by Pamela Morsi
“Oh, good grief, it’s on me,” Karly said. “As far as that goes, Charlie would probably let you run a tab. Come on. If lack of cash was an excuse in this town, you wouldn’t have a job, would you?”
The coffee shop was just across the street, the corner storefront in the two-story brick building that Mazy remembered as a place to buy hardware. The café was now furnished in dull earth tones, with dark wood paneling on the walls and work surfaces done in stainless steel. The alluring scent that permeated the place could wake you up before you even got a sip.
“So you brought a friend with you today,” the man behind the counter stated.
“Do you know who she is?” Karly asked, teasing.
“Of course I do,” he answered. “I never forget a pretty face. And you, Mazy Gulliver, have always had one.”
Karly laughed delightedly. “Don’t worry, he’s harmless,” she told her. “Charlie’s very married, but a big old flirt. Do you remember him? Charlie McDee? He was a few years ahead of us in school.”
The name did ring a bell, but not from some long-ago playground memory. She’d looked at his delinquent loan account that very morning.
“Hello,” she said as evenly as possible. She didn’t offer a hand or a smile. He wasn’t going to want her to be his friend. And she could not afford to have him as one.
The women ordered their drinks and Karly led Mazy to the two-person table next to the front window. She would have preferred a less public spot, but it wasn’t worth making a big deal. She would be friendly, drink her coffee and go on her way.
And yet, Mazy was quickly surprised to find she was enjoying herself. Karly was funny and personable. Not at all like the vague impression of her that was in Mazy’s memory.
“So your last name is Farris?” she asked.
“Yes, I married Walter Farris.”
“I don’t think I know him.”
“Oh, sure you do,” Karly insisted. “He was older than us, but he used to ride around town on his motorcycle all the time.”
Mazy had an immediate recollection of a mysterious loner guy roaring through town on a vintage Indian two-tone chopper.
“You don’t mean...Apache Farris?”
Karly laughed. “Nobody calls him that much these days,” she answered. “It’s Che among family and friends, but mostly he’s Walt, the Little League dad.”
“He was so hot,” Mazy pointed out. “And so unavailable.”
Karly nodded. “Right. Women still ask me, ‘How did you get him?’”
“They do not,” Mazy said.
She laughed again. “Oh, they do. Seriously, I wonder about it myself sometimes.”
Mazy’s imagination immediately conjured up a fabulous fantasy of the two of them. It was such a romantic idea—the quiet loner in black leather and the shy, friendless hill girl. A man, a woman and a motorcycle. She could picture it so perfectly she almost sighed.
“So tell me everything,” Mazy said. “There is nothing I love better than a great love story.”
Karly shook her head. “I’ll tell you all about it one of these days. It’s a love story, but it’s also a long story and I want to hear about you.”
“Me?”
“Of course! The whole town is buzzing. Are you back for good this time? Are you just passing through?”
“Probably the latter,” Mazy answered. “I’m sort of rebooting my life. Coming back to get a fresh start.”
She thought her answer was innocuous enough, but it raised one of Karly’s eyebrows.
Her next question seemed very deliberately casual.
“So are you and Tad getting back together?”
“No.” Mazy’s answer was simple. She punctuated it with a sip of hot, foamy coffee.
“You are both single now,” Karly continued. “I mean, there was a spark there, once. That kind of thing can smolder for decades and then reignite. It happens every day.”
Mazy shook her head. “It’s not happening this time,” she said. “Mr. Driscoll is my boss. Period. I have no interest in that direction.”
“Sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Karly let out a gush of breath as if she’d been holding it. “Thank God,” she said. “I was really worried.”
“Why?”
“I’ve always really liked you,” she said. “And I don’t like him.”
That was surprising. “Tad was the most popular guy in town,” she pointed out.
“Blah,” Karly said, sticking her tongue out as if the thought made her sick. “What he did to you was totally crappy. Not everyone took his side, you know.”
Mazy shrugged. “They probably should have. What happened was more my fault than his.”
“You’ll never convince me of that,” she said. “And anyway, I have my own reasons for disliking the creep. He was a jerk to me in school.”
Mazy was a bit shocked at that. Not that Tad was incapable of meanness, but that he’d even noticed Karly.
“What happened?”
“Don’t you remember the clothespins?”
“Clothespins?”
“I guess I remember it so vividly, I expect everyone else to, as well. It was in sixth grade.”
Mazy shook her head. Sixth grade was when her father died, she was hazy on any other memories from that year.
“Maybe I wasn’t there,” Mazy said.
“Everybody was there,” Karly assured her. “It was General Assembly, grades six through twelve.”
Mazy shook her head.
“It was the middle of winter and we were in the auditorium with all the windows closed. I always sat by myself near the aisle at the back of the room,” she said. “When I came in that day all the seats around mine were filled with Tad and his friends. I didn’t know why. I was so naive I actually smiled at them.”
Mazy nodded.
