Chapter 32
“Holy fucking shit.”
Zander took the words right out of Penny’s mouth.
Side by side just past the caution tape, Penny and Zander stared at the sunken main street of Sullivan’s Glen. Workers in bright orange vests milled around, putting up more tape and orange cones.
Penny took in a long, slow breath. She’d been doing a lot of calming breathing in the past twelve hours, since she’d gotten a call about an emergency downtown. Also crying, shaking her fists in the air, pacing her kitchen, and sitting on the ground between her beehives.
But as Penny assessed the damage of downtown Sullivan’s Glen, where swatches of pavement protruded at jagged angles from a literal hole in the ground, she knew it could have been so much worse.
Miraculously, there’d been a lull in traffic when the road had collapsed, so no one had been hurt.
The only casualties were a few parked cars.
And the annual Sullivan’s Glen Honey Festival.
Vendor tents slated for this portion of Main Street were jumbled in the chaos, some tipped over sideways into the sinkhole. Down the street, emergency crews disassembled the others. Penny had tried to help, but they’d quickly ushered her back to her side of the caution tape.
It was Sally from city hall who’d given Penny the bad news: while only one block of Main Street was sunk into the ground, the county engineers had concerns about the entire downtown.
An extensive water leak, combined with record rainfall that spring, had turned everything under the asphalt to mud, and they were unsure how widely the danger spread.
Until a full safety analysis could take place, the entire area would be kept clear.
“The area” included everywhere the festival was to take place.
“Okay.” Penny nodded. “Okay. How can I fix this?”
Zander stared at her. “Excuse me?”
“There must be something I can do. Maybe I can help clean up some of the tents, see if any of them are salvageable for the deposit we put down. Do you think they’ll let me help?”
“No, I don’t.” Zander held her arm, like Penny might jump over the caution tape. Which, in all fairness, she had considered. “I think that’s a very bad idea.”
“I could go over to the basketball courts, where you had the food stuff set up. Are the crates of ingredients still there? Because if we get them now before it gets too hot, I might be able to—”
“Penny. That whole area is closed—we’ve been over this. It’s not safe.”
“Oh my god, Zander. It’s not like the ground is just going to collapse under me.”
“That’s literally what just happened. We’re only standing here right now because they knew you wouldn’t leave without seeing the carnage.”
“Fine.” She whipped out her phone. “I’ll start calling the vendors, make sure everyone knows. I’ll tell them to sit tight while I figure out another weekend.”
Zander grabbed her phone before she could pull up the spreadsheet. “Your mom is calling the vendors, remember? And this area is going to be blocked off for weeks, and all the weekends in August are already permitted for something else.”
“Like that stupid garlic festival,” Penny grumbled. “There has to be another time we can do this.”
“Penny, there’s not. We’ve double- and triple-checked.”
“So what? We just accept that this isn’t happening? I’ve been planning this for months, Zander. You’ve poured yourself into this for most of the summer, and now you’re ready to just give up?”
“I’m not—” He shook his head and entwined their fingers. “I’m not giving up. But we need to face reality. This isn’t something you can fix.”
“If I work hard enough—”
“You’ll make yourself sick and miserable.” Zander pulled out his phone. “Hold on, okay? Stay right here, I’ll be right back. Do not move, Becker.”
He stepped away, phone to his ear.
When she’d called him the night before, half crazed and rambling about sinkholes, he’d come to her place immediately and held her as she sobbed into his chest. It was more than she deserved, because for all the ways her heart wanted to go along with Zander’s plan to continue their relationship, she knew it couldn’t work.
He was a romantic, but she was a realist—she had responsibilities to worry about and no choice but to look at things rationally.
Penny’s first priority was Becker Farms, and she couldn’t do that with her heart and mind hundreds of miles away.
She tried again to call her mom but was sent right to voicemail.
She was desperate now for some of her silver linings, because from where Penny stood, this was really bad: her deposits and investments in the festival were lost, and there was no telling how much would be covered by the bare minimum event insurance she’d purchased.
