Chapter 5
“Um, Pen? Those people look like they might eat us alive.” RJ scooted closer to Penny, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.
“Do you remember last year when we had that heat wave and a fight broke out in the line at the ice cream truck and Karen dumped her iced coffee over Sarina’s head?
I think we’re in the danger zone. Like, we might want to consider arming ourselves with lemonade or something. ”
It was a long line. A really long line. And the market didn’t officially start for another twenty minutes.
But her table was ready, decked out with jars of honey and beeswax candles, plus bundles of flowers, herbs, and fresh vegetables from their garden. And she’d made space for their latest best-seller: RJ’s mini fruit pies, made with love by hand.
“It’s because May was so rainy,” she mused.
This market, like the others she visited around the county, had been dead for weeks as the whole area got record rainfall.
“Too many customers is better than no customers at all. I just hope it’s like this in Morrowville and Seneca this week, too. We need it.”
“True, but… Wait. Morrowville and Seneca?” Her best friend stared down at her, hazel eyes narrowing as he raised one thin black eyebrow.
RJ had a six-foot-three frame from his Norwegian mom, light brown skin from his Venezuelan dad, and a body bulky from a lifetime of ice hockey. He’d recently cropped his black hair close to his head after a failed experiment with a man bun.
She and RJ had been connected at the hip since toddlerhood while their mothers—best friends in their own right—chatted in lawn chairs and watched their kids play.
In a small town like Sullivan’s Glen, everybody had family around, so Penny and RJ stuck together like glue, agreeing to be cousins in name and spirit.
Each summer that he went to Atlanta to stay with his dad, and later, when they’d parted ways for college and life beyond, Penny was left with a little hole in her heart.
Everybody comes back to Sullivan’s Glen at some point.
Zander’d said it as a joke. But for a lot of them, it was true.
When his mom got her MS diagnosis, RJ accepted that his career in ice hockey wouldn’t go beyond the farm leagues and decided being close by was more important.
Now he split his time between caregiving, coaching youth hockey, and managing the orchards at the farm.
He’d taken classes and connected with other operations to make sure he was taking great care of their apple trees, and Penny couldn’t be more grateful.
But that also meant one more person she loved was tied into the fate of Becker Farms.
“Pen. You told me you weren’t doing Morrowville and Seneca. We agreed you’d slow down to make more room for festival planning.”
Penny broke their staring contest as she adjusted jars on the table. “You suggested that and I didn’t respond. Technically I didn’t agree to anything.”
“You’re going to make yourself sick.”
“You know I don’t have a choice.”
“Penny—”
“I should never have told you.” Penny crouched to check the supply of jars on hand under the table. “I’m going to figure it out.”
For months, she’d kept the loan disaster a secret, even from RJ. But one day while they’d been bottling honey, he’d said they should take a trip together, really enjoy some time off, and she’d burst into tears and explained the whole situation.
RJ crouched beside her. “I’m glad you told me, Pen. But I really wish you’d tell your family. And I wish you’d call Henry and tell him this is his mess to clean up.”
“I’m the one who signed the papers. It’s my mess. I’m the one who didn’t really think—”
“But you trusted him, Penny. You thought he’d be around to help. This isn’t fair.”
She sighed, circling her finger along a golden jar lid. “It doesn’t change the facts.”
And the facts were that at Henry’s urging almost three years ago, she’d gotten a loan to build out a microbrewery facility for hard cider after months of hearing It’s all the rage, babe, it can take this place to the next level.
Penny didn’t tell her mom and Mimi about the plan—once everything was set and building ready to begin, she’d announce the project with a flourish, demonstrating her expertise at running things, her usefulness in guaranteeing them all a more secure future.
Except that the “contractor”—a friend of Henry’s friend who vouched for him, who did deals by handshakes and not contracts—disappeared with her money, and everything fell apart from there.
And when it did, Henry focused on the next big idea rather than acknowledging the disaster, and, to her continued embarrassment, Penny let him.
Months later he was gone for the last time, leaving a heap of debt for Penny to remember him by.
For a while, she’d been able to manage the payments.
But then the interest rate ballooned, just as the apple harvest was hit by a scourge of codling moths, and months later she lost a dozen hives to varroa mites.
Profit margins were already diminishing each year as shoppers wanted to pay grocery store prices for Penny’s premium honey and produce, and the setbacks ate their savings, forcing Penny to stop paying the loan to keep Becker Farms going day-to-day.
She just needed a great summer to get to the other side. Which meant going to as many markets as she could squeeze in and staying up late to plan the festival.
