“I’m still a little unclear,” said Lezlie as they pulled out of the police headquarters parking lot. “Was this the mayor’s idea?”
It was now. “I think she said that, didn’t she?” Probably.
“Not exactly. She just led me in that direction, hoping I’d think it.”
Lezlie Hurst was a smart cookie. “Well,” said Josh, “you know how it is with things like this. One person gets a glimmer and then others jump in and it becomes a great idea. Sort of like in a think tank.”
“Who got the glimmer?”
“Does it matter? The important thing is what we’re doing, not who thought of it.”
Lezlie nodded and wrote in the tablet she had balanced on her lap.
Of course, that was the right thing to say, but part of him wished he’d gone ahead and taken credit for the idea. Surely a certain woman would be impressed if she knew he was a good Samaritan.
Then again, he’d been a good Samaritan and driven her home and walked all the way back to his house in the snow and all he’d gotten was cold feet. But not nearly as cold as Jamie Moore’s. Hers were frozen as solid as her heart.
“I knew it,” Emma said, when she saw the Wednesday edition of the Heart Lake Herald. She stuffed the article about Josh into her purse to take with her to the Chocolate Bar. This was bound to convince Jamie that Josh was the perfect man. Then it would only be a matter of time. At least someone would get a happy ending for the holidays.
Her ending wasn’t going to be so happy, not after her meeting with Mr. Pressman at the bank. Of course, she’d known it for months, but now she knew. There was no way she could keep her doors open. Come January there would be new retail space for rent on downtown Lake Way, and Emma would be looking for a job. Obviously, she was no business wonder babe like her avatar, Tess L’amour. She could probably get a job somewhere as a sales clerk, though. She knew how to ring up sales. Just not how to make them happen.
The snow was mostly melted now and the streets were clear. No longer snowbound, half of Heart Lake seemed to be out, either walking or driving down Lake Way, finishing errands or heading home. If only a few more of those people had found their way into her shop she wouldn’t be facing such a bleak new year.
No tears, she told herself sternly. This is not the end of the world. It only felt that way.
If she didn’t have the article about Josh to give Jamie she’d have bagged their weekly chocolate binge. A million mochas couldn’t make her feel better today.
Sarah had beaten her to the chocolateria and was settled in at one of the bistro tables. She smiled a greeting at Emma, and pulled her purse off the chair next to her to make room. Jamie was at the counter, finishing up with one last customer.
Shirley Schultz.
Emma’s despondency began to morph into something with a little more fire. What was Shirley doing in here, buying truffles, when she still owed Emma money for that last bit of fabric robbery she committed at Emma’s big sale? She ignored the open chair and moved up to hover in back of Shirley.
Jamie had just rung up the sale. “That will be six thirty-two.”
Shirley opened her purse and began the money hunt that was so familiar to Emma. But instead of coming up empty she pulled out a ten-dollar bill.
“Hi, Mrs. Schultz,” Emma said. “Needing a chocolate fix?”
Shirley gave a start, then turned around and smiled at Emma. “Emma. How are you, dear?”
“I’m just fine, except for the fact that I’m about to lose my business. How are you? Oh, I see you found some money. Got any extra in there?”
“Oh, dear, I’m afraid that’s all I have.”
“Well, you can give me that change and I’ll subtract it from the bill you owe me. It’s only the size of the national debt, but don’t let that worry you.” Before Shirley could pick up the bag with her purchase and escape, Emma grabbed it. “Wow, thanks. I could use some chocolate. That’s really sweet of you.” She pulled out a truffle and popped it in her mouth. “Mmm, good.” She felt like Jim Carey in drag, doing something wildly psychotic. It felt good. Everyone should get in touch with her inner Jim Carey.
“My chocolate!” protested Shirley.
“Oh, I thought maybe you bought it for me since you felt so bad that you owe me money. Gosh. I’d buy a truffle for you, but I seem to have forgotten my checkbook!”
For a moment, silence reigned. Jamie, who was never at a loss for words, gawked at Emma. Then she felt an arm around her shoulder. “Emma,” Sarah said gently.
