Picket Fence Promises. Kathryn Springer

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      Greta is Mindy’s niece, her brother’s youngest daughter. There aren’t many teenagers like Greta in Prichett. She dresses in black from head to toe, but that’s just to throw people off. She designed Elise’s dress for the pageant and I know she has a colorful soul.

      “Tired lately. Senior year, you know. She’s supposed to find out any day now if she’s been accepted by that college in New York.”

      The door opened and Jim Briggs stepped inside. Mindy began to bounce up and down so much that I was tempted to make her sit in the elephant chair. It came equipped with a seat belt for rambunctious toddlers but there were many times I was tempted to stuff fidgety adults into it, too.

      If there were an eligible bachelor in Prichett, it would be Jim. He’d sold the family farm and started an excavating business, which must have been successful because a few years ago he built a brand-new, two-story house just outside the city limits. I tried really hard not to drool over the picket fence.

      Jim and I had met shortly after I’d moved to town. He’d shocked me by stopping in at the salon even though the majority of the men in Prichett seem to regard personal grooming the same way a stray dog would. When they got too shaggy, they’d go to the barbershop, which had the macho name of the Buzz and Blade. I never confessed to anyone that that was the reason, in a moment of attempted wit, that I named my salon the Cut and Curl. The trouble was, no one got it. So much for being witty.

      For reasons that I didn’t want to question, Jim had passed the Buzz and Blade that day and stopped in to see if I had time to cut his hair. His reason became obvious while he was in the shampoo chair. His warm, chocolate-brown eyes stared up at me as he’d tried to woo the new girl in town. I may have been flattered, except that his unique brand of romance was telling me that since we were both over twenty-one and single—and because I had a past the town could only guess at—maybe we should get together. As an afterthought, he mentioned pizza.

      So I dyed his hair green.

      He ran all the way to the Buzz and Blade and I don’t quite know what happened after that. All I know is that Jim has avoided me ever since and no one else—the cowards—had asked me out on a date since.

      And now here he was, shaking snow out of his hair and pouring himself a cup of coffee.

      “That’s regular,” I told him.

      He made a face. “Is there anything else?”

      I’d seen Jim in church just this past Sunday. Elise told me he’d been attending for a few years now but I wouldn’t have known that because I just started to go to church a few months ago myself.

      “Is there something I can do for you?” I asked cautiously. Wax your eyebrows? Dye your hair green?

      He smiled. “Two things.”

      Uh-oh. For his sake, one of those things better not be pizza. I could tell by the way that Mindy’s body had gone completely still that her brain was already set on Record.

      “I just joined the PAC and Candy told me I should talk to you about what subcommittee to serve on.”

      PAC was the Prichett Advancement Council. Candy had started it shortly after she was elected mayor. Most of the businesses on Main Street were represented, the Cut and Curl included. Candy had finagled me into serving as vice chairman right at the beginning and ten years later I was still the vice chairman. Not because I was such a great vice chairman but because no one else wanted the job. The other committee members had the responsibility of bringing brownies or making sure there were disposable coffee cups for the meeting. I had to convince everyone that change was a good thing. Brownies were definitely easier.

      “We don’t have subcommittees.” What was Candy thinking? “We all just kind of pitch in and do whatever needs to be done.”

      “She mentioned there was a new committee forming because of the grant the city received last week. Something about the arts?”

      “We got that grant?” I couldn’t believe it. Prichett was barely a dot on the Wisconsin map and we’d actually received the grant that Candy had applied for two years ago?

      “So she says. She’s pretty excited about it.”

      I could only imagine.

      “A grant for what?” Mindy interrupted.

      Sorry, were we talking too fast for you to take mental notes?

      “Candy applied for a special state grant that pays for something in the area of the arts. If we got the grant, we decided to put a sculpture in the park.”

      “That’s a good idea.” Mindy’s head bobbed enthusiastically, almost dislodging the clips I’d put in her hair. “Especially since we’re getting new playground equipment in the spring.”

      The new playground equipment was compliments of Elise. When she won the pageant, she received a check to donate to her favorite cause. Since the playground equipment had been in the park before the invention of a neat little thing called plastic, it definitely needed replacing.

      “What’s the sculpture going to look like?” Jim poured himself another cup of coffee. I was tempted to tell him that I hoped he had a good book handy, because with that much caffeine speeding through his system, he wasn’t going to fall asleep until Saturday.

      “We haven’t decided yet.” Honestly, the chances of receiving the grant had been so small we hadn’t even discussed it. “I suppose that’s why Candy wants a separate committee.”

      In a way that was good because our PAC meetings lasted three or four hours as it was. It may have had something to do with the fact that Prichett’s idea of advancement was one step forward and three steps back. As vice chairman, it was up to me to nudge them into taking the one step forward. Sometimes the nudging took months.

      “If you don’t mind, I’ll put myself on that committee, then,” Jim said. “It sounds like fun.”

      Fun? The words “PAC” and “fun” just couldn’t exist in the same sentence as far as I was concerned.

      “I will, too,” Mindy chimed in.

      “You have to be a business owner to be in PAC,” I reminded her. I took out the blow dryer and glanced at Jim before I turned it on. “You said there were two things?”

      “Yeah, I also need a trim. Do you have a few minutes between appointments?”

      I could tell Mindy wanted to linger and find out if there was something going on between me and Jim by the way she counted out my tip in change instead of parting with the five-dollar bill I saw peeking out of her purse.

      “Oh, Greta needs an appointment to get her hair done for the Senior Tea,” Mindy remembered. I may have denial down to an art, but Mindy has perfected delay tactics.

      I checked my appointment book. The Senior Tea was one of the highlights of the year and my schedule was always tight that day. According to legend, The Tea started years ago as the final exam for a chapter on etiquette in the home economics class. Somewhere along the way, finger sandwiches and punch served in foam cups evolved into its present-day extravaganza—a rite of passage for the senior girls that gave them the chance to wear formal dresses, have СКАЧАТЬ