“I could say the same for you,” he said.
“So help me understand what’s going on in your head, and I’ll try to explain what’s happening in mine.”
He made a reluctant noise in the back of his throat.
“Come on, we’ve spent a lot of time together not talking or just sort of bouncing off each other in unnaturally uncomfortable social situations. I feel like a little revealing conversation isn’t too much to ask. You said you’re from New York. What part?”
“Manhattan. I grew up in one of those neighborhoods full of nice brownstones, where people always seem to get murdered in the first five minutes of Law and Order.”
Margot glanced around at this tiny school in this tiny town and tried to imagine someone used to the hustle and bustle of New York City adjusting to the lack of bagels and sirens.
“You know how everybody always argues over where the real Original Ray’s Pizza is? Well, I know. And because you’ve been, on occasion, sort of mean to me, I’m not going to tell you.”
Margot scoffed. “Fair enough. Give me a deep-dish pizza over a folding piece of flaccid, half-cooked dough anytime.”
Kyle gave her the stink eye. “I take it back. We can’t be friends.”
“I apologize for insulting your hometown’s floppy edible shingles,” she said. “For no other reason than I’d like to know how and why you left New York for Lake Sackett.”
“My wife grew up here,” he said. “I went to UVA because it was not New York and I wanted a change. That’s where we met. We were every Facebook cliché about marrying your best friend. Maggie was one of the most fascinating women I ever met, just supersmart and funny. You’d think she would be intimidated, a girl from a small town on a big college campus, but she didn’t take crap from anybody. I was studying to be a teacher. She was going into nursing. And when we got married, I got her to move to New York for a while. And she tolerated it, for my sake. She tried to make an adventure out of it. We’d been living in Brooklyn for a while when she got pregnant with Hazel. And then our walkup apartment was broken into for the fifth time and we decided maybe it would be a good idea to move out of the city and raise the baby in a place where we could be ninety percent sure there wasn’t a human trafficking ring running out of the basement.”
“I’m assuming that’s in most parenting books,” she conceded.
“Maggie’s family is here. Parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole bit. She wanted to be able to give the baby the kind of childhood she had. And since a lot of my childhood centered on warnings about not talking to strangers on the subway, I couldn’t help but agree with her.”
Margot nodded. “By the way, Hazel and Juniper?”
“There’s a history of plant names in the family. My wife—whose name was Magnolia—was very susceptible to guilt-tripping by her mother and grandmother.”
“Still.” Margot snorted. “Don’t you miss it, though? Not just the food and the museums and theaters that show more than one movie at a time, but the noise? I mean, I never thought I would miss the sound of traffic and police sirens, but I can’t get a decent night’s sleep without them.”
“I miss some things. When we first moved here I was a lot like you, with the city shoes and the Starbucks withdrawals. But Lake Sackett grows on you—the people, the fresh air, the scenery, the fact that most of my neighbors wouldn’t kneecap me over a parking spot. And the life here, it’s just different. I got to the point where I wasn’t homesick anymore and people stopped calling me ‘that city fella.’ My friends back home thought I was nuts, but I came to love it here. And when I lost Maggie, the people here are what got us through. I don’t know what we would have done without them.”
“So, city fella, how long do you think it will be before people call me by my first name instead of ‘Stan’s girl’?” she asked.
“Four, five years, tops.”
“Great.”
He cleared his throat. “So you now know my entire romantic history. Please, share some form of information with me so this isn’t so one-sided.”
Margot shrugged. “Um, there isn’t much to tell.”
“You mean you didn’t leave some devastated upwardly mobile stockbroker in your wake?”
“No, I haven’t really had a relationship in . . . four years. I mean, I dated. In college, I did the undergrad serial monogamy thing. But nothing came of it, much to my mother’s horror. After I graduated, I started working and I was always busy. No one really seemed—and this is going to sound like an awful thing to say about my fellow human beings—but no one seemed worth the effort of being in a relationship? My mother always made it sound like it was so much work to take on another person, to make sure your life ran smoothly. And nobody really made me want to invest that kind of time. And just to increase the sad factor, I’m probably going to move again in a few weeks, so I’ll have to start over with a whole new city full of men I will date but never commit to.”
