I had to hang up to hurry to get to the bookstore, because this was going to be a big day. I hoped. Marley and I, with Gunnar’s input, had planned a Gold Friday event, with gold balloons and streamers and ribbons to match the gold “Holliday Booksellers” painted on the front window. We weren’t quite done with the renovations, but had decided to make Gold Friday a grand re-opening party to coincide with the usual post-Thanksgiving shopping day.
We had been promoting it, including by promising that Woodsmen players would be in attendance. Gunnar had gotten a lot of the guys on the team to say they would show up and to put it on their social media, and there was already a crowd of interested people waiting at the front door and peering into the store windows when I drove into the back parking lot. I hoped they had fun and got autographs, and I also hoped they bought books.
“This is insane,” Marley muttered to me an hour later. She had arrived right on time to help me, but had declined to wear the name tag I had ordered for her. As the first Holliday Booksellers employee outside of my immediate family, I’d wanted to do something special, but she said she’d rather be dead than pin on a plastic thing that had gold stars surrounding her name. “Do people really care this much about books? Or is it all about the stupid football players?” she asked skeptically, surveying the huge crowd.
“You saw, you were at the game,” I reminded her. “They really care that much about the Woodsmen.” I checked on Gunnar, standing near the travel books and trying to look inconspicuous. He had been mobbed despite hiding in the unpopular section, and he looked more uncomfortable and unhappy than unobtrusive. And he looked so cute, so sweet, so lovable—
“I’m going to go check on Gunnar. Are you ok here?” I asked, as yet another customer approached the counter.
“Go, before he runs for it,” Marley advised, then turned to the customer and gave what was meant to be a smile. “Welcome to Holliday Booksellers how may I help you,” she chanted, and I patted her on the back. It was a great effort.
“You’re my favorite player of all time,” I overheard a woman telling Gunnar earnestly as I approached. “I think the offensive line doesn’t get the credit it deserves.” She leaned forward. “I want to give you the credit. I really, really want to give it to you. Hard.”
“Uh, thank you,” he said, and when he saw me, he looked so relieved. “Hallie,” he announced, and opened up his arms from where he had crossed them protectively over his wide chest.
“Hello,” I told them both, and snuggled. The lady spotted Darius and took off after him instead.
“How are you doing?” Gunnar asked, pulling me so close that I stood on his feet. “Happier than the last time I saw you?”
That had been when I’d bolted away in a run of shame back to my cottage early that morning after seeing off his parents. I’d leaped over the moat and yelled that I’d catch him later, then I’d called Gaby and woken her up to pour out the story of his mother walking in on us. Gab had definitely made me feel better about it. And after she and I spoke, as I’d thought about what Gunnar and I had done that morning—and what he’d said to me during that event—I’d stood in the shower and laughed out loud with happiness. So I answered now with total certainty, “I’m great. Wonderful.”
“You’re also very agile when you can see what you’re doing, wearing your glasses,” he pointed out. “My heart stopped a little when I saw that you were going to jump the ditch, but you sailed right over.”
“I didn’t really stick the landing,” I admitted, and showed him the bandage around my ankle.
“Maybe I can rub it for you later,” he said. He bent down to kiss me.
“According to my employee handbook, that behavior is not allowed,” Marley called to us from the counter, and many heads swiveled in our direction.
“Later,” Gunnar muttered to me, and his cheeks bronzed up.
“There isn’t really an employee handbook. And you should leave,” I told him.
“No, it’s a big day for the store. It’s my responsibility to be here,” he said, but he watched me hopefully.
“Gunnar, I really want you to go get some treatment for your back. And also, you’re supposed to get the kitchen countertops installed today, and you might want to be there to supervise. Or, you could get your car washed, and also, you’re out of milk. You have too much to do to stay here.”
Never had a man looked more relieved. “If you think so,” he said, and I nodded firmly.
