Chapter 2
chapter
two
Farrah cursed her luck as she drove back into town. How could she have predicted that Darren Buttars of all people would be at the cemetery on a Wednesday morning? Why in the world was he even there?
Then she’d seen his brother and sister-in-law, and everything had made sense. How she’d told him not to look up Gary also made total sense.
Darren asking about Bolt, her cat which he didn’t even like, made no sense.
And the way she’d practically begged him not to do something that would cause her to stop speaking to him made zero sense.
She hadn’t spoken to him in two months.
“Doesn’t mean you don’t want to,” she muttered to herself as she turned onto Main Street and aimed her car toward Center.
But she had a line, and Darren had crossed it. More than once. He’d asked her about riding her horse in the parade. She’d said no, citing the fact that she didn’t have a horse. He’d gotten someone else to ask her. Tucker. The parade organizer. The rodeo queen.
Honestly, couldn’t they find someone else to carry the colors in a parade?
Answer: Yes. Because the parade had happened a few days ago, and someone else had trotted their horse down Center and Main, holding the flag aloft just fine.
Farrah might have been able to handle all the needling, but Darren had gone one step further. He’d actually submitted her application to be the flag-bearer. And that crossed the line, and she had to do something. It was the principle of the matter.
She missed him though, sometimes more than she cared to admit. More than she’d thought she would. More than she had patience for.
She pulled into the bowling alley parking lot and eased around the building to the back. They didn’t open until noon in the summer, and she glanced at the clock as she pulled into her spot. Only ten-thirty.
Didn’t matter. She had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. She entered through the back of the alley, switching on lights as she did. The manager, Guy Mansfield, would be in shortly, so Farrah took a few minutes to go down to the dark, quiet, dead lanes.
When she’d first started at the bowling alley a year ago, being inside such a huge building when it was closed had scared her. Now she only found peace in the way things that were normally very noisy sat quietly, waiting for someone to come enjoy them.
In a lot of ways, Farrah felt the same. She’d lived for several years in the spotlight, with people and sound all around her. But now, she mostly existed on the sidelines, near the back, quietly waiting for someone to come notice her.
She crossed her arms as she stared down the sixty-foot-long lane, the pins down at the end in their perfect formation.
“I like it here,” she said to the empty building. The light behind her cast shadows toward the pins, and she startled as the air conditioner kicked on with a hefty clunk of pipe noise.
“Thank you for bringing me home.”
She’d fought the Lord every step of the way, but He’d kept at her until she’d admitted defeat and returned to Vermont.
Sometimes, when the bowling alley was operating at maximum capacity, she missed the vibrancy of Los Angeles. Sometimes, when it snowed and she could barely see through the swirling snowflakes, she missed the warmth in California.
But only sometimes, which was a further testament to her that leaving LA had been the right thing to do.
She just never thought she’d find herself back in Island Park, the town she’d vowed never to set foot in again.
“Morning, Farrah,” Guy said from behind her and she turned from the shadowy lanes, leaving her thoughts there for the shiny wood to absorb. They really were very good listeners, and Farrah didn’t have to worry about them spreading her gossip around town.
She joined Guy in the snack bar kitchen, where he turned on the ovens while she switched on the fryers. She put pretzels in the oven and opened a giant can of nacho cheese and put it in the hot water bath to warm.
The night crew sanitized the shoes and bowling balls, and a cleaning team came through the alley in the middle of the night. So Farrah and Guy took care of all the food prep in the morning, and a teenage employee would arrive just before noon to rent out the shoes and assign lanes.
“Camry was asking about you,” Guy said.
“Oh yeah?”
“She says you’re the best babysitter she’s ever had.” He flashed her a smile before sliding half a dozen mini pizzas into the oven.
“I had fun with her too.” Farrah had enjoyed watching the little girl, but she didn’t want to make a habit of babysitting for her boss.
She’d helped out in a pinch, because it was his anniversary, and Farrah happened to really like his wife Brianna.
