Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
"Soap?" Lila asked.
"Soap," Dalene confirmed.
"Who says that?"
"Apparently, my new neighbor, that's who."
"Oh, girl. You cannot catch a break with neighbors, can you?"
Dalene wanted to sigh. She wanted to pinch the bridge of her nose. She wanted to shut her eyes and rub her temples.
She couldn't do anything of those things. There were people watching her. There were always people watching her, looking for signs of emotional fissures.
She smiled at Mr. Garvey outside the hardware store. He smiled back with his whole face. The expression had too much feeling in it. He reached out to pat her arm as she passed.
"Are you doing okay, sweetheart?"
"Never better," Dalene said and kept walking.
"So tell me about this neighbor," Lila said into her ear.
"He walked into Betty Ann's this morning while I was there.
Ate one bite of a scone…" She paused to smile at the Hendersons, who were coming out of the pharmacy and who both stopped and looked at her with the synchronized expression of two people who had discussed her recently.
Mrs. Henderson squeezed her hand with both of hers.
Dalene withdrew her hand as quickly as possible and kept it moving.
"…my grandmother's recipe, Lila, the one I've been making since I was nine. "
"The good one."
"The perfect one. And he told me it tasted like soap."
"He did not."
"He did. And then he said the crumb was too tight and that my sugar ratio was off."
"I'm taking my earrings off right now."
Dalene snorted. Whenever her best friend threatened to take her earrings off, it meant she was going to handle things with her fists. Not that Lila ever raised a hand to anyone. She didn't even wear earrings most days.
"You know you're my favorite," I said.
"Duh. So, what did he look like?"
"That is not relevant."
"So he's cute, huh?"
Dalene waved at Mrs. Patel across the street.
Mrs. Patel waved back and then did the thing — the head tilt, the concerned eyebrows, the small gesture that asked without asking.
Dalene gave her the smile that said I'm wonderful, please don't ask out loud.
Mrs. Patel pressed her hand to her heart, and Dalene heard the silent question, anyway.
At least she didn't have to answer vocally.
"Tall," Dalene said into the phone, turning the corner onto the quieter stretch by the park. "Dark hair. One of those jawlines. Good hands." She paused. "Completely irrelevant."
"Completely," Lila agreed, in a tone that meant the opposite.
"The point is he insulted my grandmother's recipe to my face, and he's going to be my neighbor. Which means I might run into him. Which further means that I will get no peace at all for the rest of my foreseeable life."
"Come stay with me."
"I'm not moving in with you. You snore."
"A dirty, boldfaced lie. And I deleted the audio proof from your phone after our last sleepover, so you can't prove it."
"I'm going to be fine."
"Of course you're going to be fine. You're Dalene freaking Austen; a direct descendant of Jane."
That was not even remotely true. Dalene's mother was Jamaican, and her father's people had settled in what would become Montana before the author had been born.
But it was a nice thought. And it was part of Lila's hype mantra whenever Dalene was feeling low.
Which —and this she only admitted to Lila— was most days these past few months.
She was about to say something back when she noticed it.
Patricia Callendar came out of the flower shop, her phone out.
She looked up and saw Dalene, and her expression did the thing — but worse than the thing.
Worse than the head tilt and the concerned eyebrows.
Patricia looked at Dalene the way people look at car accidents.
Like they couldn't help but stare as their necks turned to rubber.
Dalene smiled brighter.
Patricia looked away fast.
Then Mr. Barney outside the coffee shop did the same thing.
Phone in hand, glance up, glance away. The couple by the bookshop window did it too.
The teenager on the bench who looked up from her screen, clocked Dalene, and then very deliberately looked back down in the way of someone who had been raised with enough manners to know staring was rude but not quite enough to pull it off.
The sympathetic glances from before had been gentle. Neighborly. The warm concern of a town that cared about her and genuinely wanted to help.
These were different. These were pitying.
"Uh oh," Lila said.
Dalene's stomach dropped. "What."
"Okay, D. Don't look at your phone."
"What's happening?"
"Just — don't look at it yet. Let me—"
"Lila."
"I just got an Instagram notification and I need you to not—"
Dalene's phone buzzed against her cheek. She pulled it away from her ear on instinct. One notification sat on the screen. She moved to clear it, thumb already pressing against the cool surface, but she wasn't fast enough. The preview was right there.
@coachtristanhayes had posted a photo.
Dalene's phone was on Do Not Disturb. It had been months since the doctor had told her to reduce her screen time after nine PM. Nothing got through except the people she'd manually programmed as exceptions. Her parents. Lila. And Tristan.
She still hadn't changed it. So now she was disturbed.
"Dalene, don't open it." Lila's voice was small as it came from the phone just a few inches in front of her face.
Dalene opened it.
The photo loaded in the slow, horrible way of things you didn't want to see; top to bottom, pixel by pixel, giving her too much time to understand what she was looking at before the picture became clear.
Stone pavilion. Late afternoon light through old oak trees, exactly the way she'd always known it would look.
Brooke's hand extended toward the camera. Tristan's arm around her waist.
We said YES to the venue!
Around Dalene, Valor went about its Saturday morning. Someone called a greeting across the street. A car pulled out of the hardware store lot. The festival bunting moved in the breeze above her head, red and white, cheerful and completely indifferent.
Dalene was aware that at least four people on this stretch of street had their phones out. She was aware that at least four people on this street now knew what she was looking at. She put her phone back to her ear.
"I see it," she said.
Lila's voice was quiet. "I'm sorry."
Dalene looked at the bunting. She looked at the mountain line at the end of the street, white-capped and enormous against the October sky, the way the Rockies were always enormous and always indifferent and always, somehow, steadying.
She put her smile back on. "I'm fine."
"Dalene—"
"I'm fine." She started walking again. Past the phone-holders, past the pitying glances, past Mrs. Kowalski who had opened her mouth and then thought better of it when she saw Dalene's expression. "It's a venue. It's just a venue."
"It's the venue."
"There are lots of stone pavilions in Montana."
"With that exact oak light that you described to him in—"
"Lila."
A pause.
"Okay," Lila said softly. "You're fine."
"I am. I'm a direct descendant of Jane Austen."
Both statements were lies.