“I do. Go, and later at your house I can also, you know…” I crooked a finger and he leaned down again so I could whisper in his ear. “I could rub some things for you, too. By that I mean, your penis.”
He laughed into my curls. “I’m already looking forward to it.” And he was, because I felt it when he hugged me goodbye.
The crowd just kept coming as different Woodsmen players filtered in. Gaby made a brief, subdued appearance and complimented the decorations and the renovations, but she didn’t stay for long because we were so busy and she said that she had somewhere to go. In fact, we had never, ever sold so many books—but more than that, I was overwhelmed with happiness just to see people in the store.
To see people in the store and the lights weren’t flickering, I meant, because the wiring had been replaced. To see people in the store with the lights not flickering, and with me not having to put out pots to catch the snow melting through the ceiling because it wasn’t waterproof anymore and the insulation didn’t hold in the heat, I also meant. And I was also so happy to have Marley with me, making fun of the books the customers picked out and how people fawned over the football players.
Oh, and Gunnar. There was a lot about Gunnar that made me happy. So much that I smiled whenever he crossed my mind.
In summary, I was happy because we had people in the store, the lights not flickering, the ceiling not dripping, Marley with me, Gunnar and I having had sex, and him saying that he loved me, because even if it was mid-orgasm, it still counted. I was practically over the moon.
I remained that way up until the point that I saw Shephard Sterling of Sterling Standard Realty, Gaby’s boss and boyfriend, walk into Holliday Booksellers. He was perfectly calm and happy and looking attractive in his silver fox way, and I knew that Gaby was probably home in her color-explosion apartment having had a terrible holiday that she wouldn’t even talk about.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Marley. We had never refused service to anyone here before, as far as I knew, but there was going to be a first time.
“Shephard Sterling?” I asked, wishing I had my loppers with me.
“Yes?” He squinted at my face, because he probably needed reading glasses, or because he didn’t know who I was. Probably he didn’t know anything about Gaby, the immoral, exploitative jerk.
“I’m Hallie Holliday, and—”
“Hallie?” A woman stepped from behind him to smile at me. “Oh, I’ve heard so much about you.”
My mouth fell open. “You have?”
“This is my wife, Sharon,” Shep Sterling told me.
I looked at her guiltily as she continued to smile. This was the woman, this was her, as Gaby put it. I thought that Gaby imagined her as a pock-marked Medusa with fangs but really, she was a perfectly normal, actually lovely, middle-aged woman. Shep’s wife held out her hand.
“It’s nice to meet you. I knew your father and I was so sorry to hear about his passing.”
“Oh.” Another wave of guilt swamped me. I knew something horrible about Shep, something that this woman deserved to know also, and I couldn’t say it. The words rose in me but I kept them down. “Thank you, I appreciate that,” I said instead. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”
No, it wasn’t. I had been able to think of her as an abstraction, as the other woman whom I felt sorry for and had defended to Gaby. But I hadn’t considered her much as a person, a real-life person. There was certainly nothing abstract about her now. This was real and it was awful. An abstraction wouldn’t currently be tellin
g me how wonderful the store looked and how happy she was that it was open again, how she looked forward to supporting this local business. I even recognized her as one of the customers who had come in to buy books (books that she probably hadn’t wanted or needed) to try to help me save the store before I closed it down. I could only nod miserably at her as she spoke about my dad and my grandpa, too.
“It was a wonderful idea to ask the football players to come!” Sharon congratulated me. “Our youngest daughter just loves the Woodsmen and I spotted the tight end she always found so attractive, César Hidalgo. I'm going to run and get some autographs for Kelly,” she told her husband.
“Kelly can’t have him. He's married,” Shep mentioned and I gave him a look of utter disbelief.
His wife laughed. “Well, then I'll go check out the new defensive end for her. What's his name, Macpherson? Hallie, I’m so glad we came in today and I’ll encourage everyone I know to stop by also.” She smiled at me again. “Find something good for me to read?” she requested of her husband, and walked off toward the newest Woodsmen to get his autograph for their daughter.