Kyle’s brow furrowed. “I keep forgetting that, the part where you’re leaving as soon as you can.”
“So really, there’s no reason for you to worry about a complicated relationship and hurt feelings, because I’m going to launch myself out of town at the earliest opportunity. I would use that punkin chunkin catapult if I thought it would get me out of here faster.”
She paused, stood on her toes, and kissed him. Not a shy, polite peck on the lips, nothing that could be construed as a friendly gesture, but an honest-to-God kiss, with tongue and teeth and mingled breath. Her legs buckled slightly when he responded, sliding his hands down her butt and pulling her closer. She moaned into his mouth, threading her fingers through his messy hair. The beard was every bit as scratchy-soft as she remembered, bristling against her skin and leaving it just the right amount of raw. She bit down gently on his bottom lip just before pulling back from him. “Stop worrying so much.”
And with that, she hopped into her truck, threw it into reverse, and backed out of the space, leaving Kyle standing there with his mouth agape.
It was nice to be on the other end of that expression for once.
MARGOT SUBMITTED HER planning strategy to Kyle and the committee within twenty-four hours. She’d chosen “Glory Days” as the festival theme, highlighting not only the establishment of the town but great moments in Lake Sackett’s history. Margot believed the hopeful, nostalgic tone would attract more people than the previous year’s theme of, well, nothing. She used design software on her laptop to mock up ads to place in regional papers and magazines, not to mention online travel sites. It was too late for a proper ad campaign, but she could still try to attract last-minute travelers looking for a pleasant outing before winter set in.
Overall, the committee seemed pleased with her progress. Sweet Johnnie, who turned out to be the town librarian, even spoke up in favor of the theme, exclaiming that she had all sorts of old photos that could be used in printables, posters, and displays. Dobb woke up long enough to say that he had some of the old tractors used by the construction crews who built the dam. His father had bought them cheap on a whim when the Corps of Engineers teams left, and Dobb had spent years restoring them as a hobby.
“They’re painted up and good as new,” Dobb said. “We could put them out for show at the parking lot near the dam, put up one of those tents Miss Margot was talking about with pictures and posters on the construction for a—what’d you call it? A temp’rary exhibit.”
“I think that’s a wonderful idea, Dobb,” Margot told him. “And if we spread the events and exhibits out over the town a little bit, it will definitely help with parking and traffic.”
“So you want to draw attention to one of the most painful times in the town’s history?” Sara Lee sniffed. “When people were forced to relocate from homes their families had held since the Civil War? Barely given fair market value for their land? Spoken like someone who didn’t grow up here.”
“It’s a part of our history, just like anything else,” Sweet Johnnie said, scratch
ing the back of her neck. “ ’Sides, most everybody who was still bitter about it died off about ten years ago. Nowadays people are just grateful for the lake.”
Sara turned on Dobb, demanding, “So why didn’t you say somethin’ about these amazin’ tractors before, so we could use them?”
Dobb shrugged. “You never asked.”
With support from the committee and Kyle, Margot overhauled the festival. And Sara Lee seemed to have figured out that openly bashing Margot’s plans wasn’t working, so she’d switched to more subtle methods of undermining. All subsequent meetings were attended by an entourage of Sara Lee’s cronies, all just as delightfully rigid as she was, who crowded around the table and tsked over Margot’s to-do list as if it was photographic evidence of a near-fatal car crash. It reminded her of her mother’s friends descending on a Charity League meeting, but with far less Chanel involved.
Tootie and Leslie had received several phone calls from church friends “concerned” over what they’d heard of the changes to the festival. (No one called Donna, because Donna was scary.) Her family members were being told to get Margot in line while they still could. And Margot had to put password protection in place with the vendors she was using, because “someone” had called and tried to cancel the poster she was having printed, not to mention the ads she’d placed with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Other than that, and some nasty looks from the occasional mourner, she was sure she had the situation in hand.
