Forever Finley

by Holly Schindler

  Nathan Waters, a recent transplant to Finley, watched with a sense of part-wonder, part-disbelief as the town of Finley streamed closer to Founders Park, where he had himself sought refuge, a quiet moment to gather his thoughts. He adjusted his football helmet to get a better view of the informal parade.

  They didn’t so much enter the park as attack it, Nathan thought, wondering for the slightest moment if he should vacate the old wooden picnic table where he was currently sitting—on the table top itself, his feet resting on the attached bench, his thighs surrounded by carved hearts with initials inside.

  But Michael, the barista from Cuppa who regularly made Nathan’s morning cup of joe, pulled his arm from his fiancée’s shoulder and waved in a friendly way that made Nathan stay put.

  “What’s the deal?” Nathan asked, his voice slithering around the metal face mask he had decided to wear after his latest run-in with disaster.

  “You’re asking me?” Michael chuckled, pointing at the helmet.

  “My ceiling tile fell in my apartment. Ice dam caused a leak, apparently. Missed taking off the top of my head by an inch.”

  “Oh, the ice storm,” sighed Ashley, Michael’s fiancée, ignoring the fact that Nathan’s apartment had turned into a regular destruction zone. “The one back at the beginning of January,” she added in a whispery voice that reminded Nathan of the way teenage girls talked about their crushes. “Made everyone stop for a while, put anything that had gotten out of place in their lives back in order. Amos was hard at work that night.”

  Nathan cringed. He’d heard the tales. They’d spilled into his web design office on the town square. He’d suffered through the story of Amos Hargrove, too—a melodramatic piece of shined-up history, he’d invariably thought as he dipped his head down to roll his eyes without his current client noticing. An embellishment if not an outright lie. As all stories of true love were, he was sure. Because Nathan was no Amos. He did not believe in love. Not anymore.

  “I wondered where everyone had gone,” Nathan said instead, pointing at the crowd. “Couldn’t get a single handyman—or my landlord—to answer my calls.” No sense spitting on Ashley’s fairy tale.

  “Yeah,” Michael agreed. “Whole town closes down on February first—nobody opens up shop, and if it’s a school day, the kids are out.”

  “What for—just to decorate the park?”

  Michael and Ashley turned toward Nathan with identical shocked expressions. “Not just to decorate,” Ashley insisted, shoving her hands into the pockets of her unlined jean jacket. It really was unusually warm, Nathan thought—probably, Ashley was going to attribute that to the work of Amos, too. Here he was making everyone comfortable while they came to deck out his park. Nathan cringed again.

  “We’re doing it for them,” she went on.

  “Them who?” Nathan asked.

  “Them. Amos and Finley.”

  A groan escaped Nathan despite his best efforts to swallow it.

  “They’ve never found each other,” Ashley went on. “Never gotten back together. According to legend, we have to make this the perfect setting for a reunion. Make it as bright as a searchlight! That way, they’ll both come. They’ll be together again in the place they both love.”

  A second groan. This time, it was accompanied by Nathan clutching his queasy stomach.

  “You just haven’t felt it yet,” Michael warned him. “You haven’t been here long enough. You will, though. At some point, something will happen—something inexplicable. Some small thing—a happy accident. And it will wind up changing your life. You’ll get it—this weird feeling, hair standing up on the back of your neck. And you’ll know—”

  “—Amos Hargrove,” Ashley finished with a nod. “You’ll know he was behind it.”

  A third groan. The kind that made Michael laugh. “You’re not exactly immune to ridiculousness. He who wears a football helmet for no reason is going to shoot down nearly a hundred and fifty years of tradition? A Colts helmet, no less. And here we are in Missouri.”

  “It’s not ridiculous. I just put it on to protect myself from the falling ceiling tile. And I—” Nathan paused. “I’m from Indianapolis.” The truth was, he liked the horseshoe on the side of the helmet. He needed some luck. Desperately. There—maybe he was a little superstitious. But he had to be, now that it was officially February. The month had a tendency to attack him.