The crates of honey she’d been banking on selling today would stay in the warehouse, as would the flyers telling the thousands of people who’d come to the festival about the Becker Farms apple harvest in the fall.
And all the festival vendors were out the day of sales they were expecting, and everything they’d set up the night before had been swallowed by the earth.
She and her mom and Mimi had agreed to wait to talk about the loan until after the festival, and now they couldn’t delay.
Penny could no longer cling to the hope that the Honey Festival would save Becker Farms any more than she could believe she’d have a partner to help her work through it when the dust settled.
“Sorry.” Zander jogged back. “It was Winter. I mean Mallory. Winter wanted more screen time. It’s a whole thing.”
“Is he disappointed?” she asked. “He was excited about helping with the kids’ area. He’s been talking about the bubbles all week.”
“Um, yeah.” Zander squeezed the back of his neck. “Totally. Hence the screen time.”
“Have you heard from RJ? I keep texting, asking about what he needs today. I know he had a ton of pies baked—do you know if they’ll freeze okay? Should we go get them?”
“RJ’s pies are fine,” Zander answered. “He’s just—well, I don’t know where he is. Probably freezing pies. But I’m sure he’ll let you know if he needs anything. Right now, he would probably tell you to relax and take care of yourself.”
“Relax and take care of myself? Is that a joke? There has to be something I can do.”
“There isn’t!” Zander blew out a long breath as his face softened. He closed the space between them and held her face in his hands. “Listen. This sucks. I don’t want to sugarcoat it. But it’s not your problem to solve.”
“Maybe it is, though.”
She had to do something to put herself to use. That was the answer to the horrible, achy sadness she felt in her core. If this were the bees’ problem, they’d be hurrying to clean it up and put everything to rights. She envied their simple, biologic directives.
“Penny, look at me.” Zander’s dark eyes were so kind, so caring. They made her think of fertile soil, ready to help things grow. “There’s nothing more to do right now, okay?”
“I know,” she admitted, feeling like an empty balloon. “I’ve been concentrating this whole time on paying off the loan, putting all this pressure on the event, and now I’m back at square one.”
“Baby. I’m so, so sorry.”
She looked back at the sunken ground and broken tents, thought of the wasted food and all the sales that wouldn’t be. All the plans she’d—no, they had made, together—Zander at her side all summer, a co-planner in far more than name alone.
“It’s so sad,” she said. “We did this together, you and me. You were a big pain, and you made yourself a co-planner, and at first I was so mad, but really doing this with you was the best…” And she didn’t want to cry again, because she was so tired of crying this week, but it was no use.
“It was one of the best things I’ve ever done.
It was something I’ve always wanted, to have someone truly at my side.
And I was so excited to see it happen, and see the result of all of it together before you leave.
And I’m just really sad that we won’t get that. ”
“Penny.” He said her name like it hurt, but also like it soothed the hurt.
Like it was everything. “I feel that way, too. Doing this with you has been incredible. I didn’t even know work could feel like this until this summer.
” He dropped a short kiss on her lips and drew in a deep breath.
Finally, he said, “Let’s go get breakfast.”
“Get breakfast?” She gaped. “That’s what you want to do right now?”
“Yeah.” He released her face to check his phone, typing something quickly before stuffing it back in his pocket. “I think food will help. I really want to go to breakfast. RJ mentioned a diner he loves over in Greendale.”
“Greendale is thirty miles away.”
“They’re supposed to have really good pancakes.”
“Really good—?” Penny’s jaw dropped. Behind them, Sullivan’s Glen was in shambles, and Zander wanted pancakes. “Are you well?”
Zander smiled. “The festival went to hell. But I’m here with you, and we’re going to get pancakes. So yeah, I’m well.”
She shook her head as he pulled her toward the car, all the workers looking relieved that she might finally leave them in peace. “You’re being super strange right now.”
He kissed her before opening her car door. The kind of deep, languid kiss that felt like floating. Then he shot her one of his Zander Bouras troublemaking grins. “Don’t mind me, Becker. I’m just trusting in the universe.”
