Trouble When You Walked In (Contemporary Romance) (4 page)

“Maybe he’s changed since high school.”

“People don’t change,” Laurie said. “Look at your parents. When was the last time they called you?”

“I call
them
. That’s our arrangement.”

“They’re selfish academics who’ve never paid attention to you, and you’re
still
trying to win them over.”

“Laurie, they love me. And I love them.” Sure, they were in their own little brainy world all the time. Always had been. But when they remembered to come out of their offices, they were very sweet. And she had Nana to make up for all the hugs she might have gotten otherwise.

“I know,” Laurie said, “but somehow things should have worked out differently for you. And I blame them.”

“What’s wrong with me the way I am? I love being a librarian.”

“Nothing. But part of me imagines you as the stripper librarian. I can just see you on that pole, holding a book. You know what I mean?”

They both chuckled.

“You have this weird idea that I’m some wild woman waiting to be unleashed.” Cissie took her glasses off and polished them on her sleeve. “But I’m happy. And as for Boone, I don’t know why you’d think I care about his love life.”

She’d always been too embarrassed to admit she had a crush on the hottest guy in town. She was supposed to go for intellectual types who played chess rather than football.

“Come on,” Laurie said. “Until he marries and settles down, Boone’s going to be every woman in Kettle Knob’s fantasy.”

“But you’re married and settled down. Perry’s
your
fantasy.”

Laurie made a face at her. “You’ve clearly never been married.”

“Is everything … good? I mean, you love Perry, right?”

“Of course.” Laurie hopped up, held out her hand, and pulled Cissie to her feet. “You’ll understand once it happens to you.”

If it ever did. “If the library moves, the legend is over.”

Laurie’s mouth dropped open. “I forgot about that. So now we have to fight for you to stay where you are, no matter what.”

“But I don’t believe in the legend,” Cissie assured her.

“Who cares? It still might be true! And I, for one, am not going to see your chance to meet your soul mate go down the tubes.”

A few minutes later, Laurie followed Cissie up the mountain to her house. They parked their cars out front, beneath the massive oak tree that had stood there for probably six hundred years, according to the tree experts.

Sam and Stephen, Laurie’s little boys, ran straight to the front porch, sat backward in two rockers, and started rocking for all they were worth.

“You’re the slowest driver ever,” Laurie told Cissie as they walked up the front steps.

“That’s our secret, right?”

“Okay. But when are you going to get used to living on a mountain?”

“Driving ten miles below the speed limit helps me believe I won’t go over the edge,” Cissie explained.

“There are
guardrails
.”

“I know. You’ve told me a hundred times. And I’m still going to drive how I drive.”

Laurie grabbed the backs of both rockers and stopped her sons’ madcap ride.
“Down
.
”

Cissie threw open the front door, which was always unlocked. “Nana, I’ve brought you your favorite boys!” she called from the kitchen, never dreaming she’d be living back home at age thirty-two. She’d figured she’d be married by now, maybe with a child or two of her own. She’d make love every night on a four-poster Shaker-style cedar bed with a crocheted canopy topper in front of a roaring fire with her version of Boone Braddock—

No. With Mr. Darcy, of course. Boone was now officially off her fantasy list, no matter what Laurie said.

“Nana!” the boys cried in unison. “Where are you?”

Laurie set a pie dish and two identical catalogs on the kitchen counter. “Are you sure she won’t mind buying more? What if she has a whole attic full?”

“I know she doesn’t,” said Cissie. “She loves that gift wrap. Don’t feel guilty.”

Laurie bit her lip. “Well, I do make the best chicken pie in town. I hope that’ll help lessen the pain when she writes out the checks.”

“And y’all need to stay for dinner.”

Laurie shook her head. “We would, but Perry might come home early tonight from his trip.”

“I hope so.” Cissie was glad for the distraction of her BFF and sons, but how would she tell Nana that the library was going to be no more? Their family history was tied up in that place.

“Where is she?” Sam asked.

Usually when Cissie came home she heard her grandmother singing or whistling. But the house was strangely quiet. She refused to panic. Nana was fit as a fiddle.

“I hope she’s all right,” Laurie whispered.

Which only made Cissie panic more. She handed off the boys to their mother. “Let me check. Y’all wait here a minute.”