I stared at Shep angrily. My knee actually itched with the desire to place it where Marley had put hers into Carey Winslow. “You have a lot of nerve coming in here. I’m Gaby’s friend. Gaby Carter, your twenty-five-year-old employee!” I reminded him. “The woman younger than your daughter, Kelly. The woman you’re having an affair with, you louse!”
“Shh,” Shep said, and glanced around, the sneaky little weasel. “I know who Gaby is. I wasn’t aware that she had told anyone about…”
“I’m the only one who knows about you messing around on your wife, and Gaby only told me because she couldn’t take the strain of it, because it makes her miserable.”
He looked around furtively again and stepped towards me to speak in an even lower tone. “Gaby is a wonderful girl. A great employee.”
“A wonderful girl? A great employee? Is that all she is to you?” I demanded. My voice rose. “Are you serious? She loves you! And what if she had been pregnant a few months ago? What would you have done then, you lecherous—”
“Shep?” a voice asked from over my shoulder.
Oh. Oh, Jesus God, his wife was right behind me. Why? Why did I always have to be saying the wrong thing to people?
“Let’s go,” Shep said, and put his arm through hers to lead her out of the bookstore.
The snow was falling faster as I dropped off Marley at the end of the day. “Please. Please tell me why you started banging your head on the counter when that old guy ran out of the store earlier?” she wheedled one last time. She didn’t often use the word “please,” so I knew that she really wanted to find out.
I shook my head again, because I was done speaking for life, and she rolled her eyes. “Fine! See if I live with you now.” She held on to the door after she stepped out of the Bronco. “I didn’t really mean that. I still really want to,” Marley told me.
“I know you do,” I assured her. And now Gunnar had asked his lawyer, Ainsley Evette, to work on it too, so I was fairly assured of our future success. Marley was still waiting there. “I’m not telling you about the old guy,” I said. Another eye roll, but she blew me a kiss after she ran through the snow and opened the door of her foster parents’ house, and I blew one back to her.
“You didn’t actually say anything wrong,” Gunnar consoled me when I got home, after I gave him the bare bones of the story without naming names. “You were right, but unfortunately, you said it at the wrong time. It wasn’t like when you told me that I was too old to play football and—”
“I didn’t say that!” I insisted into the phone. “I was just theorizing about statistics back then. I didn’t mean you.” I ineffectually turned the screwdriver I held in my other hand, but the hinge on the door out to the deck still hung loosely, and the screw just went around and around instead of tightening it. This wood was bad, too.
“Even if the wife does find out, I think it’s for the best,” Gunnar continued. “She deserves to know what kind of man she’s married to. And from what you’ve said to me about her, I think that Gaby deserves better also.”
“I never told you that I was talking about Gaby!” But it probably hadn’t been too hard to guess whom I meant when I had called her “a sweet, beautiful woman who made a terrible decision by sleeping with her boss at the real estate company.” “Yes, Gaby does deserve better,” I agreed, “and so does Shep’s wife. He certainly doesn’t deserve either of them. You know, if I’d had my loppers—”
“No, you wouldn’t have had them, because I went into your shed and took them away,” he said.
“I have to talk to Gaby,” I sighed. I had left her a message to call me, because I was going to have to fess up. I had no idea what had gone on between Shep and his wife after they left the store, or even what she had actually overheard or understood, but I wanted Gab to know what might be headed down the pike in her direction. “I’m going to talk to her and apologize. I shouldn’t have confronted Shep at all. At least I didn’t physically assault him, because I was really trying to set a good example for Marley.” I twirled the old phone cord around my finger like Gunnar did to my curls on his. “When will you be home?”
“Soon,” he said. “As soon as the trainers come in and take the cold packs off me.”
“And you’re ok?”
“I’m feeling better than I have in a long time. Not just my back, Hallie.”
