Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The notice was in the window of Sweet Everything Bakery, taped at eye level. It was on orange paper in big letters with the town seal across the top. Jason read it from the truck while he idled at the stop sign. Town Council Rezoning Hearing. All Residents Welcome. The date sat at the bottom.
Every window that’ll take one. She’d meant it.
His phone hadn’t been quiet since the rodeo.
Mrs. Forsythe’s colt, the one that wouldn’t take a bit.
A barrel racer out of Ennis with a mare that had started refusing the alley.
Two calls he’d let go to voicemail because the men on the other end wanted to talk about that night at the pens more than they wanted to talk about their horses.
He’d called them back anyway. Tate said that was the job now. Answering all the calls.
The Baileys’ mare had come home the morning after. Loaded without a fight.
He’d come in for halters and a coil of soft rope from Bob’s, and he’d have been in and out if he hadn’t noticed all the orange notices everywhere.
He counted a couple more before he reached the square. Cliff’s Country Store. Bob’s Hardware.
He circled the block and parked. The Bloom Shop on the corner had another notice in the window that the building had office space for lease above the shop. That might be just what a new PR firm needed to get off the ground.
He didn’t know much about public relations.
He knew what the paper had printed. First honest publicity I’ve ever run.
He’d read that line enough times that the fold had gone soft.
He knew she’d walked out of her father’s suite with no title and no salary and nothing to fall back on but whatever she could build.
And he knew she still counted every door that opened for her in this town as if she expected it to shut.
A room over the square, with her name on the door, where anybody in town could walk past and see her working. That’d answer the question. Not for the town. For her.
The bell over the Bloom Shop door rang when he went in. Cold water and cut stems, buckets of mums along the wall in every color the mountain turned in October, and the woman behind the counter looked up from a ribbon she was curling with the edge of her scissors.
“Help you?”
“The space upstairs.”
“By appointment.” She went on curling. “It’s my sister’s building. She’s particular about who she shows it to.” Then she looked at him again, longer. “You’re the Dennison from the rodeo.”
“One of them.”
“The one who went in the pen.”
He didn’t say anything to that. She set the scissors down.
“Tell her Jason Dennison asked,” she said. “She’ll call you back before supper. She was in the grandstand.”
He saved the number off the sign. Then he stood there longer than he needed to, hat pushed up off his forehead, looking up at windows that might be the front to a perfect space she hadn’t seen yet.
His phone went off while he was still at the glass. A number he didn’t have, area code from out east.
“Mr. Dennison?”
“Speaking.”
“Reginald Williams.” A pause. “Cecelia’s father.”
Jason turned from the window. “Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. This isn’t about that.” Papers moved on the other end of the line. “I think it’s time you and I had a conversation. Dinner. Tomorrow evening at the Aviary. I’ll have a table.”
“What’s it about?”
“You’re not a stupid man. You know what it’s about.”
“Does Cece know you’re calling me?”
“Cecelia and I aren’t discussing much of anything at present.”
Jason stood there with his phone to his ear. Across the square, Wendy came out of Horseshoe Antiques with a stack of orange paper under one arm and started on the lamppost.
“Will Cece be there?”
“No. And I’d take it as a courtesy if she didn’t know about our dinner meeting.”
“I don’t keep secrets from her.”
“On this, you’d be wise to.”
“I’ll be there,” Jason said. “And I’ll be telling her. I won’t keep anything from her.”
Nothing on the line for a breath. Then, “Tomorrow, Mr. Dennison.” The call ended.
A man like that didn’t buy dinner to say congratulations.
Jason turned the phone over in his hand.
Tate would want to come. Tate would want to sit in the truck outside the Aviary with the engine running, and Jason would tell him no, and Tate would do it anyway.
Whatever Reginald Williams had to say across a white tablecloth, he’d be saying it to a man who wasn’t going to back down from him.
Jason looked at the phone, then at the flyer. Wendy had moved on to the bench outside the bakery.
She spotted him before he could decide whether to wave. Wendy didn’t wave. She came across the square at a walk that dared traffic to try it, the stack of flyers riding on her hip.
“Jason Dennison. Standing in front of a flower shop with your hat off. I’m going to need an explanation.”
“Hat’s on.”
“Barely.” She peeled a flyer off the stack and held it out. “For the barn. Tate already took two, but he’ll lose one.”
He took it. The paper was warm from her arm.
“She paid for these, you know,” Wendy said, and she wasn’t teasing anymore. “Every one of them. The boutique took two. Girl in there about swallowed her gum when I told her whose check it was.”
“She take them?”
“Put one in the door.” Wendy looked past him at the Bloom Shop window, at the flyer, and then at the sign under it, and her eyebrows climbed. “Huh.”
He didn’t answer that either.
“Huh,” she said again, with a good deal more in it. “Well. I’m going to go tape a lamppost. You didn’t see me.”
“Never do.”
She got three steps and turned around. “We’re coming up to the lodge tomorrow night. All of us. Tell Cece to brace herself. Faith’s bringing licorice.”
He pulled up Cece’s name and sent a text that her dad had invited him to dinner tomorrow and that he’d give her all the details afterward. He sent it. Then he took a picture of the window, both signs in the frame, and sent that too.