“Okay.” Laurie made the boys wash their hands at the sink.

Cissie slung her purse over a chair and walked nonchalantly through the kitchen into the great room, where every wall was lined with books. Dexter, their sixteen-year-old Siamese cat, lay curled in a patch of sun on the faded olive plaid armchair, his usual place in the afternoon.

“Nana?”

She wasn’t there.

Cissie paused for a moment, listened. But all she heard was the distant whine of a chainsaw somewhere on the mountain and from upstairs, the staccato sound a brand-new playing card makes in your bicycle spokes as you’re riding downhill.

She turned. Marveled at the precision and vibrant colors of a long line of small wooden blocks spiraling around the plank floor and ascending up the staircase to the second floor.

Oh, Nana
.

Cissie pressed her palm to her cheek. “Laurie! Get out here with the boys. Fast.”

They ran in. Waited.

Watched.

When the rippling waterfall of toppled rectangles knocked down the final one—the red one at her feet—Cissie clapped, then chuckled when she saw what the back of that domino said:

Time to hug some boys.

“Hurray!” Sam and Stephen yelled.

Cissie put on the kettle.

Life with Nana was never dull.

When the kettle began to huff and cough, the family matriarch appeared in the kitchen, her hazel eyes sparkling. “I don’t want tea, do I, boys?”

“No!” they cried in unison. “You want a toddy!”

“Exactly.” Nana looked at Cissie and Laurie. “What eighty-five-year-old person wants tea?”

“What’s a toddy?” asked Stephen.

“An older person’s vitamin drink,” said Laurie.

“You’re only eighty-two,” Cissie told her grandmother.

“I know, but I feel eighty-five today.”

Laurie laughed. “There’s an actual difference between feeling eighty-two and eighty-five?”

“Hell, yes, shug.” Short for
sugar
. “You try setting up all those dominoes. But I did it for these rascals.” The boys hugged her around the waist. “And maybe myself, too.”

“You’re the bionic woman,” Cissie said. “And brave. Dexter could have brought the whole thing down.”

“I worked around his napping schedule,” Nana said. “And here’s a confession. I got Mr. Reader to help.”

Cissie drew in her chin. “The bug man?”

“He didn’t have any other appointments after ours. Rule number fifty-five, boys: your bug man is not just your bug man. Take advantage of that fact.”

The two boys high-fived each other.

“Nana,”
said Cissie.

“Rule number fourteen.” Nana was on a roll. “A girl’s gotta have some adventures, whatever it takes, especially when she could kick off at any moment.”

“Don’t say that,” said Cissie.

“Kick off?” asked Sam.

“She plays football!” said Stephen.

“I knew it!” Sam crowed.

They bumped chests in a Neanderthal display of approval.

Laurie laughed and kissed Nana’s cheek. “Ready to be shaken down?”

“Where’s my catalogs?” Nana asked the boys. “I’m itching to buy gift wrap. A ton of it.”

Sam and Stephen stared at each other in delight and ran to get the catalogs. Twenty minutes later, they were gone and the chicken pie was in the oven.

“I’ll get the Jameson,” Nana told Cissie. “Meet me on the front porch for a cigar. It’s time you learned to smoke one. Give you some hair on your chest.”

“I don’t smoke cigars. They stink. And I don’t want hair on my chest.”

But she’d go. She’d sit upwind of her grandmother while she smoked her cigar and drank her whiskey and water, no ice, and talked about the world as if it were her oyster, which it had always been.

It was five thirty in Kettle Knob, definitely happy hour, Cissie supposed. And after what she’d heard today, she’d have a glass of wine, although she wasn’t big on drinking wine, except on Saturday steak nights with Nana.

She’d have a glass of merlot.

Make that two.

She leaned on the counter, shocked at herself for guzzling that first glass, and wondered what the world was coming to. She’d talked to Boone Braddock. The library was shutting down and becoming a county office for waste management. She’d have to work in a strip mall, far enough away from Nana that she’d be worried about her. And definitely too far for Sally and Hank Davis to continue volunteering.

“Whatcha so down about?” Nana asked her on the porch.

Dexter strolled out to keep them company. He sat on his haunches and took in the view. A steady wind blew from the northwest, across the mountaintops, maybe all the way from the Dakotas. Why not? It seemed as if they could see that far.

