Bluegrass Hero. Allie Pleiter

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СКАЧАТЬ just as much about town atmosphere as it is convenience. And tell me, have you given any thought to who it is that pockets all the service fees for those ugly little machines? And have you seen them? They’d look like giant metallic mushrooms sprung up on our street.”

      She had him there. “I grant you, they’re not very artistic,” he agreed, “but they’re cash machines, not sculpture.”

      “Our streetlights are streetlights, but they still look nice and fit the character of our town.” Emily crossed her arms over her chest.

      Sorrent shifted his weight to the other hip and scratched his chin. “What if there were only two—one at each end of the town farthest from the bank? And what if I talked Howard into putting you in charge of selecting the design and the mounting?”

      She was about to let him know that two ATMs was two too many when he held up a finger and added, “And what if twenty-five percent of all the profits went to the town beautification fund?”

      Emily fiddled with her register buttons for a moment as Sorrent watched her. She’d lost a sale last week when the couple buying dish towels didn’t have enough cash and didn’t want to use their credit card. She’d told them where the ATM was, and they said they’d walk down there and come back for the towels, but they never did.

      And she’d get to choose the design. Not Howard Epson, who couldn’t be counted on to choose red paint for a barn, much less a piece of public structure. And Howard would be forced to donate one quarter of his profits to the beautification fund—the fund that paid the extra money for those particularly lovely streetlights.

      Choose your battles, Emily’s mother always said. Know what hill you’re willing to die on and why. Sometimes your goals planned your solution, and sometimes your solution planned your goals.

      “Mr. Sorrent, you’ve got yourself a deal.”

      Chapter Five

      Gil walked through his bunkhouse that afternoon, shaking his head. Of the room’s twelve bunks, ten of them had those yellow bags from Emily Montague’s shop sitting on or near them.

      He sighed. He bought the guys perfectly suitable soap—he bought the guys lots of things, actually. It was part of his long uphill climb to get them to realize they mattered. The first step to making people think they have potential is to treat them as if they have potential. Gil knew that it was up to him to get this idea through to them, and he did, in a thousand small ways over the course of the months he had with them.

      Horses were one of the best parts of his program. Teaching the men to treat the horses with kindness and respect was a roundabout way of teaching them to respect themselves. Horses were patient listeners and nonjudgmental companions, so they were a good place to start when learning to care about something. They put up with most small errors but let you know when you’d made a big mistake. One of Gil’s first residents had jokingly called the horses “stunt people”—and it wasn’t that far off. Lots of days Gil prayed for as much patience and wisdom as his horses had.

      A horse would have enough sense to steer clear of Pirate Soap.

      Gil walked by Mark’s bunk and grimaced at the bar of Pirate Soap he saw lying there. Mark had been one of the hardest cases he’d ever had. King Lear, the horse Mark cared for, had been the first thing bigger than Mark that hadn’t beat him up. That tough horse and that tough guy had wrestled themselves into an understanding of each other over the months. Gil hoped all that work wouldn’t come undone because of some dumb soap gimmick. As far as he’d come, Mark still kept an eye peeled for the shortcut, the easy out. He had a soft spot for Mark because he saw so much of his former self in the young man.

      Not that he could admit to anything openly. Human-to-human caring rarely showed up between these guys—that’s what made caring for horses such a good place to begin learning. Healthy relationships were like a foreign language to them: combat, defiance and violence were their mother tongues. So “caring” started with the horses, but eventually Gil added a human element, buying a guy a new T-shirt or his favorite pizza. These became footholds as the men discovered how people cared for each other.

      He’d never have paid for their current taste in soap, though. The bunkhouse showers would probably smell worse than Emily Montague’s bath shop come sundown. If it wasn’t January, he’d have told Ethan to set up dinner outside.

      And there was Friday night. That would be a fiasco for sure. He’d taken them to last Friday’s church social in response to a correctional officer’s suggestion that they get more social interaction. Oh, they’d got social interaction that night, but he didn’t think that was what the County had in mind. He’d bought a block of tickets to the community theater musical for this Friday night. It had seemed a safe enough idea at the time, but he was starting to think that unleashing those guys anywhere near town might be a bad idea. The play was The Music Man though, where a good deal of swindling happened, so it might serve as a timely moral lesson.

      Gil took one last look around the bunkhouse, thinking he ought to just scoop up the soap and throw it out. Gratifying as it might feel, though, it wouldn’t help. He had to respect their decisions if he expected them to respect his. And as much as he hated to consider it, Emily Montague might be right about some lessons only being learned the hard way. Maybe now was the best time to teach them that a woman valued how a man treated her, not how he spiced up the air between them.

      He picked up the bag on Larry’s bed and sniffed at it. It was awful. Emily Montague’d thought highly enough of it, but she was a woman given to that kind of thing. He’d seen that “pleasant enough” scent do something to her, make her eyes get a funny, faraway look. She’d certainly never looked that way during a council meeting. No, that was a face he never saw across the table at town hall.

      Gil hit the power button to open the windows in the farm van as they drove into town Friday night. This had better be worth it.

      “Hey,” came Steve’s aggravated voice from the back row of seats, “the hair.” Steve was in his late teens and still growing into his gangly limbs.

      “Hey,” Gil shot back, “the air. My lungs outrank your ‘do.’ And since when did you care so much about your hair?” At this rate, all of Middleburg would catch the scent of them before they even pulled into the parking lot. When he’d planned on attending the theater tonight, Gil hadn’t counted on needing to sit downwind.

      Steve made a show of holding down his unruly but now unruly-and-gelled locks. “There’ll be women there. They love plays and stuff. Especially musicals.” He said the word as if musicals were at the bottom of the theatrical food chain in his opinion.

      “Any females present will be watching the stage, Steve, not you. The only one who’ll be watching you closely tonight is me.”

      “I don’t think so,” came another voice from the back of the van. “That hair’s bound to draw stares.” A rousing chorus of commentary on Steve’s hair rose up from all over the van.

      “Settle down, gentlemen, or—”

      “—you’ll turn this thing around,” came the simultaneous response from every seat in the van.

      Remind me, Lord, why it is that I do this again? Gil pulled into the high-school parking lot with a sigh. Some days he truly felt as if he was shepherding these young men into maturity. Other days, it felt more like herding hyperactive water buffalo.

      And СКАЧАТЬ