“Stop worrying about it, RJ,” she said firmly. “I’ve got it handled.”
RJ stood, tugging Penny up with him before wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
“I’m only dropping this for now because we’re about to have a literal honey riot on our hands.
” He shuddered as he looked over the top of her head, then lowered his voice.
“Don’t look, but Marjorie Grey is in the line. That woman terrifies me.”
Penny laughed as she pulled out of the hug. “That’s because she wants to get her claws in you.”
“I swear she looks at me like I’m a piece of meat. She’s my mother’s age!”
Penny covered her grin with a hand as she got ready to start helping customers. “I’ll make sure you’re the one to help her.”
RJ groaned. “You’re evil, Pen. You’ve got this town wrapped around your little finger, but I know the real you.”
And then the market was open, and everything was a whirl. She and RJ had done countless farmer’s markets together, but even their practiced ways were challenged by the crush of the crowd.
“Actually, I was in this spot of the line already and—”
That was Maurice Simon. He ran the records office and started every sentence with “actually.”
“Do you have the cherry pies, dear? I only see blueberry here, and blueberries just don’t agree with my stomach. Every time I eat them, I—”
Jasmine Hollister. She always had tummy troubles.
“If you could just hold on a second!” Penny called to someone waiting at the side. She’d promised them more chard, but it was in the back of her truck and there were people asking for honey, and—
“Pen. Oh, shit, Penny.” RJ tugged on her sleeve as he stared at his phone. “It’s Terry. She was hanging with my mom this morning, but her grandkid just got taken to the hospital after a soccer accident, and—shit.”
Penny blinked up at the market crowd, then back to RJ, who was typing something into his phone. She grabbed it, pulled out his card reader, and pressed the phone back into his hands. “Go.”
“This is too much on your own.”
“I said go!” She glanced to the line and gave her bravest smile. “I’ve got this.”
RJ’s shoulders dropped in relief. “I’m just going to check on her. I’ll come back as soon as I can get somebody else over there.”
“Go!” Penny turned him toward the parking lot. “I’ll be fine.”
Just five minutes later, Penny wasn’t fine.
People were clamoring for RJ’s pies, near-wrestling over honey samples, and asking her questions about colony collapse like she was hosting a beekeeping workshop instead of trying to run her damn business, all as she ran back and forth from the table to resupply. Things really couldn’t get worse.
Then she looked up to help the next person in line, only to peer straight into the dark brown eyes of Zander Bouras. His short beard was gone, revealing a sharp jaw with a small nick on the soft skin of his throat.
She swayed slightly before snapping her attention back to his face. “What do you want?”
“And a very good morning to you, too, Penny.” His mouth held a smirk, but his eyes were shifty. He darted a look over one shoulder, then the other, adjusting his Red Sox cap like he hoped to pull it over his entire face.
“What are you—” She followed his gaze to two women in the next line over, watching him unabashedly as they talked behind their hands. Zander’s shoulders curled in further. “Are you in disguise?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Just trying to stay low-profile. Listen, I thought we could talk about Winter and—”
“Not right now, okay?” She motioned to the line behind him. Next to Zander, Mr. Zigler griped about moving things along.
“But Winter is really excited, and I promised him I’d figure it out with you today.”
“Look around. I’m swamped and the person helping me had to go, so I’m doing this all on my own. Come back in a few hours.”
“Come on, Becker, it will just take a few minutes. The world’s not going to end.”
Penny’s hands slapped down on the table.
“I don’t have a few minutes!” Who was this guy, to waltz up and expect her to give him her attention when she had work to do?
So much work to do. “Maybe you think I can blow this off because it’s just some little farmer’s market in some stupid town, but this is my business. This is my life. Come. Back. Later.”
Zander’s eyes narrowed just before he nodded and stepped out of the line.
Penny sucked in a deep breath, grateful he hadn’t caused an even bigger scene.
But as she turned to the next customer, a booming voice soared over her market table.
“All right, everybody, listen up! If we could form two orderly lines, everything will go much faster for all of us. We’ll have one line form in front of the lovely Ms. Becker, and the other one right here with me.”
Penny’s gaze shot to Zander standing beside her, directing the crowd like a symphony as people split into two lines.
“What,” she spat, “are you doing?”
He pulled off his hat and tossed it to the ground before running his fingers through his hair. Somewhere in line, a woman sighed.
“If I need to talk to you about my kid, and you can’t talk until you manage your customers, then there seems to be only one solution.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. Penny Becker, I’m here to help.”