7. Charlie
SEVEN
CHARLIE
Crochet hooks danced as I retold the events of the past twenty-four hours. A handful of elderly women including Minnie listened on while they worked, inserting the appropriate hums of displeasure whenever I spoke Sebastian Anderson’s name.
“So now I have to meet the bastard at the Monticello tomorrow morning so we can go over the work that needs to happen for the gala. I actually have to work with him for a month , and I might not even get to save the theater at the end of it all.”
Beside me, one of my two best friends, Abigail, ignored the tangle of yarn on her lap and sipped her glass of Pinot Grigio. My other best friend, and the final member of our inseparable childhood trio, Sophie, stared at me, wide-eyed, while her cute crocheted elephant took shape between her hands.
Abigail grinned. “I want to go back to the part where he plucked splinters out of your butt.”
“It was a desperate situation,” I replied, defensive. I hadn’t mentioned the whole ass-smacking incident, but judging from the glimmer in Abigail’s eyes, she could tell I was holding back. She exchanged a glance with Sophie, and it was clear they’d extract the information out of me as soon as we were alone.
Hooker’s Paradise wasn’t exactly the right place to go into that kind of nitty-gritty detail, though. When I dropped my gaze to my lap and saw the sad few rows of a half-finished granny square I’d managed to create over the past six months, I wondered how long it would take for the rest of the women to kick me out of their club.
But Hooker’s Paradise wasn’t really about crocheting. My late mother—adoptive mother, technically—had been an avid knitter and crocheter. She and her girlfriends had started the club before I was born as a way to relax and gossip in peace for an hour or so every couple of weeks. I started attending when I was ten years old, then stopped when I became too cool to do it as a teenager, and came back to the club as a way to reconnect with my mom after I came back from college. It had been a constant in her life, and mine too as a result.
Both my parents were gone now; they’d adopted me when they were older and had both suffered health problems in their late fifties and died within a year of each other. Hooker’s Paradise had carried on, and it felt like a little piece of my mom that I could visit every two weeks without fail.
This week, we were in Minnie’s living room seated on a mismatched assortment of chairs and couches. I’d claimed a rickety dining chair with a seat that sagged in the middle, a piano at my back, surrounded by walls of old photos. The venue rotated every week, but Minnie consistently had the best snacks. I grabbed a garlic knot from a dish in the center of the table and tore it open, giving up on the granny square.
I wasn’t much of a crocheter, but being here with my mom’s friends—and my own girlfriends—made me feel like I was still part of a family. As a foster kid who got adopted out at nine years old after a hellish journey through the system, belonging was precious.
Abigail arched a dark brow, eyes sparkling. “Uh-huh. A desperate situation,” she repeated. “And now you have to work with him?”
“That’s the most surprising thing,” I said, picking up my hook. “I’ve never seen Regis Greene so… competent . He really put his foot down.”
“Maybe he hit his head and it started his brain working again,” Minnie suggested, frowning at her work. She sighed and ripped out the last row of work she’d completed, then gave up and grabbed her glass of wine. She was only slightly better at crocheting than I was, so maybe my spot in the club was safe for a while yet.
My job, on the other hand, was not.
“What’s that look for?” Minnie asked me.
“I’m just contemplating whether unemployment is preferable to working with Anderson for a month. Or if I’ll have to suffer through it and lose my job anyway.”
“None of that, now,” Minnie chided. “What would your mother say?”
I huffed. “She’d tell me that everything will work out as it’s supposed to.”
“That’s a lot less comforting when you’re staring down the barrel of unemployment,” Abigail noted.
“What are the chances you’ll save the theater?” Sophie asked.
I shrugged. “Depends on the town councilmembers. I’m sure Anderson will have some slick proposal that promises them untold riches and droves of tourists. How can I compete with that?”
“You come up with a better plan,” Minnie said as she refilled glasses of wine all around.
I sighed. “Like what? He’s going to walk up in front of the council and everyone else at the gala and show them pretty graphs with lots of profits. I’ll just be telling them about history.”
“What if you proposed to turn the lobby into an event space?” Sophie asked, tilting her head. “They’ll see how well it works for the gala, and it’ll be a lot easier to build than a full teardown and rebuild.”
I arched my brows. “Hmm. Anderson won’t see that coming.”
“Jerk,” Abigail muttered, and I smiled at her. At least I knew these women would always be in my corner.
“A vote on the theater isn’t the worst idea in the world,” Evelyn, a white-haired friend of my late mother’s, noted. She was the sole knitter in the group, but the rest of the die-hard crocheters let her come along despite her transgression. Probably because they didn’t want to shit their brains out for three days after being served a cup of innocuous-looking tea. Evelyn tilted her head at me. “You’ll get to refurbish the lobby to its former glory, so you’ll have the advantage. It’ll remind everyone what we’ve let slip. It might even teach that city slicker the value of our history.”
My lips curled into a snarl. “I don’t think Anderson knows the value of anything except swanky rush-job developments he can sell at a tidy profit.”
“And tweezers,” Abigail noted. “I’m sure he knows the value of tweezers by now.”
Glaring at her only made her smile widen. Sophie said nothing but rolled her lips inward as if to hide her grin.
“He’s quite a looker,” Minnie observed. At my outraged squeak, she shrugged. “Am I wrong?”
“Whether or not Sebastian Anderson is handsome is irrelevant,” I argued.