She told herself that, right up until the “incident” with Animal Control.
Margot was driving home from work, humming along to one of Duffy’s Blake Shelton CDs. Her jacket was thrown casually over a stack of large mailing envelopes in the passenger seat—envelopes she’d purchased herself, thank you. They were evidence of her latest round of job applications. She tried not to let the lack of responses to her inquiries bother her, but frankly, she was starting to think she might see a Lake Sackett winter. It was a singularly depressing thought and not just because of the lack of tourists or traffic.
She had to admit she’d had a pretty good day at the funeral home, despite her concerted effort not to upsell anyone. She’d managed to schedule services for Bennett Haskell and Garmin Rudd so the two families—who had been feuding for years over a hunting lease gone wrong and happened to have uncles who died at the same time—didn’t run into each other once. And she’d actually managed to walk downstairs to deliver Frankie’s lunch. Sure, she’d kept her eyes closed the whole time, dropped the grease-spotted bag into Frankie’s hands, and run blindly toward the stairs—smacking into a wall. But she’d gotten down the stairs, which was more than she’d thought she was capable of weeks before.
Margot pulled the truck into the compound’s driveway, rolling over the now-familiar ruts and bumps with practiced ease. As she rolled up to Aunt Tootie’s place, she noticed the large white truck with SACKETT COUNTY ANIMAL CONTROL painted on the driver’s-side door. The back of the truck was composed of kennels inset in the truck body. And a tall, rail-thin man seemed to be loading one of Tootie’s dog pack into a kennel. Tootie was shouting and waving a rake at him in a threatening manner.
Margot threw the truck into park and tried to hop out before she even unbuckled her seat belt or turned off the engine. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she freed herself and jogged across the gravel drive as quickly as she could manage in heels. The rest of the dog pack were going crazy, barking and yapping, but Margot noticed that none of them snapped at the animal control officer.
It struck Margot as odd that Tootie was alone in her confrontation with the dogcatcher. Normally one of the uncles would be on the compound grounds, but with a fishing bachelor party in town and the dueling funeral services, it was all hands on deck at McCready’s. Margot had been released early because she’d arrived at the office in the predawn hours to accept delivery of Mr. Rudd’s custom Harley-Davidson-themed casket. It seemed suspiciously coincidental that Animal Control’s visit had been timed during such a busy afternoon.
As she got closer, she heard Tootie shouting, “Dougie Hazard, don’t make me call your mama on you!”
Dougie Hazard’s heavy Adam’s apple made him look like a cartoon buzzard. He was backing toward the truck with Arlo in his arms, which was wise, considering the rake. Tootie might have been old, but she had a considerable amount of upper-body strength.
“Now, Miss Tootie, I know you take real good care of your animals. I have no objections to how you keep ’em. But once a complaint has been filed with my office, I can’t just ignore it. That’s the kind of thing that will get me fired.”
“What’s going on here? Put Arlo down now!” Margot demanded, prying the rake out of Tootie’s grasp. “Really, Tootie, you’re going to give yourself a stroke.”
“He’s taking Arlo!” Tootie shouted.
“Can you explain why?” Margot asked, turning on Dougie. “You can see that the dogs are all in good shape. They have clean conditions and ample food, and they’re obviously getting plenty of exercise and socialization.”
“Miss Tootie has thirteen dogs in her possession, which is one over the limit set by the county ordinance against hoarding,” Dougie told Margot, hitching his loose belt over his narrow hips with one hand as he struggled with the wriggling dog. “That means I have to take one to the county shelter. And since Miss Tootie can’t provide any papers proving this one’s had his shots, I’m taking him in.”
“Is it a kill shelter?” Margot muttered out of the side of her mouth.
Tootie nodded, glaring at Dougie. “After seventy-two hours.”
Arlo squirmed in Dougie’s arms, whining pitifully. Margot shot Dougie a venomous glare. “Really? You don’t feel bad about this, at all?”
“I don’t make the rules!” Dougie protested.