Two plates of pancakes and a trip to the Greendale Public Library later, Zander was finally taking Penny home.
Apparently, sightseeing was Zander’s coping mechanism.
He’d also wanted to stop at a nature refuge for a “leisurely and very long stroll,” but Penny just wanted to get home and pull the covers over her head.
After a lengthy argument during which Zander managed to list fifteen reasons that a stroll would be just what she needed, he finally acquiesced and took them home.
The pancakes had been good, at least. Though Zander kept getting calls from Mallory—she was needing a lot of co-parenting advice today.
And Penny enjoyed the peaceful drive with the windows down.
But as they got closer to town, her melancholy took root again.
She really would have loved to see the thing she and Zander made together, and she wouldn’t get another chance.
Traffic slowed as they approached the turnoff to the lane that the Bouras and Becker properties shared. “What are all these cars doing here?”
Zander tapped on his steering wheel. “Not sure.”
Most of the cars were pulling into the lane. So many that the line backed into the road.
“Where are all these people going?”
“Um, weird.” More tapping on the steering wheel. “Don’t know.”
They finally turned in, and cars were parked along the side of the drive all the way to where the lane split. As Zander pulled through slowly, Penny gaped at the array of people and trucks and tents, like a circus had come to town and set up in Zander’s yard.
If Zander thought the whole thing was weird, he didn’t say so. He just pulled up near his house and put the car in park. Penny leapt out, only to have someone barrel into her from behind.
“Ooh, sorry, Penny!”
She spun to see a burly guy carrying large black bags under each arm.
“Patrick?” He was the goalie on RJ’s hockey team. “What are you doing?”
“Putting the tents where RJ told me they should go?” He was breathing hard. “I better go, though. He said if we slack off, we don’t get pizza.”
“RJ?” Penny looked around the people moving around outside like busy little ants. “Where is RJ?”
Usually RJ was easy to spot in a crowd, but a surprising number of the people around her were as big as he was, most of them carrying things.
Finally, she spotted her friend near a tree, smiling big and pointing somewhere as he talked to another one of his teammates.
When RJ glanced over and saw her staring, his eyes widened before he bound toward her.
As RJ approached, two extremely familiar voices floated toward Penny from the path that led to her bee yard.
“I told you, Mother, I already talked to Macey and she said her truck is out of commission.”
“Christ on a cracker, she’s a dirty liar!
I saw her driving the truck yesterday. She’s just too lazy to get out of bed so early.
” Her mother and Mimi appeared on the trail, Mimi’s finger pointed in the air.
“I promise you, if we send one of the hunks over there to borrow her truck, she’ll give up the keys in an instant, and we can start doing the rounds and getting everybody’s shit over here. ”
Just past them, Janice from Neat Knit was laying out skeins of yarn on a plastic table, and nearby them, Ronaldo from the chamber of commerce chatted animatedly with Sally from city hall.
“Fine, but you need to ask one of the hunks to do it.”
“Oh, Ruthie, I’d be more than happy to.”
“Pen!” RJ slid in front of her, breathing hard. “You’re here!” He gave a distinctly unfriendly look to Zander. “Zander, I thought you guys were going to be out all morning.”
“Dude.” Zander groaned. “I swear to god I tried.”
RJ shook his head. “You had one job.”
“You try bossing Penny around! I just barely got her to agree to the pancakes.”
“You guys?” Penny interrupted. “What is going on?”
“Penny!” Penny was engulfed in her mother’s arms. “Good morning, sweetheart. Did you already have breakfast in Greendale?” She shot a look to Zander. “It’s still so early.”
Zander mumbled something indecipherable and ran a hand over his face.
“RJ, honey,” Mimi butted in. “I need you to direct me to your best hunk, and stat.”
He wiggled his eyebrows. “We all know that’s me, but if you’re looking for someone else—”
“Excuse me!” Penny hollered. Everyone snapped their attention to her. “But what the hell is going on?”
RJ bounced on his toes, his smile big enough to swallow her up. “Isn’t it obvious, Penny? We’re saving the Honey Festival!”