“Well, I never,” huffed Shirley.
“You’re right you never,” Emma said, her voice hysterical. “You and everyone else in this town. Nobody thinks about how someone like me is supposed to stay in business or pay her rent or eat.” Her Jim Carey moment ended as quickly as it began. Emma dropped the bag on the counter and burst into tears.
“It’ll be okay,” Sarah said, and tried to hug her.
But, of course it wouldn’t. She knew it, they knew it—everybody knew it. And now she’d just eaten Shirley Schultz’s chocolate. And she couldn’t stop crying. She pulled away, saying, “Give her another. I’ll pay for it. I’m sorry, Mrs. Schultz. I’m . . .” A failure, a loser, all alone, unemployed. Take your pick. She couldn’t stay here a minute longer. She turned and fled from the Chocolate Bar.
Shirley Schultz finally spoke into the stunned silence. “That young woman has a serious problem.”
It was all Sarah could do not to grab her skinny neck and wring it.
Jamie spoke up before she could say anything. “Yes, she does. She’s too nice. It’s no wonder she can’t stay in business when people take advantage of her,” Jamie added, looking pointedly at Shirley.
“Well, I’m sure I don’t,” Shirley said stiffly. She snatched the bag with the one remaining candy and marched out of the shop.
“That old leech,” Jamie muttered.
“She is,” Sarah agreed. “But she’s the symptom, not the problem.” Jamie was right. Emma was too soft. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go find her.”
They tracked Emma down at home. Her eyes were red and her makeup was streaked.
“Fix your makeup,” Jamie commanded. “We’re going out.”
“I don’t want to go out,” Emma snapped in a very un-Emma-like voice.
“It’s free food. Don’t turn it down.”
They took her to Brewsters Brews where Samantha Brewster took one look at her and sent over a margarita on the house. Sarah watched in horror as Emma tipped the glass and chugalugged.
Finally Jamie pulled her arm, forcing her to set down the drink. “Take it easy, will you? Now, talk. What’s going on?”
Emma stared at the scarred wood table. “I talked with Mr. Pressman at the bank today. We crunched the numbers and we agreed that it would be best if I . . .” She paused to take a shaky breath. “Turned the key on my business.”
It was every business owner’s worst nightmare, of course. Sarah laid a comforting hand on her arm. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me, too,” said Jamie, taking the other arm. “That so totally sucks.”
“I’m a failure,” Emma sobbed.
“No you’re not,” Sarah said fiercely. “Failures don’t even try. You try harder than anyone I know.”
“I had such high hopes. You know, I actually had some people sign up for my next quilting class. If I could have just stayed open a little longer.” Emma unwrapped the table setting in front of her and used the napkin for a handkerchief.
She would have simply postponed the inevitable, Sarah thought sadly.
“I’ll get a job,” Emma said. “I’ll go work at Fabricland or Macy’s. Maybe I’ll get a job at Savemart in the fabric department. I’ll probably see half of Heart Lake there,” she added bitterly.
“Maybe you could teach quilting classes on the side,” Sarah suggested gently. “You know, through the park department. That’s what you love the most, isn’t it? That would be the best of both worlds. You’d have a pa
ying job and still get to do what you love.”
Emma nodded, forcing a wan smile. “I’ll have my business loan paid off by the time I’m . . . fifty,” she finished on a sob.
Sarah resisted the temptation to tell her that fifty wasn’t old. “This will work out somehow. You’ll see.”
“I’ll have to move home with my parents. Lucky them.”
“You can move in with me,” Jamie offered.
“You don’t want me. Nobody wants me, not even my cat.” Emma picked up her glass and finished her drink. “Can we get another?”
So far the only “we” drinking was Emma, but Sarah said, “Sure,” and signaled the waiter. “Three margaritas.”
Jamie produced a small Chocolate Bar bag and held it in front of Emma. “Here. I brought medicine.”
Sniffing, Emma pulled out a white chocolate truffle. “Everyone in town’s going to think I’m crazy.”