“I was always so hopeful in those days,” Karly said. “Every morning as I waited on the bus I’d think, ‘Today is the day that I’ll make a friend.’ Crazy, huh? I never did make one, aside from you. It’s hard for me to even believe it now, but that day I thought, ‘Oh, look, the coolest guy in school is being nice to me.’”
Karly laughed and shook her head.
“So what was he up to?”
“He’d brought a bag of clothespins and passed them out to the other guys. A minute after I sat down they all pinched them on their noses, in unison. Once the other kids noticed, the whole building cracked up at how funny it was that they thought I smelled bad.”
Karly’s tone was matter-of-fact, but there was a slight tremor in her hand as she brought the cup to her lips.
“Even Principal Berger laughed, though he tried to cover his up with a cough.”
It was clearly a humiliation that still stung.
“Oh, wow, Karly. I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “It was a long time ago. And it was a very different place. I wasn’t the most spick-and-span girl in school. I probably did smell bad.”
“I don’t remember that,” Mazy replied honestly.
“If I did, it wasn’t because Tad and his friends were better than me. It was easy for them to be clean. I was growing up in my grandpa’s cabin with no running water. Tad’s house had, like, three bathrooms or something. Washing up with pan of warm water was the best I could do before school. I managed a whole bath and a shampoo when I did laundry on Saturdays.”
Mazy recalled with clarity the sound of Tad’s laugh when he was humiliating somebody. He wore haughty condescension and snarky superiority like a badge of honor. But Mazy had assumed that behavior had been mostly reserved for herself. And that she’d earned it. That she deserved it. Certainly Karly did not.
“I’m so sorry that he did that to you. He was a real shit.”
“Yes, he was,” Karly agreed. “I think he probably still is. But for me, that was like a million years ago. Now I’m all grown up, living happily-ever-after in a split-level ranch with all the amenities of modern life.”
Karly laughed and Mazy managed to chuckle with her.
“Still, if you were to decide that you wanted to give bad old Tad another shot, I wouldn’t judge you.”
Mazy shook her head. “No way. I seriously don’t want him.”
“Good. You can do so much better.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Mazy said. “My track record’s not very impressive.”
“Because you’ve been chasing the wrong ones,” Karly said. “You need a better kind of fellow.”
“I keep telling myself that the smart thing is to swear off men entirely.”
“That’ll never work,” Karly told her.
Mazy nodded. “I know. I am such a romance addict. I’m in love with love. I can tell myself to steer clear, but I’ll be falling for somebody before I know it. And, knowing me, he’ll be just as big a jerk as Tad.”
“Well, maybe this time, instead of falling you should jump.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t wait to stumble into Mr. Wrong,” she said. “Find a really nice guy. One who could actually deserve all the love that you have to give.”
Inexplicably, her words conjured up the image of Eli looking long and lean and sexy standing on the Lathams’ back porch.
7
The story was on everyone’s lips. Mazy Gulliver had not only sought out Tad Driscoll on her first morning back in town, Tad had hired her to work at the bank. Eli had overheard more than a few jokes about the banker so thrifty that he put his mistress on the payroll.
The community barely had time to recover from that tidbit before a new one appeared in their daily mail. An unpleasant buzz began filling the phone lines.
Eli paid no attention, deliberately focusing on the tenons that he was carefully shaping from cherry. Clark, however, had taken two back-to-back gossip calls, but before he’d had a moment to share what he’d heard, Sheila arrived brimming with news.
Eli’s sister-in-law was short and, thanks to her own great cooking, tending toward extra curvy. Her hair was bleached a blond so platinum that it was actually white. The color didn’t do anything good for her complexion, but she was still an attractive woman when she smiled. Today she was smiling with what seemed malicious glee.
“Guess what she’s done,” she said to Eli in a manner he could only describe as accusatory.
“She who?”
“Mazy Gulliver,” Sheila answered. “Some women go out of their way to make trouble for themselves and everybody else.”
Clark was frantically trying to listen to the phone and his wife at the same time.
“The be-yatch is back in town to do Driscoll’s dirty work,” his sister-in-law announced. “Apparently Tad has hired her to put the squeeze on folks. It’s why she moved home. She’s probably been plotting for years how to get back at us.”
“What are you talking about, Sheila?”
“She sent out a letter yesterday saying she is now in charge of collecting debt for the bank. She’s threatening people’s families and their livelihood—and she’s only been here a few days.”
Clark managed to free himself from his caller.
“Are you sure about that?” Eli asked her as Clark made his way over to them. “It sounds like a tale somebody made up.”
“It absolutely is not!” Sheila said. “Sandra Peavy got the letter and so did Lacey Wallender. Big as brass she says that she’s the new ‘collections officer’ and that she’ll be contacting everyone individually.”
“So, these are people who owe the bank money,” Eli clarified. “That doesn’t sound like she’s ‘threatening’ anybody. It sounds like contacting them might be her job.”
“Well, people feel threatened. And what’s she doing sending out letters?”
Clark nodded. “The whole town is in an uproar,” he said. “That was Jimmy Ray Esher on the phone. He wanted to see if we’d let him hide his bass boat in our garage.”