“On the contrary, my dear,” Minnie replied, a glint in her eye. “I saw the way he looked at you when I opened the door to the meeting room. He’s got the hots for you, girl. I think you should use that.”
“I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.”
“Oh, don’t be a prude. He liked your shoes.”
“My shoes?”
“Your shoes. He noticed them.”
“Maybe he has a foot fetish,” I muttered. Wouldn’t put it past him to be into something freaky.
“Even better!”
“The vomit is literally in my mouth, Minnie.”
Evelyn snorted and exchanged a glance with the tiny elderly lady to her left, who pursed her lips. Ida had been a regular babysitter when I’d first joined the Reeves household. She had a kind heart, but she ruled with an iron fist. Ida gave me a long glance as her hands moved and a work of crocheted art appeared between them. All she said was, “Hmm.”
I straightened, picked up my pathetic granny square, and decided to change the subject. “You’re right, Evelyn. People will want to save the Monticello,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “I’ll campaign. I’ll go to the archives and the museum and pull up some interesting tidbits and anecdotes, and people will remember that the architecture of this town is one of the things that makes it so special.” My fingers brushed the soft yarn on my lap and in a small voice, I admitted, “It’s my home I’m really worried about.”
Evelyn paused, meeting my gaze. “He really wants to tear down that beautiful house?”
“That’s what his permit application said.”
Sophie looked at me, concern lining her features. “But you’ve lived there for years.”
It had been a trying twenty-four hours. That’s the only explanation I had for why my eyes suddenly filled with tears, why the thought of that big, arrogant oaf of a man made me feel like curling up in a ball and crying until I felt empty inside.
But when Sophie—sweet, sensitive Sophie—made a noise at the back of her throat, dropped her work, and wrapped her arms around my shoulders, I knew it wasn’t just the stress and shock of what had happened.
He was attacking my town. My home . I’d grown up sure that I’d never belong anywhere, until I met my mom and dad. I was an angry, hurt little kid who hit the jackpot and fell into a loving family. This town wasn’t just a collection of old buildings. It was a patchwork of memories. It was every wound that had scabbed over and healed, every smile, every ounce of joy I’d ever experienced.
Anderson was trying to take that away from me.
That old attic apartment wasn’t just four walls and a roof. It was the only home I’d ever had. My parents managed the property for Lydia Radcliffe while they lived in the ground-floor apartment. That’s where they took me in and showed me that I was worthy of being loved. My dad was a handyman who worked on all of Lydia’s properties, and he taught me everything he could about maintenance.
When I came back to New Elwood after college, I nearly wept when I heard the attic apartment was vacant. It was the place my dad painted with me. The sink was the one he fixed when it started leaking and sprayed all over the place. He watched on while I installed the pendant light above the dining room table. When I was a kid, we found a beautiful old stained glass window at a flea market and installed it above their kitchen sink on the ground floor. The whole building was woven with loving memories of the two people that made me feel whole.
If that house got torn down, I’d lose so much more than a home. I’d lose all those moments where I felt loved and supported, all those memories of my dad’s cheerful encouragement and patient instruction. My mom’s visits, the soft smile on her face when she saw a new piece of decor or a framed photo of the three of us.
More arms appeared around me, and I was wrapped in all the love and support of a bunch of crazy crocheters. It took me a few long moments to gather myself, and I wiped under my eyes while nodding at them all. “I’m fine,” I told their worried faces. “I’m okay.”
“We’re going to get him,” Minnie said, eyes fierce. “We’re going to run that bastard out of town.”
“He’s not tearing down one single brick of this place,” Abigail agreed as she rolled her shoulders as if she’d march over to Anderson’s place and fight him right then.
“I’ll brew some tea,” Evelyn added, and when I gave her a wide-eyed look of horror, she winked, and the heaviness of the moment was broken as we all began to laugh.
The walk home from Minnie’s house was pleasant, with the smell of spring heavy in the air and crickets chirping all around. I walked past trees in full bloom and inhaled their floral perfume while I mulled over this new challenge.
I could either fight Anderson head-on or try to bring him over to my side. My instinct was to fight, because even the thought of softening toward him for a moment made me want to scream. I wanted to rage at him, pummel him into submission.
But my mother always said you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, to which I would retort that it seemed pretty disingenuous to catch flies with sweet promises only to let them die a grisly, sticky death for their foolishness. She’d cluck her tongue at me to hide her smile. But maybe she was right. I smiled as an idea sparked.
The wrought-iron fence encircling the cemetery came into view, and I made a slight detour toward it. It was officially closed, but I glanced in both directions before hopping the fence, then padded along the well-groomed paths toward two familiar tombstones.
My heart clenched when I stopped before them. My parents. The only family I’d ever known. Dad would have wrapped his arm around me and kissed my temple while I vented all my anger at him, absorbing it and defusing it with nothing more than a squeeze of my shoulders. Mom would have made me a plate of food and urged me to eat, because nothing good ever came from being hungry and mad, so you might as well fix the first while you worked through the second.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to them, and I wasn’t even sure what I meant by it. But with one last breath of the cool nighttime air, I stiffened my spine. This wasn’t a lost cause. My fight wasn’t over before it began. I could save the theater, my home, my job, and any other building Anderson tried to destroy.
I’d try to play nice, just like Mayor Greene had said. I’d work with Anderson for the month. And in that month, I’d show him just how much he’d underestimated me. Lull him into a false sense of security, then bam ! Hit him where it hurts.
Starting tonight.