Neither Sarah nor Jamie had to ask what she was talking about. “Shirley had it coming,” said Jamie.
“I think I’ll move,” Emma decided. “All those good deeds—why did we bother? This town has no heart and it doesn’t deserve any angels. I’m never donating a quilt to anything again. I’m never making a quilt again!”
“You don’t really mean that,” said Sarah as the waiter arrived with their drinks. “It looks bad now, but think of all your favorite movies. It always looks bad for the heroine at first. But somehow she finds a happy ending.”
“Unless she dies in the end,” Emma said, and took a deep drink.
“You’re not going to die,” Sarah said firmly. “Now, a toast. Here’s to new beginnings.”
“To new beginnings,” echoed Jamie.
Emma didn’t say anything. She was too busy drinking.
They ordered dinner, but she ate little and drank more. By the time they left the restaurant she was singing “The Bitch Is Back” at the top of her lungs. As they passed a table of gawking middle-aged women who had stopped talking to stare, Emma announced that there would be a big fire sale on Saturday at Emma’s Quilt Corner. “Tell everybody,” she finished, waving an arm.
“I’m sure they will,” Jamie said, guiding her out.
“I’ll put the ad in first thing tomorrow. Seventy-five percent off. What the heck! Eighty percent. Do I hear ninety?”
They took her home and helped her into bed, then locked the door and closed her in to sleep off the booze. If only she could sleep off the misery as easily.
“She’s going to have a killer headache,” Jamie predicted.
“That’s the least of her problems,” said Sarah. Poor Emma. She tried so hard, dreamed so big. She and Jamie both. Sarah wished she were a fairy godmother. She’d give both girls a pile of money and a handsome prince.
Except she’d tried to give Jamie the handsome prince and Jamie had slammed her heart’s door on him. What, by the way, had she done with the Herald? She’d meant to show Jamie that article about Josh. It would have been good for Emma to see, too. Maybe it would have encouraged her to read that someone in Heart Lake was still doing good deeds.
But Emma needed more than encouragement right now. She needed money.
Sarah went home feeling suddenly pooped. She put on her slippers and settled on the couch in front of the TV.
She began flipping through the channels toward the Food Network, past the latest search for America’s top model, a stupid sitcom, and a rerun from the seventies on the oldies station. And there on AMC was It’s a Wonderful Life, which would, of course, play all month long on one channel or other. She hadn’t watched it in years. She set down the remote and got sucked into watching George Bailey and Mary Hatch fall in love.
By the end of the movie, she was smiling. She called Sam at the station.
“I’m behind you a hundred percent, babe,” he said when she’d finished explaining her idea to him. “We’ve got that money for an emergency and this sounds like one to me.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Emma woke up with a screaming headache on Thursday morning. She took two aspirin and went back to bed. To heck with the shop. It wasn’t like she had customers banging on the door to get in anyway. She pulled the covers over her head and played dead. It wasn’t hard. Her life was over.
By afternoon the headache was gone and she had no excuse to avoid dealing with the details of death. She had to put an ad in the paper for her going-out-of-business sale, make signs for the windows, and cancel the fabric order she’d placed earlier with the Timeless Treasure rep.
She dragged her heavy heart to work where she called the paper and put in the ad. It cost her twice as much as usual because she was a day past the deadline. But at least the ad would come out on Saturday, just in time for the sale. The woman taking the information was polite and businesslike. And uncaring. Not a single, “Gosh, I’m sorry.”
Big surprise. No one cared. The campaign to put the heart back in Heart Lake had been a bust. You couldn’t replace something that had never been there.
On Friday she sat all alone in her shop, feeling like a prisoner on death row and thinking about her stupid, rude behavior to Shirley. Boy, that had been the worst kind of movie moment. She hoped Mom and Grandma didn’t find out.
Mom and Grandma. Just thinking about them made Emma want to cry. They had both given her money so she wouldn’t have to take out such a big business loan. She had sure let them down. Mom had sacrificed her kitchen remodel. She should have redone the kitchen.
