her.
“Actually, it’s for me.”
“WHAT?” Her squeal made him pull the phone away from his ear in self-preservation.
“Yeah.”
“You? You’re not going back to D.C., are you?”
“No. Not moving. Just want a change.”
“It’s because of that Rachel, isn’t it? I knew it. I’ve been telling Maisy not to hold her breath.”
“About what?” Maisy Bilbee worked the counter at her dad’s auto repair shop outside of town. Her dad was Deke, whose name Kell had borrowed when he first ran into Rachel.
Maisy was something like his fourth cousin twice removed. Literally half the women in Luview were off limits for dating because…
Gross. Cousins.
“Oh, come on. As if you didn’t know Maisy had the hots for you. Like half the single women around here.”
This wasn’t much of a surprise, though he was pretty sure most of those women really wanted his recently widowed brother.
Poor Luke had to fend them off with a stick after the one-year anniversary of Amber’s death.
It was as if a switch flipped and they could all start love-bombing him on the day after Thanksgiving.
And he was having none of it.
“That walk-in appointment, Annabeth. Got one free today?”
“For you? Hell, yes! Can I video this and put it on TikTok? Hairy lumberjack goes billionaire stylish?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I was joking!”
“I can go on over to Debbie’s Do-house just as easily as get my hair cut by you, and she won’t want to post it online.”
“Debbie!” Annabeth snorted. “Debbie can’t cut her way out of a paper bag! And besides,” Annabeth sniffed, “she has a basement salon. Mine is on Main Street now.”
The vocational high school three towns over offered a cosmetology program, and as a result, half the basements in town had salons in them.
True achievement for these women (and a few men) was the ownership of an actual storefront salon.
Rents had shot up in recent years, and smaller spaces were hard to come by.
“Give me a time,” he insisted.
“How about in an hour?”
“An hour?”
“Sure!”
“Okay, then. Will do. Thanks.”
“No problem. It’s an honor, really. This was so much fun when we did it five years ago, but you had waaaaay less facial hair then. I’ll charge my clippers!” With another squee! she ended the call, and Kell stared at the phone.
“All right. Hair taken care of. Suit next.”
Hidden in the back of his closet, Kell found the zippered plastic bag holding the four suits he owned. One of them was his ancient black funeral and special occasion suit from high school, the other three from his time in D.C. As he sorted through them, he came to the charcoal gray and smiled.
This was always his favorite.
Memory took over and he conjured the image of himself in a mirror, pink shirt, navy and pink tie with white flecks, and patterned socks to match.
“This is crazy, man,” he muttered to himself as he stripped down to underwear and began dressing. The shirt was too snug. It wouldn’t button, and not because of an overgrown gut.
“Uh oh,” he said, reaching for a white shirt that had always fit a bit large. This one was a perfect fit, as if custom made, the loose spots he recalled gone.
If the loose shirt fit just right, then what about his suit? His date was tonight. He didn’t have time to get anything tailored, and he certainly wasn’t in the right place to go out and buy a new one, unless it was a work jumpsuit at the farm supply store.
He groaned as he thrust one leg into the pants and then the other, his thighs pressing hard against the seams.
He had thickened.
Rachel was right.