They’d driven to the city for a Broadway show, and while her jealousy had topped the charts, she’d fed the five-year-old and played board games and watched movies until they both fell asleep.
Broadway wasn’t the same as the television career Farrah had been aiming for, but it felt too close to the heart. Maybe that was why she’d been prompted to go to the cemetery this morning though she had no desire to conjure up memories of the man who had abandoned her as a child.
A man she didn’t even know existed until a few short years ago. A man whose existence had turned her entire life upside down—literally—and sent her down a path she wasn’t proud of. A path she was still trying to come back from.
Just another reason to let Darren find someone else, she told herself as she took the pretzels out of the oven, brushed them with butter, and sprinkled huge chunks of salt on them. But he hadn’t gone looking for anyone else. Farrah was connected well enough to the gossip lines in town to know.
Guy’s phone rang, and Farrah’s pulse pumped out an extra beat. She hated phone calls before the bowling alley opened. It wouldn’t be a customer calling; they’d call the alley and the recorded message would tell them when the fun center opened.
No, this was an employee about to call in sick. And Farrah knew what that meant.
“Can you work the front desk while I find someone who can come in?” Guy didn’t look weary of his young employees. His fingers flew over the screen as he started texting other people who might be able to cover for the missing teen.
“Sure thing.” Farrah flashed him a smile and stepped out of the concessions stand. If she had to choose, she’d rather be in the back, stirring marinara and frying frozen cheese sticks.
But whatever. This was a job she needed, and one she enjoyed almost all the time. She cast a daggered glance to the only horses in the place—a mural painted on the far wall of the landscape south of town. If she looked carefully enough, she could see Steeple Ridge Farm.
And of course, she’d looked carefully enough while dating Darren, so now her eye flew to the spot with the big brown stable every time she looked at the painting. The stable was only about three inches big in the depiction of the town, but it felt huge to her.
She turned her back on it and used her key to turn on the cash register. She went into the office and opened the safe to retrieve the cash box. With that in place, she checked the shoes, the switches to turn on the lanes, all of it.
The pre-open checklist took several minutes, with the last item on the clipboard to make the rounds of the alley to check for trash, make sure all the racks had the correct number of balls, and pop into the bathrooms to make sure they had been cleaned.
Everything at Pinned was in order, but fifteen minutes remained until they opened. Farrah sighed, realizing that she was ready to go home and her day hadn’t even really started yet.
Seeing Darren had really thrown her off her game, and she took a deep breath to try to center herself. But oxygen alone hadn’t been enough to help her since she’d broken up with Darren.
Three hours later, with the moms-and-children crowd gone, the bowling alley only had one group of older gentlemen still slinging the ball down the lane. The door opened, and a pair of women entered.
Farrah recognized one of them from high school, and her heart shot to the top of her skull. She hated running into old acquaintances, but it was inevitable when she’d returned to her hometown after so many years away.
“Farrah Irvine,” the woman said. She wore a bright smile just like she always had in high school.
“Meagan Bybee.” Farrah smiled back, though hers didn’t feel as natural as Meagan’s looked. “What are you doing here in the middle of the day?” She glanced at the other woman, glad she didn’t have to be confronted with a pair of old classmates.
Meagan had fared well the past thirteen years. Her skin was still smooth though deeply tanned and she carried a flush in her cheeks. Her copper-colored hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, and her eyes glinted with the color of pine trees.
“This is Audra,” she said, indicating the other woman. “We came to meet with Guy about the farm.” Meagan scanned Farrah in her jeans and the ugliest bowling shirt on the planet. “I can’t believe you work here.”
Farrah had heard that at least fifty times in the past year. “It pays the bills,” she said, turning to get Guy.
“Whatever happened to your show career?”
Farrah flinched, wondering if it would be too rude to simply walk away as if she hadn’t heard. But Meagan was only four feet from her. She’d have to be legally deaf to have not heard. She twisted back, not giving Meagan her full attention.
