Snow Falling on Bluegrass

“Hey!” I cried, shooting to my feet. “Have you all gone nuts? Sadie is your boss. I don’t care if you’re tired or cold or you’ve lost respect for her because you’ve seen what she looks like in third-day jeans—”

  “Kelsey, please stop ‘defending’ me,” Sadie said.

  “You don’t get to have a little whiner-baby tantrum because it started to rain. Now everybody put your big-girl panties on and deal with it!” I exclaimed. “Tom and Gina, if you really don’t trust Sadie’s leadership, you two are welcome to start your own damn tribe on the other side of the lodge!”

  Gina hopped up, palms flat on the table as if she was going to spring over it and tackle me. At this point, she could bring it. I was tired of listening to her whine, tired of sleeping on the floor, tired of being cold and uncomfortable. I was pretty sure slapping the ever-present slick of pink lip gloss off Gina’s pretty, pert face would release the endorphins needed to make me feel better.

  “Well, we’ve officially arrived at the Lord of the Flies portion of the retreat. Who had Thursday in the betting pool?” Charlie asked brightly, as if the near-mutiny of the staff was some sort of therapeutic skit.

  No one laughed.

  “Look, everybody, just take a break, okay?” Sadie said, pinching the bridge of her nose as if to ward off a headache. “Go read or rest or warm up by the fire. I’m going to talk to Luke and figure out where we are. We’ll meet up again for lunch and see where to go from there.”

  Gina shoved her chair aside and flounced away to the lobby, glaring all the way. Dorie Ann pointedly ignored her and stalked into the kitchen with Theresa at her heels. Tom seemed to understand that he’d overstepped his bounds and approached Sadie to apologize. Everybody sort of drifted away from the table and found elsewhere to be. While Sadie and Tom retired to the fireplace to work out their differences, I flopped back into my chair.

  “Will and I are going to go get some more firewood,” Luke told me. “Try not to start any screaming matches while I’m gone.”

  “That was nothing,” Charlie told him, sounding vaguely and inappropriately proud. “You should see her play Trivial Pursuit. The arts and entertainment questions get vicious.”

  “She wrestled Bonnie to the ground over the pink pie piece at the office Halloween party,” Will mused. “It was kind of hot.”

  I looked to Charlie, expecting some offense or defense or any reaction at all. But he just grinned and said, “No, I remember. It was.”

  “I’ll bet.” With a wink in my direction, Luke and Will tromped back out into the snow, leaving me and Charlie alone in the dining room. I leaned my forehead against the table and blew out a long breath.

  “Well, that was . . . colorful,” Charlie said.

  “Thanks for stepping in,” I said. “It probably would have gotten ugly . . . er.”

  “It’s just stress. It’s natural for people who have been stuck together for this long to get on each other’s nerves. We all need a break, that’s all.”

  I grumbled, “I’ll give Gina a break.”

  “Easy, killer.” Charlie tapped me on the shoulder, prompting me to sit up in my seat. “We need to do something about the others.”

  “And by that, I am assuming you don’t mean a neighboring tribe on the Lost island.”

  He snorted. “No, we need to do something for the staff, or this trip is going to be the thing that permanently changes all of the relationships in the office. The little Hatfield-McCoy-style split we had over Josh and Sadie? That will be nothing. We’ll go back and resentments and little arguments from this week will build up until the staff just won’t want to have anything to do with each other. No more break room chats. No more outings to historical reenactments and festivals. We’ll go to staff meetings and actually focus on work.”

  “Ugh.” I shuddered.

  “So what are we going to do?” he asked, his expression expectant.

  “How should I know?”

  “Because you always know what to do. That’s your thing. You are presented with a problem. You come up with a plan. Your loyal minions use said plan to destroy said problem. You are Kelsey, Destroyer of Problems.”

  I hoped that chapped skin could be blamed for my flaming cheeks. “Oh, you have a lot of confidence in me.”

  Charlie nudged me with his elbow. “Always have.”