It was hard to be down about anything when you were looking at a vista so majestic and peaceful that it literally took your breath away. The Smokies were like a cluster of worn old women with rounded shoulders, millions of years of wear and tear softening their lines but not breaking them. No storm or wind, not even time, could move these mountains. They’d be here long after Nana and Cissie were gone.

Cissie sighed, sat in a rocker. “I’ve got some bad news about the library.”

“Spit it out.”

“It’s shutting down. We’re merging with Campbell. At the Harris Teeter strip mall.”

Nana paused a moment, took a sip of whiskey. “It was a good run. Over a hundred years. Not much in mountain time, but in human time—in USA time, especially—it’s pretty damned good.”

“But we can’t just give up.”

Nana took a puff of her cigar, and a strong, sudden gust lifted her hem up over her knees. She smoothed it back down. “We’re getting that old northwest wind, the one we get once a decade or so. Last time it was here, it blew off Billy Shoemaker’s hairpiece and knocked half the letters off the theater marquee. They found an
M
two miles away in Leena Douglas’s garden.”

“Nana. Let’s get back to the subject.”

“The wind
is
the subject, honey. Sometimes things happen you have no control over.”

“You’re the spitfire of the family,” Cissie insisted. “You can’t be telling me to sit there and take it.”

“It depends. Sometimes weathering the storm is better than fighting back, and sometimes it’s not. What can you do about this problem, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. They’ve already signed the papers.” Cissie thought a second. “I could write a letter to the editor.”

“You could.” Nana leaned down and picked up Dexter one-handed. He circled a couple times in her lap and settled down.

“You don’t seem very riled up,” Cissie said. “I thought you would be.”

“At my age, nothing is big enough to rile me. I’ve seen it all.”

“But this means…”

“What does it mean?” Nana tapped her cigar on an old porcelain bowl on a wrought-iron table to her left.

“It means—” Cissie thought about everything she’d always counted on, including true love. These mountains. Chocolate cake to drive away the blues.

“Out with the old, in with the new, as they say.” Nana’s eyes twinkled.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because old matters.” Cissie leaned over and pet Dexter’s smoky ears, and he let out a rusty meow. Cissie took Nana’s hand and squeezed.

Nana squeezed back. “You mean Dexter, not me, right? I’m not old.
Yet
.”

Cissie laughed and kissed her grandmother’s bony knuckles. “Of course, I mean Dexter. But old Rogers family papers matter, too. And—and folklore.”

“Kettle Knob library folklore, especially.” Nana chuckled. “My, oh, my. You don’t really believe in that old story, do you?”

“What harm is there? You still throw salt over your shoulder when you spill it.”

“Habits. They’re easy to fall into.”

“Tell me about it.” Cissie sighed. “Nana—”

She couldn’t bear to say it out loud.

“Honey.” Nana’s voice wasn’t pitying. But somehow, Cissie’s eyes and throat stung. “You don’t have to say it. I know what you’re thinking—that you’re in a rut.”

Cissie nodded. She started rocking, too, and kept her eyes on the farthest peak. “But the fact that you guessed I’d say that … You must have been thinking I was in one, too.”

“Not at all.” Nana blew a big smoke ring, which lengthened and twisted into a figure eight and was carried away by that pesky wind. “It’s not like you don’t get out. You go to work. The store. The occasional birthday party, show, or church thing. Stop being so hard on yourself.”

They rocked in silence a minute or two, Dexter perfectly content with the motion of Nana’s chair.

“I want more.” Cissie stopped rocking.

“That’s my girl.” Nana smiled.

“Hey, you said I was
fine
—”

“And you are. If you’re satisfied. But I suspected you weren’t, and if you’re not”—Nana shrugged—“you have to do something about it. Or become as petrified as that old stump.” She angled her chin at a tree stump a hundred yards off that had been used over several generations for splitting wood.

Cissie sighed. “It’s hard when your best friend is married and has two little boys. And the single people in Kettle Knob my age are either busy working parents or into extreme sports ranging from skiing to hang-gliding to bar-hopping marathons on a Saturday night. I’m just so … boring.”

“Honey, we live in a small town. You have to make do. Get creative.”