If ever there was a time when a girl could have used a comforting talk with her mother this was it, but Emma couldn’t work up the nerve to call and deliver the depressing news yet. She wished she could talk to someone. Sarah probably was finishing up at the bakery, up to her elbows in flour, and Jamie was busy running her growing business. Pretty soon she’d be hiring help. She probably wouldn’t call Emma, though, not after the way Emma had run Shirley Schultz off.
The memory of her dream came back to mock her. She had so envisioned the people of Heart Lake coming together to make something beautiful—what a bunch of hoo-ha.
A grand total of four women came in and bought fabric and that was the extent of her business. When she shut up shop at five she was ready to cry but willing to admit that deciding to pull the plug had been the right thing to do. She hadn’t heard from Jamie to see if she wanted to hang out and she was too embarrassed over her bad behavior to call her friend, so a lonely Friday night loomed ahead of her. Ugh.
That margarita she’d had on Wednesday had tasted pretty good. Maybe she’d swing by Brewsters and get another. She got as far as going into the pub, but all those tables packed with laughing friends worked like an invisible force field, keeping her out. She turned and fled, settling for running by Safeway and picking up a bottle of peach-flavored wine and a movie. She’d have her own party.
By ten o’clock the movie was over, the bottle was nearly empty, and Emma was facedown on her bed, fully dressed and drifting toward oblivion. No one in her family drank. She was charting new territory. Hometown girl makes good.
Saturday her ringing phone about split her head open. She grabbed the receiver with one hand and the spinning bed with the other and managed a weak hello.
“Where are you?” demanded Jamie.
The words charged in through her ears and banged around in her head. “Don’t yell,” she protested.
“It’s noon and your shop is closed and you have customers.”
“Tell them I’m closed for the day. I’m sick,” Emma said, and hung up. She squeezed her eyes shut and begged the evil genie whipping the bed around to please stop.
Ten minutes later someone was banging on her front door. She couldn’t get up. She couldn’t move. She was never going to move again. She was also never going to drink again, either. What had she been thinking, anyway? “Go away,” she moaned.
The banging stopped. A moment later it started again at her bedroom window. “Get up and open the door.” The voice came through the window muffled, but it stil
l wasn’t hard to recognize. Jamie again.
“I’m sick,” Emma called, then winced at the pain she’d caused herself.
“Let me in or I’m going to break this window.”
Emma staggered to the front door. Her head was going to explode. Oooh, she would so never do this again. Ever. She opened the door and Jamie marched in. Blinding sunlight followed her. Emma held up a hand to protect her sensitive eyes and moaned. “Shut that.”
“Geez, you’re a mess.” Of course, Jamie wasn’t. She was wearing her favorite red leather jacket that she’d found in an upscale thrift store, her perfectly fitted jeans, and red cowgirl boots, and was carrying her favorite red leather purse. “You’re hungover,” she accused. “What would your mother say?” she added as she led Emma into the kitchen. She got a glass of water, then steered Emma to the bathroom, where she pulled Advil out of the medicine cabinet and shook out two pills. “Here. Swallow this,” she instructed. While Emma swallowed, she started the shower running. “Strip and get in,” she commanded. “I’ll be right back with clothes.”
Emma got out of her clothes and into the shower and got the shock of her life. Cold. Freezing cold! With a screech she fumbled for the shower knob. Was Jamie trying to kill her?
“Don’t you dare turn the temperature up,” came a voice behind the shower curtain. “You need to wake up. Wash up and get out. I’m making coffee.”
Emma washed up in record time and stumbled into her clothes. She blew her hair almost dry and stuffed it into a scrunchy, then went to the kitchen.
Jamie had shed her jacket and was now busy making toast. She looked Emma over. “Let’s put some makeup on you.”
“I don’t need makeup,” Emma said grumpily.
“Trust me,” Jamie said as she poured coffee. “You do.” She plopped the toast on a paper towel, placed the mug in Emma’s hand, and then marched her back to the bathroom. “Okay. You drink. I’ll work.”
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