Chapter Twenty
Benny loved going home with a good haul, but that afternoon, it seemed like it took an hour to pass every mile marker of the two-hour trip from McAlester. He started to call Libby, but he knew if he did, he wouldn’t be able to be quiet about all the antique dishes he’d bought that morning, and he wanted it to be a surprise.
“Libby is going to be so excited when she sees what we’ve found,” he told Elvis, who was sitting on the passenger seat beside him.
Elvis moved to the floor and stuck his nose against the air conditioner vent.
“Some company you are,” Benny fussed at him. “I can always leave you at home.”
The dog wagged his tail.
“Do you want to stay home?” Benny asked with a chuckle.
That word home caused him to realize how much he wanted to stay home more. In the same moment, he recognized that the feelings he had for Libby went beyond employee and employer, or even simple friendship.
He passed a WELCOME sign on the outskirts of Blanco, and then three different church signs. A few minutes later, he was on the other side of the town and traveling through ranching country again. Most folks would consider a town of fewer than two thousand people to be a small place, but it was all relative. To someone who lived in Dallas, Blanco would be a dot on the map. To the four people in Sawmill, it would be a big city.
“The squirrels are having a race,” he whispered.
His grandpa often told him that he needed to be still and focus on one thing at a time. “Your thoughts are like a bunch of baby squirrels just out of the nest, running from place to place,” Walter had said.
And he had been right—back then and right up until this very day. Benny’s thoughts jumped from his own realization that he was falling in love with Libby, to what he should do about it, to her possible excitement when she saw the dozens of pink dishes he was bringing to the store, to the letter she had let him read—the latter of which had very little to do with his feelings. From there, they wiggled around to the way she was getting the office in order and then back to the way she made him feel when she looked at him with those light blue eyes.
“I really do like Libby for more than a friend,” he admitted.
His phone rang. He put the phone on speaker and laid it on the console.
“Hello?” He could hear the anxiety in his own voice. “What’s going on?”
“I just wanted you to know that I’ve moved to Dallas.” Tatum’s words were slurred.
“Are Opal and Sally all right?” he asked bluntly.
“I have no idea about that old lady or my aunt Sally.” She giggled. “I have a job interview tomorrow doing security work for a big firm. I need two personal references. Can I put you down as one of them?”
“Are you drunk?” he asked and checked the time—four o’clock.
“It’s five o’clock in New York City.” She giggled again. “Will you give me a good reference or not?”
“I don’t really know you, Tatum, and I’d have to be honest if someone called me. I wish you all the best, but I’d rather that you not use me as a reference.”
“We have known each other since we were kids.” Her tone raised an octave with each word.
“We knew each other a little as children, but we haven’t spent very little time together since we’ve been adults. Get someone else, please,” he said. “Maybe one of the people you worked with in the service. They know you a lot better than I do. All I could tell them is to be careful about putting you in a job where a dog was involved.”
The call ended so abruptly that Benny checked to see if he’d lost service. “I guess she didn’t like my answer ... but I would have to tell the truth.”
Elvis sat up in the seat and scratched his ear.
“Does that mean you heard every word?” Benny asked.
His tail thumping against the leather seat sounded like drumbeats. Benny nodded and passed a sign that said Hugo was twenty miles ahead. That meant he would be home in half an hour—in time for supper. He had stopped at a supermarket in McAlester and bought up supplies to last for several days. Tonight, he planned on making spaghetti for supper and seeing if Libby wanted to join him for a front porch picnic.
The winds were with him, as his grandfather used to say, and he made it to Sawmill in twenty-five minutes. He stopped at the trailer long enough to unload the groceries and let Elvis out of the truck. Then he drove on to the store and parked out back in the usual spot. He started to go through the back door but figured Libby had already left. When he rounded the last corner, he saw her just leaving the building with Fancy running as far ahead as her leash would allow.
“Hey, are you just now calling it a day?” he yelled.
She turned around and waved. “You are home earlier than I thought you would be. How are you feeling?”
That she was interested in him made him feel like a king. He lengthened his stride, and the two of them walked across the parking lot together. “I’m fine. Evidently, whatever got ahold of me was a twenty-four-hour bug—or it didn’t like me and went on to pester someone else.”
“How did the trip go? Did you find anything interesting, or was it a disappointment?” she asked.
“I’ve got a trailer loaded with glassware,” he answered. “We’re going to build shelves in the next two days and get it on display by the weekend, I hope. There’s still some lumber out in one of the warehouses that was left over from when this place was a real sawmill.”