  “So, now that I have you alone, could we continue the conversation we were having about you being aloof and—”

  “Charlie!” Josh yelled. “Could you come here a minute? Will had an idea involving the minibar in the bridal suite and candles from the gift shop.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I exclaimed.

  Charlie dropped his head. “I would tell him no, but technically he’s my boss.”

  “Assistant boss,” I reminded him.

  “That’s not nice, Kelsey,” Josh called.

  “Neither is your pathological procrastination, Josh!” I yelled as Charlie walked away. “I’ll just take care of this team-building idea on my own, then!”

  8

  In Which My Novelty Ringtones Are Sadly Accurate

  When the team reluctantly filtered back into the dining room for lunch, they found that I had created a giant Jeopardy! board over the dining room window using a king-size sheet and construction paper. The categories were “Kentucky State History,” “Sweet Eats Cupcake Flavors,” “Kentucky Derby Winners,” “Obscure Roadside Attractions,” and “Funny Staff Phobias.”

  “Thank you for that last one, by the way,” Josh muttered as the contestants lined up at the little service bells we were using as buzzers.

  “You want more respect, have a manlier phobia,” I told him. “Now, first question: Kentucky is home to what museum that claims that dinosaurs were present in the Garden of Eden?”

  Dorie Ann smacked her bell. “The Creation Museum in Petersburg!”

  “And Dorie Ann is on the board with two hundred dollars. Dorie Ann, next category?”

  Dorie Ann chewed her plump bottom lip. “I’ll take ‘Funny Staff Phobias’ for four hundred dollars, Kelsey.”

  “This monkey puppet is the official Vent Haven ConVENTion mascot and was used by W. S. Berger.”

  Sadie slapped her bell and yelled, “What is Jacko the Monkey?”

  “Correct!” I exclaimed. “We would also accept ‘A monkey puppet in a bellhop costume that once made Josh cry, then pass out.’ ”

  “I hate you guys,” Josh groaned, though he was laughing with the rest of us. “And it was Jojo the Caveman that made me pass out, not Jacko the Monkey.”

  I played host while Charlie flipped the question cards and kept score. It took a few questions, but eventually the whole staff got involved in the game, shouting out answers and gloating over their scores. They relaxed, laughing and teasing each other over missed answers and the none-too-subtle in-jokes we’d hidden among the questions.

  We needed this. We needed to be reminded why we enjoyed our jobs. As much as we liked the work, the real thrill we got out of promoting Kentucky’s attractions was the fun we had together coming up with our wacky schemes.

  Eventually Dorie Ann claimed victory in Final Jeopardy by betting her whole pot on “Portions of this classic Western movie were shot in Smithland, Kentucky” and answering correctly that it was How the West Was Won.

  And because the team seemed to be having a pretty good time with Jeopardy!, Sadie suggested Trivial Pursuit after dinner to keep the momentum going. Luke found an old-school Genus Edition in the lodge’s cache of board games. Charlie and I paired up and absolutely slaughtered the other teams, between my grasp of eighties culture and literature and Charlie’s history and science knowledge. There may or may not have been an obnoxious victory dance when we obtained the elusive orange pie piece.

  “And in one horrifying swoop, Charlie and Kelsey made us their intellectual bitches,” grumble
d Josh, who shared one measly blue pie piece with Sadie. “Everything’s back to normal.”

  “So this is normal for them?” Luke asked.

  Bonnie sighed. “I forgot how annoying they could be when they’re together.”

  I grinned at Charlie and held out my fist for bumping. “We’re back!”

  “Goofy euphoria. The second sign of snow madness,” Sadie whispered.

  Sadie finally seemed to relax now that she was doing something productive. We planned our summer schedule, including our participation in the Columbus-Belmont Summer Training Encampment and the Hatfield-McCoy Reunion. But we still didn’t have our overall theme for the summer tourism season. Winnowed suggestions so far included “Kentucky—Off to the Bluegrass Yonder” and “Kentucky—What Are You Waiting For?”

  Gina defended her idea, “Kentucky—Home of Johnny Depp” pretty vigorously, but Sadie could not be swayed to spend thousands of dollars on brochures just because Captain Jack Sparrow had happened to be born in Owensboro.

