43. Annabelle
Annabelle
Three months later
I twist the key and open the door to my building’s new annex.
Grant is behind me, wrestling with a hand truck holding eight gallons of beautiful mint green paint.
I look over my shoulder to catch him checking out my ass.
He grins when I notice him, not at all ashamed. Why should he be? My ass is cute.
We place drop cloths on the floor, laughing when the cloths bunch up and we tangle our hands trying to straighten them.
“We’d better hurry,” he says. “People will start showing up in about ten minutes.”
“Then we should probably pretend we know what we’re doing.”
Yesterday, we taped everything off and painted the ceiling. Today, it’s the walls and trim of the brand-new greeting card business I’m calling Lake & Pine.
I’ve taken the crumbling parking lot next to The Break and turned it into a warehouse and design studio. I had lots of help. Not just Grant, but his brothers, his cousins, our friends, and anyone else who wanted to pitch in. At times, it felt like a whole-town effort.
When it’s finished, I’m going to have my own card printer, a pick-and-pack station, a design space with a gallery wall, and my own office.
There will also be desks for my staff. I’m going to hire at least two people.
Maybe three. Lia is busting through paperwork to get me incorporated as quickly as possible.
I’ve already contracted with a logistics company to move my product in and out, especially the pallets of cards that are going to stores.
All this from one viral moment. My fifteen minutes of fame lasted longer than fifteen minutes once Darla Lee and a few other celebrities started talking about me, and Truly Penrose kept talking about me.
The fact that I live in the middle of nowhere, working for myself, somehow made me even more desirable.
Pretty soon, publicists started begging me to send cards to their clients.
The world’s first celebrity card designer? Yeah, that would be me.
I granted interviews to seven magazines, three TV stations, and sixteen podcasts. I was almost booked on The View, until there was a last-minute conflict and they dropped me. It was just as well, because I have more business than I can handle at the moment.
I’ve kept my longtime fans and they still cheer me on. Every week, I pick a newsletter subscriber at random and send them a bespoke card. They don’t go viral the way celebrity cards do, but they’re the ones I’m most proud of.
Grant helps with the captions. His ideas are sarcastic, hilarious, and so very wrong. He says mine are too nice. We meet somewhere in the middle. Those cards are always the most popular.
“What’s this?” Grant asks, pointing to the lower corner of the far wall where I did some creative lettering.
Yesterday, I took my lightest marker and wrote Lake & Pine, built with love.
I added my name and the date below it. “We’re going to paint over it anyway,” I tell him. “I was just having a happy moment.”
Grant asks to borrow the marker. I hunt around in my supply box and hand it over. He kneels and adds, and one very proud boyfriend.
My heart sparkles like a sunrise over the lake. I pull him in for a kiss, which is quickly interrupted by the arrival of our first volunteers. June and Lia bring urns of coffee and boxes of donuts to set up on card tables outside, then they grab paint brushes and start cutting in corners.
Felix is next, wearing the grubbiest paint clothes imaginable.
An hour later, he’s made himself the unofficial foreman, supervising the moving of ladders, pouring paint into trays and assigning people to walls.
By noon, it seems like half of Echo Creek has shown up, and the other half are stopping by to see what we’re doing.
Grant takes every opportunity to give a tour.
“Her desk will be right there,” he says.
“By that big window. Cards displayed along that wall. Desks for her assistants on that side. And me in the background, telling you that I always knew she’d make it. ”
At noon, Dove and Roy bring over sandwiches. Grant notices that I’ve got a smudge of paint on my jaw, and he wets a napkin to carefully wipe it off. “That’s one of my favorite places to kiss,” he says, and leans in to show me just how much.
“Hey lovebirds,” Roy calls from across the room. “Less flirting, more painting!”
We break apart, laughing, finish our sandwiches, and get back to work.
Activity swirls around us all afternoon. Ladders shifting, coffee poured, good-natured arguing about primer versus two coats. In the back hall, a radio is playing contractor rock. Sometimes the whole room sings along.
Sophie stops by with a new list of grants we can apply for.
Turns out, Ender was wrong about me needing loans to fix my building.
There’s state aid, small business assistance, and a whole fund just for women entrepreneurs in Schoolcraft county.
Best of all, Ender and his cronies aren’t eligible for any of it.
Sophie and I are working on proposals together, since she has a business of her own to nurture, and our opportunities overlap.
She grabs a brush and fixes the terrible job someone did cutting in around an outlet. She does the same around the window frame in my office. Then she starts leveling all the ladders. Sophie’s little brother is here too, and when she tries to pull him off a ladder, he pouts, calling her bossy.
