Bluegrass Hero

by Allie Pleiter

  “Please. There’s a sour old lady living next to me who used to smile all the time.” The man leaned heavily on a dark wood cane. “I’m looking for that kindness soap they said you sell.” He adjusted his bolo tie and winked at Emily. “It’s her birthday tomorrow, and I sure would take to seeing some kindness from her again.”

  Gil’s scowl radiated from his pores as he pretended to be inspecting some hand towels.

  Emily smiled at the old man and steered him in the direction of a display of lace handkerchiefs. “Ladies of a certain age,” she said as if revealing a secret, “have a fondness for scented hankies, you know.” She gently touched his elbow.

  “Hankies—that’s a good idea, too. I reckon she would like something like that.” He picked up the Edmundson’s Kindness Soap. “So what does kindness smell like?”

  Emily heard Gil stifle a derisive snort from behind her. “It’s a vanilla sort of smell,” she said, “with a hint of butter and cinnamon. