His Town

by Ellie Danes

  After I finished up my rounds, I had to walk past Jacob’s table.

  “You’d think that Bill’s Diner would have a rule about people conducting business without buying anything,” he said with a sneer.

  “Rhett Baxter has given Bill’s Diner enough business to allow him to come in and talk about something important to the community,” Lyle said, looking at Jacob firmly.

  “Bill would agree,” one of the waitresses, Stacy, said.

  “It’s all right,” I told the people who’d rushed to my defense. “He’s got a right to an opinion, same as us all.”

  “You’re getting in the way of me doing my business,” Jacob said, rising from his booth.

  “Not at all,” I pointed out calmly. “I haven’t even interrupted your conversation.”

  “But these folks can hear what you’re talking about as you walk around the whole place, gathering signatures,” Jacob pointed out.

  I nodded to the farmers he’d been talking to; they looked a bit crestfallen to be the center of attention all of a sudden. It wasn’t as if no one in the diner had known what they were there for—but I guess it’s different when everyone’s looking at you, instead of ignoring you.

  “They can make up their own minds,” I suggested. “If they want to talk to you, I’m not stopping them, and neither is anyone here. No one was interrupting until you interrupted yourself.” I thought blandly that Jacob was exactly the kind of guy who’d gotten on my last nerves when I’d been at Notre Dame—the one who thought it was a show of how badass he was to try and mouth off to the big, muscled-up jocks, to dare to be an asshole to them. Most of us were good about ignoring fools like Jacob, but every once in a while, one of the linebackers would be pushed over the edge and hit them—usually just once. Once was enough to give the impression about why it was a bad idea to fuck with people who were three or four times your size.

  “Let’s take this outside,” Jacob suggested, probably realizing how ridiculous he looked.

  I tried not to snort. Suggesting we take it outside meant that he wanted to look like he wasn’t scared of me. In truth, he really didn’t have much reason to be, since I had no intention of beating him up. But it was such a transparent move.

  “Sure thing,” I said. “We could probably talk a little more privately out there.” I looked around the diner. “And we wouldn’t be interrupting all these fine folks’ meals.”

  As far as I was concerned, we’d go outside, Jacob would get his rocks off yelling at me, and I’d just more or less laugh to myself about how ridiculous he was being.

  Instead, once we were outside, he took a different tack.

  “Do you think you’re going to get Emily this way?” he asked.

  I just stared at him. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “I mean after taking her on that tour, and spending so much time with her—don’t think I don’t realize what you have in mind,” he said.

  The wide sidewalk was fairly empty of pedestrians at the moment, so all I could look at was either Jacob or the false storefronts across the street from the diner. I’d much rather look at the stores than his ugly face, but I focused on him, hoping to end this conversation sooner rather than later.

  “What I have in mind is saving my town,” I told him. “I need to save it from idiots like you who want to pave everything over and put a big box store in where it doesn’t need to be.”

  “You aren’t fooling me,” he countered. “I see the way you’ve looked at her. This is about Emily. Well, I have a newsflash for you, bud. You’re not going to get her.”

  I almost laughed out loud at that. I didn’t think that I “had” Emily—things were way too up in the air between us—but the thought that I was only protesting the change to my town to get to her was ridiculous. I’d all but kicked her out of my house after finding out what her father’s company was up to. Of course, Jacob had no way of knowing this.

  “Oh my god, you are a tool,” I said, shaking my head.

  “I might be a tool, but I’m a lot closer to getting into Emily’s panties than you’ll ever be,” he said.

  All at once, any humor I saw in the situation evaporated. I couldn’t say why, but something about what he was insinuating just made something snap in me.

  “I’d bet you aren’t close to any woman’s panties, with talk like that,” I said. “Whatever you think about how things are between me and Emily, you don’t need to talk about her that way.”

  “Oh yeah? What are you going to do about it, big man?”

  My hands clenched into fists almost before I knew what I was doing. “I don’t want to beat your ass, but I will.”

  “Oh sure, the big bad town hero’s going to beat up the city slicker,” he said, shuffling from foot to foot and looking like a stupid little imp. “How much is Emily going to like you if she finds out you pounded me, big man?”

  “How much is she going to like you if she finds out you’re talking to other people about her panties, little man?”

  It went back and forth for a few moments like that, and I thought that after all it wasn’t going to come to anything—I’d be able to keep my cool, and just go about my business. But then something I said, I don’t even remember what, made him snap, the same way his comment about Emily’s panties had done to me, and Jacob launched himself at me, shouting.

  I knocked him off of me without much effort, because he obviously hadn’t planned beyond throwing himself at me with arms swinging. I grabbed one of his wrists and brought it around to his back, trying to do little more than make him stop for a second. He kept kicking and swinging out the other arm, yelling cuss words, and it probably would have gotten a lot more physical if Emily hadn’t chosen exactly that moment to appear.

  “What the hell is going on here?” she demanded.

  I stopped, and Jacob went still.

  “I was just having lunch with some potential sellers,” Jacob said. “And your friend here picked a fight.”

  Emily raised an eyebrow at him, looking from Jacob to me for a moment.

  “Why do I have trouble believing that?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Tell me another one, Jake. Maybe this time, try the truth.”

  “You believe him over me?” Jacob wriggled free of my loosened grip and scowled at both of us.

  “He hasn’t actually said anything yet,” Emily pointed out. “But I’m going to listen to both of you, and I am going to surely know whether either of you is telling the truth. So, what the hell happened?”

  “He picked an argument in the diner and I took the bait,” I told her. “We came outside to talk, and he accused me of doing all this”—I took the petition out of my back pocket where I’d folded it up—“to try and get at you.”

  Emily looked at Jacob for a long moment.

  “You tried to make me bribe you with a date to even think about changing the plans for Mustang Ridge,” Emily said, and I felt pretty justified in what I’d done—little though it had been—to Jacob before she’d arrived. “I’m not about to buy that you didn’t do what Rhett said you did.”

  “See? You are siding with him,” Jacob said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe you, Em.”

  “Believe that I’m not going to side with you when you’re picking fights with people for no good reason,” Emily said. She turned and looked at me. “You should have known better than to do some outside-the-diner showdown with him, too.”

  Jacob looked at least a little satisfied that he wasn’t the only one being told off, but at least I knew that Emily was right. I was willing to take my lumps on that account.

  “I was just about to head home,” I said. “I’ll see you around, Emily?”

  “You will,” she said. I knew she probably wanted to keep her involvement with me a secret for as long as she could—that meant definitely not letting Jacob know we were working together. “Jacob, I think you need to go back to the office.”

  “I’m not done with my lunch,” Jacob said.

 
“Yes, you are,” Lucy said from the doorway of Bill’s. “Your check is paid. You should go home.”

  I tried not to smile, but I couldn’t quite help it. Jacob was going to have a much harder time convincing anyone to sell to him after trying to pummel me in clear view of my friends in the diner.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Emily

  I managed to get back to Houston by the end of the day, after Rhett’s fight with Jacob. I wasn’t sure why, but I was fairly certain that things were not going to go the way that Rhett and I wanted, and that it would be good for me to be able to go into the office in the morning to see what I could do from that end. There had to be a way to make things clear for Dad, to make him understand what was going on and why his new plan was all wrong for Mustang Ridge. I scrounged together a dinner of leftovers and invited my neighbor and best friend, Natalie, over to split a bottle of wine with me. Then I brought her up to date on where things stood—as much as I was able to share with her, and willing to let her in on the situation.

  The next morning, I didn’t even get a chance to wake up to my alarm. Instead, the sound of my phone ringing—my father’s personal ringtone—ripped me out of a deep sleep. I sighed in disappointment. I’d been enjoying a dream where I was lying with Rhett in the barn, not doing anything but staring up at the stars.

  “Hey, Dad—what’s up? It’s not even eight,” I said, checking the time to make sure.

  “I need you in the office ASAP,” Dad said, his voice curt.

  I blinked, still half-asleep, stunned by the mood I could sense in him. What had happened?

  “I just need to get dressed,” I said. “I can be there in less than an hour.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line and I yawned as silently as I could, blinking away my sleepiness. I would, I thought, also take a quick shower and get some coffee going while I cleaned up. Drink it on the way in. Whatever was going on with Dad, it was obviously urgent.

  “Try for thirty minutes,” he said.

  “I can’t promise thirty minutes, but I can promise less than an hour,” I said. “I was asleep until you called, Dad. You should at least want me awake enough not to end up in a five-car pileup.”

  “Okay,” Dad said. “I’ll have breakfast here in the office for you.”

  That seemed a bit softer than how he’d been talking before, but I was still on edge. I had no idea what could have happened.

  While I was showering, splashing my face with water over and over again, it occurred to me that whatever it was must have something to do with Mustang Ridge, since that was the only big thing going on at the office. I felt a sudden chill crackle through my spine, so strongly that I checked to make sure that the water from my shower head hadn’t gone cold.

  I got my coffee and ran out the door without even checking to see if Natalie was around. If there was something going on with the situation in Mustang Ridge and Dad was irritable about it, I needed to see if I could use that as some kind of opening, if I could maybe get through to him now. Maybe Rhett had somehow managed to get enough signatures to trigger a town council meeting? Or maybe someone from the town’s administration had tipped Dad off that it wasn’t as accepted as they’d thought? Or maybe Jacob said something about what Rhett was doing, after that fight they had yesterday. I’d seen how he was looking at Rhett.

  I got to the office with fifteen minutes to spare and hurried upstairs toward my Dad’s office. I was suddenly certain that the fact that I hadn’t stayed overnight in Mustang Ridge was an important thing, and that was why Dad had paused. He’d expected to hear that I would need two hours or more to get in. Since it was about an hour before things really started in the office, there wasn’t anyone around, and I didn’t have to answer any questions or greet anyone on my way to my dad’s office.

  “Hey, sweetie,” Dad said, greeting me at the door. “I got you a kolache.”

  I smiled at him and stepped past him into the office. “Thanks.”

  “Jacob’s going to be here in a minute, too,” he added.