  In years past, February had wrecked his favorite Jeep, terminated him from two different jobs, started a kitchen fire in one of his apartments. Worst of all, just last February, Nathan’s own fiancée had left him. On Valentine’s Day. Wrenched Cupid’s arrow out of her chest and dropped it on the kitchen tile, no longer smitten. She’d pulled off her engagement ring, too—the diamond one—and left it on the dresser next to the plastic one. Nathan had gotten the plastic ring from one of those silly vending machines that stood inside grocery stores, the kind that were stuffed with little egg-shaped capsules that held Cracker Jack-style prizes. He’d bought it when they’d barely been dating a month—first trip to the grocery store together, for some wine and popcorn for a home movie night. He’d made a joke of it, slipping the ring on her finger, but even then, it seemed, he’d known he’d do it for real. And now, a year after pawning the diamond, he was still carrying the plastic band in his pocket. For some reason, there was something special about it. Something that seemed more precious than the one he’d had to take out a loan to buy. He just couldn’t let it go.

  “You oughta give him a rub,” Michael said, pointing toward Amos’s bronze statue. It had tarnished to a deep, dark brown for the most part—but certain spots were still bright orange, polished by the fingers of Finley residents: The toes of his boots. The tip of his nose. The right hand, open at his side. The rim of his hat. And a small, silver-dollar-sized circle on the left side of his chest: the spot right over his heart.

  Nathan refused to look at the statue. He did not believe in the legend of Amos Hargrove. He did not believe that any magical force had drawn him to Finley, as one of the waitresses at the Corner Diner had tried to insist as she’d served his eggs over easy. What he really needed was to crawl inside a cave and stay there until the calendar page finally flipped again. To make the entire situation even worse, it was leap year—brutally tacking on an entire extra day to the end of February.

  “I’m serious,” Michael said. “People swear by it. Give Amos a rub, and your luck will change. Probably do you far more good than that crazy helmet of yours.”

  “Don’t tell me you actually believe that.” This time, though, the voice of dissent wasn’t Nathan’s—it belonged to Kelly Marx, the only person in Finley currently dressed for a full day of work, wearing gray slacks and a fitted houndstooth tweed blazer.

  “Don’t tell me you’re in Nathan’s camp,” Michael said. “Not our own wedding planner.”

  Kelly grimaced and hugged her clipboard to her chest, instantly regretting her words. It was her job to be enthusiastic about all things romance—especially this month, and especially in front of two of her clients. But enthusiasm was hard to grow again once it died—like her heart was full of soil that was too acidic to sprout another round of flowers. As far as Kelly was concerned, February was nothing more than a long stream of cookie-cutter ceremonies. Far worse than June. Sometimes, in June, weddings were held outside. Sometimes, they weren’t quite as formal. She’d helped plan one last year at a family farm for a bride in white cowgirl boots. February, though—always the same vows recited in the same chapel, always candlelit, always full of red accents, always with roses in the bouquet and on the reception tables. Love itself was looking like a cliché to Kelly. Like something cheap, flimsy, mass-produced.

  She hadn’t started out thinking of February that way—but then again, she’d never have anticipated she’d be back here, in her hometown, planning weddings. Not when she’d set out to be a fashion designer. When she’d been so certain that was how her life would turn out: runways and slick Vogue covers. Sometim
es, the big city kicked a girl right in the shins. Sometimes, it turned her into a seamstress, forcing her to stitch together someone else’s designs. Sometimes, it sent her back home covered in bruises. Sometimes, a girl made a living any way she could. Even if it was plastic and flat and void of joy.

  “I was getting a few things in order for your reception,” Kelly announced, pointing over her shoulder at the stone building in Founders Park—the banquet hall.

  “Who’s around to let you in?” Ashley asked.

  Kelly raised her hand, jingling a set of keys.