“Well, the rule doesn’t apply anyway. Because that dog isn’t Tootie’s, it’s mine,” she said, taking Arlo from his grasp. Arlo’s claws dug into her arms as he scrambled up her body. Also, she was pretty sure that warm wet spot spreading against her silk blouse wasn’t sweat. Still, Margot didn’t want to imagine how Tootie would react if she lost Arlo. Or really, how Margot would feel if she lost Arlo. She’d gotten accustomed to him finding a way into her home and onto her couch. He was like a warm, furry worry stone.
“He’s yours?” Dougie asked in a tone that clearly communicated his desire to call “bullshit” on Margot’s claim.
“Sure is,” Margot said, willing herself not to shudder when Arlo’s wet nose wedged under her chin. As much as she liked Arlo, that didn’t make that sensation any more comfortable. “Goooooood boy.”
Dougie’s thin, graying eyebrows lifted. “Do you have any vet bills or paperwork to prove he’s yours?”
Margot glanced at Tootie, who subtly shook her head.
“No. He’s a stray. I just found him in the parking lot at the Food Carnival the other day. I haven’t had a chance to file the paperwork yet,” Margot lied smoothly. “I’ll be sure to go do that as soon as possible. Surely you can’t punish a good Samaritan for not having time in her busy schedule to run down to the courthouse, can you?”
Dougie frowned at her. “Put him down, walk about ten paces, and call him to you.”
“What?”
“Prove that he’s yours,” Dougie said. “Call him.”
“This isn’t a scene from Annie,” Margot protested. “I haven’t had time to bond with him yet. And I’m just calling him Arlo because he didn’t have any tags and it was the first name I could come up with. I don’t know what he answers to.”
“If you want me to go, call the dog,” Dougie told her.
“Fine.” Margot handed the dog to Tootie and walked ten steps away. Tootie whispered in Arlo’s ear while Margot dropped into a crouch.
“Come here, Arlo. Come here!” Margot said in her best doggy voice. Tootie put Arlo on the ground. But for once, instead of instantly invading Margot’s personal space, he sat on his butt, staring at her with his head cock
ed to the side.
“Uh-huh.” Dougie snorted.
“Come on, Arlo! Come here, sweet doggy!” Margot cooed.
Arlo stayed seated on his furry butt.
“Arlo,” she grumbled through gritted teeth. She rolled her eyes and smacked her hands against her legs in frustration. Suddenly Arlo perked up and came running. Dougie’s jaw dropped, but not nearly as low as Margot’s. She let the dog paw at her knees, but wary of further damage to her clothes, didn’t pick him up. Arlo circled around to Margot’s left hip and sniffed at her pocket with interest.
“You see there?” Tootie cackled. “That there’s Margot’s dog. I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen.”
Margot blanched as a small plastic baggie slipped out of her pocket and Arlo clamped his teeth on it. It was a sample she’d picked up at the jerky store—mako shark with lemon and ginger flavoring—thinking that Duffy would get a kick out of it. She made a discreet grab for the jerky bag and stood, tucking it behind her back so Dougie couldn’t see the meaty treat that had lured Arlo to her.
“Sit, Arlo,” she told him firmly. Arlo whined a bit but planted his furry butt on the ground.
“Fine,” Dougie muttered, scribbling angrily on his clipboard. “But you will get his papers in order by the next time I come out here. And Miss Tootie, you’ve been skatin’ the line for too long, makin’ me a laughingstock at county commission meetin’s.”
“Oh, I don’t make you a laughingstock, Dougie, you do that well enough on your own,” Tootie shot back. Margot nudged Tootie’s ribs with her elbow.
Dougie grunted and waved her off as he stomped toward his truck. He peeled out of the driveway with the dog pack chasing the tires at a respectable distance.
“Oh, y’all stop that!” Tootie yelled, calling them back. “You don’t chase stupid! It will find you eventually! Go on home now!”
The pack stopped the chase and took off running toward E.J.J. and Tootie’s cabin; all except for Arlo, who seemed to assume that his fraudulent adoption was actually happening and planted himself at Margot’s feet.