“Which one?”
“With the horses.” Meagan leaned into the counter and turned to Audra. “You should’ve seen this girl jump. She could make a horse go over anything, no matter what was on the other side, no matter how high.”
The way Meagan told it, Farrah had solved the problem of deforestation or global warming. “It was just horse jumping,” she said. But everyone in Island Park seemed to remember it differently.
“Always modest.” Meagan grinned. “What was your other show career?”
“I tried acting,” Farrah said, not wanting to get into it. “Didn’t work out, so I came back here.”
“To the bowling alley.”
Farrah and Meagan had been in 4H together, and the town wasn’t that big, so they’d shared a lot of classes too. But they weren’t exactly best friends. Farrah wasn’t quite sure what to do with Meagan’s non-question and look of interest. What was her angle?
“You never struck me as an indoor person,” Meagan said.
Audra elbowed her, and the two seemed to have a conversation without saying a word. Meagan really zeroed in on her now. “Didn’t you go to college for a little bit?”
“Yes,” Farrah said, not quite sure where this line of questioning would lead. She hated with the heat of the sun how much this conversation reminded her of another one she’d had just before leaving LA.
“What did you study?”
“Agribusiness.”
Meagan beamed again, practically blinding Farrah with the whiteness of her teeth. “About as far from a bowling alley as you can get.”
Farrah finally turned fully, the stitch in her back annoying her almost as much as the redhead still grinning at her like the fool Cheshire Cat. “So what?” She didn’t care that she sounded rude.
Meagan’s eyes sparked, daring Farrah to get in her face again. “You don’t belong in here, Farrah. What if I offered you a job at my family’s organic farm?”
Whatever Farrah had been expecting from Meagan, a job offer wasn’t it. She blinked, trying to catch up enough to formulate a response.
“We raise tilapia,” Audra said. “Year-round. Along with strawberries, ten varieties of lettuce, microgreens, mushrooms, and herbs. It’s amazing.” She spoke of lettuce as if it were spun from gold.
“Year-round?” Farrah asked. “Even in the middle of the icy Vermont winter?”
“Have you heard of aquaponics?” Meagan didn’t wait for her to respond. “We expanded to that five years ago. Audra is a botanist, and she runs our vegetable side. We have an aquaculture guy, and I help bridge the gap between the two.”
Farrah had to acknowledge her interest in such a venture. She had heard of aquaponics, and frankly, it would be better than spraying disinfectant in used shoes and handing out pretzels to five-year-olds.
“I didn’t finish my degree,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Meagan said. “I remember you from 4H. You had great ideas, and you weren’t afraid to try and fail.” She glanced at Audra. “She’s what we need at the farm.”
Farrah’s fingers clenched. You weren’t afraid to try and fail.
That might have been true once. But now—now Farrah didn’t want to fail again. It seemed like everything she tried ended up in disaster, from horse jumping, to college, to acting, to dating.
“Come out to the farm when you finish here,” Meagan said. “I’ll show you around.” She glanced around. “You got a paper and a pen? I’ll give you my number.”
Numb, and not quite sure how she located the pen and slip of paper, Farrah watched as Meagan wrote Bybee’s Botanicals and a phone number on the paper.
Then she walked away, her head held high and her laughter floating through the empty building, going into Guy’s office and leaving Farrah all alone again.
She stared at the number, at a complete loss for what to do. She recalled Meagan Bybee’s family owning an organic farm. A pretty big one too, if she remembered right. Meagan had always been outdoorsy, always interested in how to grow better food for Vermont.
A spark flared to life inside Farrah. She’d once been passionate about things too. Passionate about horse care while competing. Passionate about film and television and acting.
Her fist closed around the paper, crumpling it as the anger she kept thinly veiled rose and broke through her defenses.
She wasn’t passionate about anything anymore. She couldn’t afford to be.