  Michael offered her one of his bags of red tinsel. “Now that you’re done, you can help with the decorating.”

  “Actually,” Kelly said, eyeing Nathan’s helmet with wariness. “I need to get back to the office.”

  “Office!” Michael shouted. “You guys both need to give Amos a rub. You and Nathan here—who has not yet sent us his RSVP, but is coming to our wedding, aren’t you?”

  “I’m no good at weddings,” Nathan grumbled.

  “But you’re coming,” Michael insisted. “The whole town’s going to be there.”

  Nathan pulled himself from the picnic table and began to head toward the bridge that would lead him back to the square, his own office, the deserted center of town. He refused to participate in some silly tradition that perpetuated the lie of two people being meant for each other. Sometimes, people turned out like him—having met that perfect someone, knowing from the beginning it was right, and losing them anyway.

  “I’m telling you,” Michael shouted, “you’d have a completely different Valentine’s Day if you’d just give the guy a good rub-down.”

  “Forget February,” Nathan called back.

  Kelly nodded in agreement as she headed toward her car in the nearby parking lot. Yes, she thought, forget February. Because love, more than anything in the world, really should have been unique, one-of-a-kind. And the longer she was in her business, the more February was beginning to make it seem like love was one-size-fits-all.

  They both flinched when Michael and Ashley called out, nearly in unison, “Amos has his work cut out for him!”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Nathan remained convinced of Amos’s general lack of power when his month carried on with the same kind of bad luck that had become typical of other Februaries. Every single day it was something: A flat tire. A woman bumping into him at Cuppa, sloshing coffee onto his messenger bag and ruining the thumb drive in the front pocket. A late notice in his mailbox for a credit card bill that had never arrived in the first place—surely shredded by some sort of February-style post office fiasco, Nathan mused, conveyor belts clogged by unending streams of two-bit Valentine’s Day cards. He stubbed his toe when he stumbled toward his loft’s bathroom at night, he accidentally bit his own tongue when he ordered pizza, and he lost two different clients because they both decided to go DIY on their own websites.

  And then February sneered right at Nathan; it cackled and it unloaded its worst prank yet. To start with, February made the temperature dip, gave Finley another winter storm not unlike the harsh blasts the town endured in January. And then February sent the sun out right away to melt the snow and ice—or so it said. February tapped Nathan on the shoulder and whispered, “See? It really is all gone. Just some damp sidewalks left now.”

  Before he could remind himself that February was not to be trusted, not ever, under any circumstance, his right foot hit the one spot left in all of Finley that was still frozen over. He fell onto the slanted sidewalk outside his office—and he slid, like a kid on a downhill sled, straight toward his building. He threw his foot out in an effort to try to catch himself. But on impact, the pain that traveled up from the sole of his foot nearly cut him in half.

  Michael heard him screaming; he left Cuppa to drive Nathan to the hospital. A broken foot—that was the official diagnosis. “You and your dumb legend, your dumb statue,” Nathan mumbled, less to Michael than to the entire town.

  “Did you rub it?” Michael asked. “If you rubbed the statue, it’ll all turn around.”

  Nathan glared. The worst part—even worse than breaking his bones—was that he’d also mangled it, the old plastic ring. He’d fallen on it; it had gotten smashed in his pocket. When he looked at it in the emergency room, he suddenly could no longer remember the time when things were good with his former fiancée—only the time right before the end when what they shared seemed dented and smashed and out of place. He threw it away in the hospital trash can, where it got mixed up with used Kleenex and dime-a-dozen latex gloves and coffee filters—so many things that were intended to be disposed of from the very get-go.

  His left leg was fitted with a walking cast, which he thought should have been called a hobbling cast, actually. February decided to remain so unusually warm (his car window was always down and he went everywhere in shirtsleeves and sunglasses) that Nathan regularly drove himself over the bridge to Founders Park. He clumped and staggered toward his picnic table, where he ate lunch in clear view of Amos’s statue. Funny, though—the table didn’t feel the same beneath him without that silly old ring in his pocket. More comfortable, somehow. Which meant he was laughing and shaking his head at himself—just like the Princess and the Pea, he thought, overly sensitive about a trivial matter. A kid’s vending machine ring, with no value to speak of.