“What warehouses?” she asked.
“Grandpa let a stand of trees grow up between the store and the two warehouses back behind it, so they’re not visible to most folks. It’s where the lumber that was planed to the right thickness is kept, and where we still have some stock ready to bring into the store when we have room,” he answered. “We’ll go out there in the morning and measure the boards. If we don’t like them, I can always have some delivered from the lumberyard in Paris.”
“You are still buying stock when you’ve got a store full, a back room full, and some in storage?” she asked. “Summer is coming on strong, and it’s shaping up to be a hot one.”
“I was here through several summers back when I was younger, so I know how the heat affects sales,” he said.
“I made a couple of graphs while I was cleaning out the files. Business always fell off considerably in July and August, then picked up in the fall,” she said.
“I’d like to see those graphs. They might make a difference in the amount of time I spend away from home this summer.”
Libby stepped up onto the porch, secured Fancy’s leash to the back of a chair, and went straight for the cooler. “That’s because folks won’t stay long in a hot building. They’ll come in and shop around a little while, but then they leave pretty quick. Victoria used to fuss about whether we could keep the lights on in those two months because there were so little sales. September wasn’t much better because folks were more concerned with getting their kids or grandkids ready for school.” She opened the old cooler and turned back to him. “Water or tea, or a beer from inside?”
“Tea is good,” he answered as he sat down at the table. “Got any ideas about how to keep the customers in the store longer?”
“Victoria had an old refrigerator at the front of the store. She kept it filled with water bottles and gave them away free in those two months. You might consider moving this old soda pop cooler to the store and doing the same thing—free water made a difference at her store,” she suggested. “We can keep the water and tea that we normally put in the cooler here with the beer inside the station.”
“That’s a great idea. We’ll do that before we open on Friday.” He took a bottle of tea from her. “I thought you’d be more excited about the glassware I brought home.”
“Is it the pink and green patterns that sell as fast as we put it out?” she asked.
He nodded and twisted the lid off the bottle. “Yes, and a lot of carnival glass—some even in the purple color that is really hard to find.”
“Are you serious?” Libby opened a bottle of water and poured a little of it in Fancy’s bowl, then took a long drink before she sat down. “I can’t wait to see it. How long do you think it will take to get the shelves up so we can unpack it?”
That was the excitement he had waited all day to see. “Half a day, at the most. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I walked into that house. Two elderly sisters had lived there together until they passed on last year. They were both collectors of antique glassware. No one else seemed interested, so I bought the whole collection. The executors even helped me wrap and box it up.”
“There’s still a lot of daylight left,” Libby said. “We could go do some measuring and check out the warehouses right now.”
“You’ve worked all day,” he said.
“And the office is clean and ready to go. The desk is even cleared off. If we get started tonight, I can put the data into the computer as we unpack, and it will all be out on the shelves this weekend.”
“We can do that, but first we need to have some supper. I’m starving,” he said. “I was planning on making spaghetti, but it will take less time to heat up a frozen pizza. We could share it before we go back to the store.”
“That sounds great. I’ll make a salad while it’s heating, and we can eat in the apartment, where it’s cool. It’s a shame to pay for all that air-conditioning and not use it. There’s a couple of small slices of pecan pie left over from book club last night, too.” She hopped up, grabbed her bottle of water from the table, and headed inside. “See you in a few minutes.”
Benny whistled all the way to his trailer, went inside, and turned on the AC. He pulled the pizza out of the grocery bags first, started it cooking in the toaster oven, and unloaded the rest of his supplies.
His grandfather’s voice was clear in his head. I always told you that working with someone was the best way to get to know them.
“Where did that come from?” he asked.
His question got no answer, so he forced himself to focus on his grandfather’s words. He had worked with a lot of people at the firm, but he still considered most of them acquaintances rather than friends.
“But it does when it comes to Libby,” he admitted after he thought about it for a few seconds. “If she left and asked me for either a personal or a business reference, I could give her a glowing one in either instance.”
A blast of stale, musty air rushed out of the first big building when Benny unlocked the door and slid it open. He flipped a switch by the door, and about half of the fluorescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling lit up. Long pieces of lumber were stacked on shelves against the wall to Libby’s left, and to her right were several things covered with thick canvas.
“Those are huge pieces of furniture that would only fit into a mansion,” Benny explained and pointed toward the racks of wood across the room. “There’s some oak and a few pieces of pecan wood from back in the days when this was a sawmill, but most of it will be pine, and it warps pretty badly.”