  “We need something a little more universal,” Sadie told her as kindly as possible. “For instance, I have been claustrophobic since we got here. To be honest, I feel fenced in, trapped, closed off, like you’re all sucking in oxygen that rightfully belongs in my lungs.”

  “Well, jeez, Sadie, tell us how you really feel,” Jacob muttered.

  “It’s actually given me an idea,” she said, ignoring him. “What if we do a campaign called ‘Underground Kentucky’? We have a bunch of cave systems in the state, like Mammoth Cave and Lost River Cave. And some of the distilleries age their bourbon in basements, right? We could do a whole series of ads about staying cool underground in Kentucky this summer.”

  “What if we focused on the ‘staying cool’ message?” Josh suggested. “We can keep the cave systems. But we can add separate material on the weird ice creams available here. Ann’s Ice Balls in Newport. Dippin’ Dots are only produced in the Paducah plant. We can run in a couple different directions.”

  “Sounds good.” Sadie nodded. “Fun fact: in Kentucky, it is illegal to carry ice cream in your back pocket. Find some way to fit that into your campaign and you get a gold star.”

  “How does she know things like that?” Dorie Ann asked as she began sketching layouts involving caves and cones.

  “Years of study,” I told her.

  We went round and round until we narrowed our concept and had enough material to return home ready to produce the necessary brochures and paperwork. Even Will had some solid input, noting that we should alert local authorities before printing brochures with the various state landmarks, just to allow the municipalities to make adjustments to traffic enforcement and parking availability. And he none-too-subtly suggested that we produce a brochure of new historical sites around the state, which just happened to include the McBride’s Music Hall Museum and the Martha Smallwood Burlesque Museum in his hometown of Mud Creek.

  I went through my supply of backup camera batteries, but I managed to snap dozens of interesting photos during these sessions. I had my fill of exterior shots. Eventually they all started to look the same. So I took candids of my coworkers. Sadie and Josh attempting to work from a dining room table with only a dry-erase board and legal pads. Dorie Ann sketching in a corner. Gina didn’t want any close-ups of her in her makeup-free state, so I made sure to take a few extra.

  I had already decided to build a commemorative snowpocalypse pinboard when we got back to the office, entitled You Can’t Keep a Good Staff Down. I would have Bonnie make use of her snowflake-cutting skills to decorate the shots of us being all productive and responsible. At least we could prove to Commissioner Bidwell that we’d made good use of our time while we were away.

  Of course, our productivity meant that we ran through the office supplies we brought with us. We depleted our stock of binder clips, which I considered a remarkable proof of how much work we were actually accomplishing. Since the front desk didn’t stock them, Luke agreed to let me look through his manager’s desk for some extra. But the manager, Sandra, was not nearly as neat as Sadie. Her drawers were a jumbled mess of twisted rubber bands and paper clip chains. And she was a doodler, filling the margins of her blotter, her calendar, and her spare Post-its with stars and spirals. My hands nearly shook with the impulse to sort through the chaos.

  “That mess is driving you crazy, isn’t it?” Luke mused.

  I scooted Sandra’s chair closer to her desk so I could rifle through the top drawer. “It’s nice that you know me so well after such a short time together.”

  “Oh, I think it would take a few more months of being trapped together before I really figured you out. Maybe years. You’re a girl with a lot of layers,” Luke said. I grinned at him. “I’m willing to put in the time, though, just so you know. I just want to put that out there.”

  And suddenly, I couldn’t seem to look up at him. I was depriving myself of seeing those oceanic eyes looking down at me, and for what? Because I had suffered a personality transplant and was now too shy to function? When we arrived at the lodge, I was all fired up to rebound with anything that had a pulse. And now that I seemed to be on the verge of something with Charlie, it seemed wrong to talk this way with someone else. Flirting was one thing, but outright discussion of what he was willing to “put time” into? It felt wrong.