“Sex releases all those endorphins,” I noted. Was it an endorphin release that made me tremble inside when I thought about how Gunnar had touched me? Chemically and biologically, I thought not, but I wanted to feel that again. Many, many, many times.
“It’s not just the sex,” he responded. “But I’m really looking forward to more of that. I’ll be there soon and I’ll pick you up. The snow is coming down hard and I don’t want you to get hurt on any construction stuff buried under it in the yard if you walk over to the Feeney place.”
“Drive carefully,” I told him and hung up. Then I went back to trying to fix the hinge so the door would close properly. It was letting a ton of cold air into my kitchen from the storm outside and I shivered in my t-shirt. My whole house seemed to be made of swiss cheese, about the same tensile strength and about the same level of ventilation. I went to turn up the heat again and to put on a sweater.
I stopped as I walked through my living room, because there was a new crack in the ceiling. Wonderful, great. I sighed. Now the plaster was starting to go, probably because the whole house had been so damp with the fall rains and now with the snow. I thought about the book I’d checked out from the library, which explained plaster repairs but was a little outdated, in that it discussed making the materials with horsehair. Before I started to fix the ceiling, I would have to—
Was it growing? I removed my glasses, rubbed them, then put them back on to stare at the area above my head. Was the dark, broken line actually moving in front of my eyes? The whole ceiling seemed to move as I stood transfixed. It felt like it was getting closer to me.
“Oh, Jesus God!” I grabbed the picture of my parents at their wedding off the wall and made a run for the front door, which fell back off its hinges as the ceiling came down with a gigantic crashing noise. A cloud of dust and snow flew into the air like a bomb had gone off. And my cottage, as I had known it, was suddenly gone.
∞
“My house fell down.”
“No,” Gunnar corrected, “not all of it. Just the roof over the living room and the kitchen. Your bedroom is still ok. That patch job the roofers did when your leg went through might have held it up. Lucky.”
I stared at him.
“I was trying to look on the bright side,” he explained. He took my hands in his and held them, and then he pulled me closer to his body. “The roof couldn’t take the weight of the snow and ice, but the walls are still there, the floors, and most of the furniture is probably, well, maybe all right. Jesus H. Christ, munch, you
’re freezing.” He rubbed my back and arms to restore the heat in me.
I had gotten covered in snow as I stood outside, staring at the wreckage of my cottage, and then some neighbors had shown up and someone gave me a blanket and someone called the fire department for just in case. And someone else had given me a phone, and I had called Gunnar. He had come right away, driven much too fast on our snowy, gravel road, and ended up with the nose of his car down in that stupid moat in his yard. Which was actually there to solve a drainage issue, it turned out, but had created a whole new problem by swallowing most of his hood.
“I’m fine,” he had yelled, as he climbed out of the window, and then I, who was not at all fine, had thrown myself into his arms and cried.
And now here we were in his house, and all of his construction crew was over at mine, because it had fallen down. Part of the roof had fallen, anyway, and no matter about Gunnar trying to be optimistic, the situation wasn’t good. At best, I wouldn’t be living there for a while, and at worst, I wouldn’t ever live there again.
“They’ll cover it up with tarps and then when we know it’s safe, we’ll go in and salvage—I should say, we’ll go and take everything out of it,” he told me.
“Salvage,” I repeated, and looked up at him. “Gunnar, what am I going to do? I knew I was holding everything together with tape and good luck, but now what? I have to have a house for Marley.”
“Is that what you’re worried about most?”
“Yes.” I sighed and shivered. “I can figure out something for myself, but I can’t leave her without a place to go. Not after she thinks that she’s going to be able to come live with me.”
“Hm,” he agreed, nodding.
“The stuff inside I don’t care about. I mean, I do care and I want to salvage what I can of my possessions, of my memories, but that’s not what was important about that cottage. It was my home and it was going to be a place for her to call home, too.”
“I think we’ll be able to save most, if not all, of your stuff. But I also think that you’re right. What was important about your cottage was that it was a home.”
The Last Whistle Page 26