  Nathan’s thoughts rolled freely in the park, like a fistful of kites bandied about by the wind. He caught himself thinking that the kind of woman he would end up with would not be a delicate little princess, either, but a woman with thicker skin. The sort not so easily upset by the sloppiness of daily life—a woman who greeted imperfections warmly. It was the first time he’d thought it in a year—that there would be a someone else. Suddenly, Nathan was breaking off pieces of his sandwich and tossing them to the geese who had congregated near his table. Piece after piece, break after break, tossing them away. He was breaking off other pieces, he felt—old thoughts, old feelings. Chipping at them, tossing them. Just like he’d tossed that old plastic ring. Nathan was changing. The glittering six-foot hearts in Founders Park seemed prettier, less ridiculous, somehow.

  Kelly saw Nathan there as she continued to work on the reception area for Michael’s wedding—always at the same table in the park, a creature of habit, just like her clients who were always asking for the same old humdrum menus and place settings they’d seen a hundred times before. The two acknowledged each other with nods and the kind of pauses that could have opened up to full-blown conversations but never quite did.

  She always had somewhere else to be, another errand, another item on her never-ending checklist. As February ground on, she wore her obligatory pink and red blouses and heart-shaped brooches on her lapels. She smiled when other Finley-ites stopped gorging themselves on chocolate-covered cherries and conversation hearts just long enough to approach her on the square to talk about Amos and Finley, about how this was going to be the year, they could feel it. On Valentine’s Day, it would happen. Their spirits would come together. They would find each other. Why wouldn’t they? Founders Park looked better than it ever had.

  Oh, yes, the spirits of the long-ago deceased all have a definite appreciation for three-dimensional Cupids that glow in the dark, she thought, even as she smiled and nodded.

  Really, though, she would have preferred racing right up to the statue of Amos Hargrove and knocking him over. Because she had never felt it, not once, not that her life was being guided by some spiritual benefactor. She felt instead that she had bungled things all on her own, made a perfect mess of her life’s passion, broken it into a hundred little shards. What good was finding romantic love if a woman didn’t have her own life’s passion? If she wasn’t fulfilled? It would have been like putting the world’s most delicious icing on a bitter cake made of earthworms and rotten cilantro.

  Would Kelly always have a hole inside of her? Something that would never be mended—not even by the world’s most perfect love-match?

  But
she pushed these thoughts down, too, and she never showed the slightest hint of her own worries, not ever, when another Finley resident launched into their own long-winded tale of how Amos had guided them toward their happy ending. And the closest she ever came to admitting that she didn’t buy into the whole Amos Hargrove myth had been that day in the park, with Michael. Kelly told herself she needed to stand in good stead with her client base. But there was something else to it, too—she honestly hadn’t discounted the whole Amos and Finley story, not completely. After all, she wasn’t necessarily a superstitious person, but she didn’t go around purposefully breaking mirrors or walking under every ladder she encountered, either.

  The frantic call came on a Friday evening, two days before Valentine’s Day—and Michael and Ashley’s wedding. From the owner of the bridal boutique, who apologized over and over.

  “For what? What happened?” Kelly wanted to know.

  But the owner refused to say exactly. Kelly would just have to come see it, she said. She would know what to do then.

  Kelly raced to the shop, hating Main Street’s red lights the same way she hated the cheap red hearts in Founders Park. Inside the bridal boutique, Ashley’s dress had been placed on a headless mannequin. The same perfect white dress that Kelly had arranged to be stored in the shop for safekeeping. The dress, covered in layers of lace, that she had planned on picking up Sunday morning, delivering it herself to the chapel. With long slashes down the front.