  Taking a deep breath, I very deliberately locked eyes with Luke and gave him a smile. “Let’s just try to make it out of here without falling victim to any number of horror movie tropes, okay?”

  I opened the desk’s bottom left-hand drawer. This was definitely Sandra’s personal drawer, stocked with little packs of hot chocolate, trail mix, Teddy Grahams, and feminine supplies. Under a box of tampons, I found a small yellow electric lamp with a radio built in and a wind-up crank folded into the side. “Hmmm.”

  I turned the crank a few times and the lantern blinked to life. The radio broadcast a weak white noise signal. I laughed. I’d seen these in SkyMall catalogues. Wind ’N Go Portable Lantern Radios. You hand-wound the crank until the lantern was fully charged and it could light up a (small) room for hours. I flipped the lantern over to find the feature I was really interested in.

  “Yep.” I cackled. On the side of the lantern were a series of ports made for various cell phone charger cords. The adapters were stored in a little compartment in the bottom of the lantern. If we wound the lantern long enough, we could charge our phones.

  “Luke, do you know what this is?” I asked, spinning the little crank.

  “Oh, yeah, Sandra mentioned she’d picked one of those up just in case, but I wasn’t sure where she put it.”

  “Why didn’t you look in here before?”

  “Because I didn’t think she would store it in there with her snacks,” Luke said. “Besides, that’s her lady drawer,” he continued in a whisper. “I went in there looking for the good blue pens once and found things. Super-absorbency things. I’ve been scarred, Kelsey. I may need therapy.”

  “You are a ridiculous human being,” I told him.

  He shrugged. “I’m aware.”

  While Luke went to Sandra’s closet to search for binder clips, I immediately went about winding the lantern, building a charge. I took my long-dead phone out of my jacket pocket, debating whether I should plug it in. It had been better for me, I knew, not being able to check my phone. But I had to admit, I was jonesing to talk to people other than my coworkers, to let the outside world know that I still existed.

  I took out the little adapter cord that fit my model and plugged it in. My phone surged to life with what could only be called a triumphant chorus of notification chimes. Texts, voice mails, and e-mails popped into my queue like little Ping-Pong balls, demanding attention. There were several texts from Darrell, asking if I’d sent the payments on his cards yet. The fact that we were in the middle of a major weather emergency had apparently escaped him.

 
I had several missed calls from my mother.

  Pass.

  I continued turning the hand crank and debated which of my Lost Boys would be most likely to answer the phone. After some deliberation, I dialed Wally’s number, since he was addicted to Words with Friends and rarely put his cell down. He picked up on the first ring.

  “KELSEY,” he practically shrieked, making Luke turn around and stare.

  “Hey, Wally, how are you?”

  “How are you? How are you? Do you have any clue how scared we’ve been around here?” he shouted, his voice cracking. “Aaron isn’t sleeping. Bud is compulsively checking your mailbox for new mail, like you’re going to send yourself a letter explaining that you’re okay. Cyrus is bouncing off the walls. He keeps coming up with airborne rescue scenarios. But we can’t afford that kind of helicopter rental.”

  “Well, I appreciate the thought,” I told him. “I’m fine, really. We’re at the lodge and we’re snowed in without power. We have food and water and limited heat. We’re pretty comfortable, considering. How about you guys? How are things there?”

  “Fine,” he said, far too quickly.

  “Wally.”

  “What?”

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Darrell’s been sniffing around, asking about you, when you’re coming back, whether we—meaning him—should go into your apartment to clean out the fridge and sort through your mail, since you’ve been gone longer than you expected.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. Darrell hadn’t cleaned out the fridge once in all the years he’d lived in that apartment. And there was no reason for him to need my address book, since it contained only information on older relatives who didn’t like e-mail.

  “Maybe he wants to recruit my Nana Wade to sell water filters or something,” I drawled.

  “Well, we did give him a few pieces of mail that had his name on them, but that’s it. No information, no fridge, and definitely no address book. We’ll keep an eye on him,” Wally promised. “You take care of yourself. We love you. We’ll have an epic bad shark movie marathon when you get back.”