One Frosty Night. Janice Kay Johnson
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Название: One Frosty Night
Автор: Janice Kay Johnson
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Контркультура
Серия: Mills & Boon Superromance
isbn: 9781474008020
isbn:
Olivia spent the morning working the floor, as she frequently did, answering questions and helping people find the screws and bolts they asked for, pick out the best caulking material or identify the washer needed to stop that drip from the kitchen faucet. She loved the old building, with wood floors that creaked and weren’t entirely level, those high ceilings and the cold drafts that came every time someone opened either the front or back entrance doors. Given a spare moment here and there, she considered the layout and eyed stray corners, trying to envision how she could expand the stock without aisles becoming claustrophobic or displays too cluttered.
The cash registers were the old-fashioned kind, although the credit-card machines weren’t. Dad had modernized only as he had to.
“Nobody in Crescent Creek is interested in hurrying,” he liked to say. In general, it was true. Like she’d told Ben, standing in line at the hardware store was as good a place to gossip as any.
This morning, passing by the short line at the front of the store, Olivia heard Bernard Fulton saying, “That damn wife of mine thinks we’re going out to dinner tonight. Why can’t she cook seven nights a week, I ask? She says, God didn’t work seven days a week, either. I say, but this isn’t Sunday—it’s Monday. God liked Sundays, she says, I like Mondays.”
Olivia stifled a laugh. June and Bernard had eaten at the Crescent Café every Monday night for as long as she could remember, and most Fridays, too. So did all their friends. Most of the men had once worked at the lumber mill. Lloyd and his wife would be there, too, just as they’d play bingo at the grange hall every other Saturday and plant their butts in the same pew every Sunday morning at the Grace Lutheran Church. Bernard and June were Presbyterian, if Olivia remembered right. Pete Peterson, currently listening tolerantly to Bernard, was Baptist. If your inclinations were for anything else, you had to drive at least as far as Miller Falls. Not many locals did.
Was this really what she wanted? she asked herself with some incredulity. By the time she’d graduated from high school, the predictability of every day, of everyone she knew, had begun to drive her crazy. She’d yearned for something different. For adventure. For a future different from the one that had been her dream, when it had included Ben.
And now here she was, taking a ridiculous sense of comfort from the very predictability that had once been such an irritant. Not minding gossip, because...oh, because it meant people were genuinely interested in each other’s doings. Intrigued by the mystery of why Stuart wasn’t talking about what was wrong with his Ford F-250, when her eighteen-year-old self would have pretended to be interested while really thinking, Who cares?
Discovering she did care gave her a funny ache beneath the breastbone, one that didn’t want to go away no matter how busy she got.
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