  Immediately any kind of appetite I had for breakfast evaporated.

  “What does he have to do with anything?” I sat down across from my dad, but I didn’t take the bag he offered me.

  “He emailed me late last night saying there were some issues with Mustang Ridge,” Dad told me. “And he said you were involved. I want the air clean.”

  “If you want clean air, then Houston’s a mighty strange place to live,” I said irritably.

  “You may be my employee, but you’re also my daughter,” Dad said. “I don’t appreciate you being flip.”

  “Fine,” I said. “If you have questions for me, I would appreciate if you asked me them directly, instead of dragging in another employee.”

  “I would do this in any situation where one of my employees accused another employee,” Dad said.

  “Oh, would you? Because I feel like HR would have something to say about that if you did,” I said. “Besides, what is Jake accusing me of?”

  “He didn’t get into specifics in the email,” Dad told me. “Just that complications were coming up in Mustang Ridge, and you were involved.”

  I rolled my eyes. It was probably about the fight the day before.

  “Did he tell you he picked a public fight with one of the residents yesterday?” I raised an eyebrow. “And that by doing so he burned more than a couple of bridges for himself there?”

  Dad shook his head. “See, this is why I need to talk to both of you at the same time. Eat your kolache.”

  “No thanks,” I told him tartly. “I’m not hungry when I’m being accused of some kind of nebulous sabotage.”

  There was a knock at the office door, and Dad let Jacob into the room. Immediately I could see that my coworker was only too proud of himself, and any camaraderie I ever felt for him was gone.

  “Close the door behind you, Jacob,” Dad said. I noticed—at least—that he didn’t offer the sniveling little jerk a kolache.

  “Thanks for coming in so early,” Jacob said to Dad.

  “I’m almost always in this time of day,” Dad said. “Let’s just get to the point. What’s going on, Jacob?”

  “Well, I thought you should know that Rhett Baxter has been trying to sabotage our efforts in Mustang Ridge, and that your daughter is helping him,” Jacob said. “Probably because she’s been sleeping with him.”

  I felt my cheeks burn and I glared at Jacob as I started seeing red. He had no way to know what I was doing with Rhett—he had no way of knowing that Rhett and I had slept together. I hadn’t told anyone in the office, and I couldn’t believe for a minute that Rhett had told him anything about it.

  “What?” I looked from Jacob to Dad. “Are you going to get on his case about spreading bullshit gossip about me?”

  “That depends on if it’s true or not,” Dad said.

  I felt the blood drain out of my face and I just stared at my father.

  “You’d really let one of your employees talk shit about a woman employee, claiming she’s sleeping with someone without any evidence at all?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t even care right now that you’d let anyone say that about me as your daughter. I can’t believe you’d let an employee say that about another employee!”

  “If you’re sleeping with Rhett, then I have good reason to wonder about your loyalty to the company, and to me,” Dad said.

  It was like the nightmare I’d described to Rhett, my worst fear in joining up with him—that my dad would make it personal. That he’d kick me not just out of my job but out of his life over it.

  “I am not going to have this conversation with you with Jacob in the room,” I said, struggling to keep my voice as calm as possible. “This is something you need to address with me, and me alone.”

  “I actually agree with that,” Dad said. “Jacob, I’ll talk to you later. Go find something productive to do.”

  Jacob turned away from Dad on the pretense of getting out of his
chair, and sneered at me. I wanted—more than anything in the world in that moment—to drive the spike heel of my shoe up into his groin as hard as I could, but I kept myself still.

  “First of all, are you really going to trust Jacob over me? Your own daughter?” I crossed my arms over my chest and pinned my dad down with my gaze as best as I could. If I was going to lose Dad over this, then I was going to have it out with him one hundred percent. I wasn’t going to give myself any reason to regret how things had gone between us.

  “Just tell me you’re not involved with whatever Rhett is doing in Mustang Ridge, and I’ll believe you,” Dad said. “Whether you’re sleeping with him or not isn’t really important. Sleep with the guy if you want to—I’m no prude. But if you’re with him, going against me, then that is a big problem, baby girl.”

  “All Rhett is doing is trying to make the town council hold a meeting,” I said. “Yes, I am aware of it and yes, I am helping him. Because the plans that you and Jacob made together are way more involved than what you’re selling the people of the town on, and they deserve the right to make a decision about whether it’s what they want as a town.”

  “They elected their officials,” Dad said, “and the plans we have for the town will be good for them—bring more business to the town.”

  “And drive half or more of the families out of the town,” I countered. “It’ll kill the businesses that are already there. If they want to choose that for themselves, then they can do that—but they don’t need their town council making that decision for them. Can’t you see that, Dad?”

  “I can see that Jacob was right about one thing,” Dad said. “Obviously you aren’t fully committed to this.”

  “I think there’s a way that we can compromise,” I tried to explain.

  “You are my employee,” Dad told me. “If you’re helping to sabotage this project, then you’re going against the company that pays you. Since you’re my daughter, I’m not going to fire you the way I would anyone else who did what you’re doing, but I want you to think long and hard about whether your relationship—whatever it is—with Rhett is worth it to you to lose your career.”