Sheila huffed in disgust. “It would almost be worth it to keep it out of her hands. Wouldn’t you know that she’d have some scheme to move back here and get revenge on the whole town.”
“That’s not why she’s here,” Eli argued. “She probably moved back to take care of her mother.”
Sheila looked skeptical. “Beth Ann is as healthy as a horse,” she said. “Mazy had some other motive for moving back. And if it wasn’t revenge, then it has to be a man.”
Eli swallowed hard and deliberately turned his concentration back to the work at hand.
“She’s trying to get back with Tad Driscoll. I’d bet anything on it,” Sheila said. “But you’d think she’d have the decency to see him openly, not restart a nasty little affair.”
“Maybe she’s not,” Eli suggested. “Maybe she’s just working there.”
Both Sheila and Clark raised their eyebrows.
“The man got her pregnant, didn’t marry her, wouldn’t even acknowledge the child and did everything he could to paint her as a scarlet woman and make her a public joke in this town. Is that where you would go looking for a job?”
It was a question Eli had already asked himself.
“I doubt it’s where she’d be looking for romance, then, either. Anyway, all that is ancient history,” he said. “She’s probably put it behind her.”
Sheila snorted. “Well, I haven’t.”
To be honest, neither had Eli. He deliberately did his banking in Boone so he wouldn’t have to offer more than an absent nod to Tad Driscoll. Imagining Mazy forgiving him, picturing her back in his arms, bothered Eli more than he was willing to admit.
He couldn’t even pretend to himself that he’d gotten over her. Over the years, he’d dated a number of nice women. His sister-in-law was always trying to fix him up with some sweet gal from her bowling league or PTA. And he met women curators and interior designers who were as interested in him as they were in his furniture. He’d even kept up a year-long relationship with a bright and beautiful woman from Johnson City. But not even she could capture his heart. He’d given it to Mazy a long time ago, and although she obviously didn’t want it, he couldn’t seem to get it back.
The gossip-fest was forced to a halt with the arrival of some new customers. They were retirees from Connecticut, recently relocated to Asheville. They were furnishing their new home and the wife had heard about Eli’s furniture.
Typically Eli let Clark handle client visits. But on this day, he found the distraction welcome. He showed them around, priming them with coffee and then slathering them with Southern hospitality.
Word of mouth was the best kind of promotion for his business, and typically he was grateful for any new interest coming his way. But it wasn’t long before he was regretting taking the lead over Clark.
The wife was nice. She appeared to have a keen eye for design and an interest in craftsmanship. Her husband, however, was far less pleasant. In fact, in the vernacular that had been Eli’s dad’s, the man was a “gen-u-wine horse’s patoot.”
“I know how this stuff works,” the man told him. “There’s a couple of you guys here at this site for show. But once we order the furniture you get a crew of Mexicans to do the work and charge us like it was handmade.”
Eli didn’t even allow himself to make the obvious point that even a “crew of Mexicans” could do handmade work. He tried to politely stick to the facts.
“All our pieces are made right here. And the work is all done by either my brother or myself.”
The husband continued to look skeptical.
“I don’t know how you ever expect to sell anything. You don’t ev
en have a decent showroom.”
“A lot of our pieces are built to your specifications,” Eli explained. “If you want to buy something that we have on hand, you can look through our photobook or check out the finished pieces on our website.”
The “patoot” insisted on seeing the finished pieces that were for sale. Unfortunately, they were stacked up in a nearby shed that was packed in solid. Even when Eli tried to show him around, the guy seemed to prefer spouting off and making complaints. Clark kept his head down, appearing to ignore the guy. However, Eli was pretty sure that his brother was likely to plane the board he was working on into a toothpick.
“So, I guess a lot of fellows up here in the hills go into this line of work. What’s the deal? Did you get laid off from some textile plant and decide to open a carpenter shop?”
Eli ignored both the misnomer of carpenter as well as the implied insult to their business origins. “Our family has been woodworking here since 1878.”
“Oh, so you boys just don’t know anything else.”
“No, I guess we don’t,” Eli replied.
In the end, the wife picked out a very lovely entry table and asked to email measurements for another piece she wanted Eli to design. She had a good eye and excellent taste. She was also polite and still attractive for a woman of her age. And she seemed clever and capable. Enough so that Eli wondered what she’d ever seen in the loudmouth patoot she’d married.
When they got around to prices, the husband bad-mouthed and disparaged so thoroughly that when Eli caught the wife’s eye she mouthed, Sorry, behind her husband’s back. The guy was equally unhappy about the waiting list. But he eventually figured out that it was a waste of time to try to negotiate the nonnegotiable. The wife had the patience to wait for the exact piece she wanted. Eli was sure that she would be glad that she did.
After they left, Eli reflected on the mismatch. Was what he’d seen a good example of the wife’s life? Did she spend her days quietly apologizing for the behavior of the man she married? Eli figured it was likely. Could she be another one of those women inexplicably attracted to assholes? And was she happy with her choice, or did she wish she’d married the boring nice guy?