“How do you know so much about wood?” she asked.
“Grandpa taught me,” he answered. “Think we should hang three or four long shelves, or make them shorter and stagger them?”
“Shorter,” she answered without hesitation. “That way, if someone bumps one accidentally, we’ll lose fewer pieces to breakage. And it’ll be more appealing to the eye and give the customers a better view of each one.”
“Smart thinking,” he agreed. “And as an added bonus, we can use some of the shorter pieces that wouldn’t be useful in building a house.”
“Is that in your future plans?”
“Maybe ...” He hesitated. “The idea popped into my head when the pizza was cooking. I found myself whistling that old Miranda Lambert song ‘The House That Built Me’ and got to thinking about the home that I loved the most. That was the time I spent with Grandpa, either in the apartment where you live or the house in Paris. I figured out that it wasn’t the place as much as the feeling I had there.”
She lifted the corner of one of the canvas covers and peeked at the breakfront underneath. “I thought of that same song when I was at my old house in Jefferson. That place built me, for better or worse—and it was the latter a lot of the time. But it made me who I am today, just like spending time with your grandfather made you who you are.”
Benny raised the other corner of the cover so she could get a better look. “Are you getting past the feelings you had after you read that letter?”
“I think so—book club last night was good,” she answered, running a hand over the breakfront. “When you build your house, you should make one wall big enough to accommodate this thing. It’s too beautiful to be stored away. You could use it for a bookcase.”
“What does book club have to do with the letter?” he asked.
“The book we discussed was about learning to trust your heart,” she answered. “I always knew that something wasn’t quite right where Victoria was concerned, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I blamed myself: If I was a better person, she wouldn’t leave me alone so much. If I did more for her, she would hug me. That breeds mistrust, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever trusted anyone but maybe Amanda and Dolly. And I never told them nearly as much about my past as I have you folks here in Sawmill.”
Benny dropped the cover. “That makes me feel really special.”
“You are very special, Benny,” she said.
“Thank you for that,” he said. “Now, back to this piece of furniture. I don’t want a huge house. Maybe a ranch style with the possibility of adding a wing onto it if ...” He paused. “If it becomes too crowded.”
Libby wondered what he had been about to say. Was it if he had a big family and not just one child like his grandparents and his own parents had? “That sounds like a good idea. Start small and build big as you need it, but still leave one wall big enough for that gorgeous piece of furniture.”
“Going back to your club meeting,” he said as he crossed over to the other side of the warehouse. “What helped the person in your book learn to trust her heart?”
“Her friends,” Libby answered, and wandered over to look at the pieces of wood he was stacking up on a dolly. “Kind of like you and Opal and Minilee are helping me. Sally and Ilene were helpful, too, so I shouldn’t leave them out.”
“So, you trust all of us?” Benny asked.
“I think maybe I do,” Libby said and was amazed at her answer. How could she put her trust in people she had known for only a month?
Because you are trusting your heart! the voice in her head said.
“I’m glad,” Benny said with a smile as he placed one last board on the dolly. “This should be enough. We can take them over to the store and draw out a pattern as to how we want to position them on the wall.”
Libby wished she could position her life like that. Bottom shelves would hold past memories of things that didn’t matter if they got broken. The top shelf would hold priceless items like her heart and soul, and it would have a railing around it for protection. In between would be the things that mattered but weren’t as expensive or as important as the ones up above them.
“What are you thinking about?” Benny asked as he got the dolly moving toward the open door.
Libby answered with her thoughts about life.
“And where would I be?” Benny asked.
“At the very top,” she answered with a smile.
“Thank you.” He returned her smile. “We’d be there together, like the matched set of pink salt dips in one of those boxes we’ll be unpacking tomorrow.”
“You’d be willing to be pink?” she teased.
“My favorite shirt is pink.” His eyes twinkled. “I’m very comfortable in my skin. I know who I am, and I don’t intend to change for anyone.”
“Me too,” she said with a nod. “Thanks for being my pink other half.”
“You are very welcome.” He pulled the dolly out through the door and then locked it behind them. “Having someone who can talk the same language I do is pretty special, Miz Libby.”
She grabbed the handle, and together, they pulled the dolly through the space between two trees and across the back parking lot to the store. “Having someone that I can talk to about the past—especially someone with listening ears and broad shoulders—is pretty special, too, Mr. Benny.”
“That’s just Benny to you.”
“Then it’s just Libby to you,” she shot back.
He grinned. “Deal.”