“Hey,” Felix tells him. “She’s not bossy. She actually knows what she’s doing.”
Sophie rears back with a shocked expression. She covers it quickly. “I can defend myself,” she says.
Felix pulls at his grungy cap. “I was trying to help.”
“Trying to have the last word, you mean.” She pulls the ladder over to the doorway and gets a tiny brush to correct the places where someone splattered green paint on the trim.
Felix sighs and hands her a pint of white semigloss, getting offended when she tries to stir it, since he already did.
Grant is standing next to me, watching the show. “Were we ever that bad?”
I lean into him. “Worse.”
Scott and Tammy arrive when the job’s nearly done, but I forgive them when I see that Tammy’s carrying a sheet cake and Scott’s dragging in a bookshelf he found at The Restyle Room. “All it needed was sanding and refinishing,” he says. “Easy.”
Tammy has frosted the cake to look exactly like the Lake & Pine logo. “It’s beautiful,” I gush.
“My kids never let me fuss over their birthdays. Or holidays, which, you know, same thing. I hardly ever get to bake a cake.”
“You can bake me a cake anytime.” I want to hug her but I’ve got too much paint on me.
Scott and Tammy poke around a bit more, admiring what we’ve done here, but they can’t stay long. They’re leaving tomorrow for a vacation to Niagara Falls, and they need to go home and pack.
“But we’ll be back in time for family dinner,” Tammy reminds us. “We wouldn’t miss it.”
Grant puts an arm around me. “We wouldn’t miss it either.”
Tammy nods at me. “Annabelle, I can count on you for the potatoes, can’t I?”
“You betcha.” I’m honored to be trusted with a three-generation recipe, handed down from her grandmother.
Grant’s whole family treats me like I’m one of them.
June was already like a sister, but now I have three brothers too.
Felix loves to make me laugh. Blake has stopped flirting with me and is always a true gentleman.
I’m getting to know Cole, who’s quirky and brilliant.
On the last day of school, I helped Tammy’s kindergarten class make sun catchers.
Scott jumped my car when it wouldn’t start.
They aren’t my parents, but I think mine were a lot like them.
Grant and I tell them we expect lots of pictures from their trip. We walk them to the door.
Ted Ender is on the sidewalk. Smug. Overdressed. Still acting like he can buy Echo Creek. Maybe he can. His company has bought eight houses in the last three months and Ender is running for city council. So far, the businesses on Cedar Street are holding firm.
Grant murmurs, “Ready?”
“Ready,” I say. “One. Two. Three.”
We both lift our middle fingers, giving him a double bird. Ender scowls and keeps walking. It’s become our daily ritual, and it’s satisfying every single time.
We’re putting away the last of the supplies and admiring the freshly painted walls when Grant’s phone beeps an incoming text. He reads it, smiling into the screen.
“What?” I ask.
“Ricky,” he says. He shows me the screen. There’s a pink, mushy baby on it. Grant reads the caption and gives it an indulgent smile. “They had their second kid last night and she’s apparently the best child that’s ever been born. Except for their first, of course.”
Grant and Ricky got back in touch a few months ago, and it’s like they never stopped being friends.
Ricky forgives Grant for what he did, but it’s more than that.
He says that Grant set him on a better life path.
I don’t know if that’s true, but what is true is that they both ended up in a healthy place, and their friendship is thriving.
Grant texts Ricky his congratulations while I answer texts of my own. The group chat is full of plans for girls’ night at The Driftwood next week. June, Sophie, and Lia make me swear I won’t miss this one. I remind them that Kat will be visiting. They say they can’t wait to meet her.
Grant stands behind me and kisses the top of my head. He reads over my shoulder. “They love you.”
“Because love is real,” I tell him.
“It is,” he agrees. “What do you say I take you home and show you how real it is?”
“Your place or mine?”
That’s a joke. We’re renting a house on Conner Street. The apartments above The Break are empty for now, but I have big plans for the building. The renovation includes a new roof, a new HVAC system, and extra insulation. I’m going to make the rage room soundproof, once and for all.
“I love that I can say home and it means with you,” Grant says.
“I love every ridiculous part of you, from the way you argue with your shoes to the way you bring the sun into every room you enter. I love what you’re building here, and I can’t wait to discover what you’ll do next. I love you, Annabelle.”
“And I love you, Grant.” I’m sticky with sweat and spilled paint, full of coffee and sugar, and somehow, with Grant’s arms around me, I feel like the most beautiful, most talented, luckiest woman alive.
The best part is, I get to spend the rest of my life with the best man I’ve ever known. A man who supports my dreams. A man who’s given me his whole heart.
A man who loves me.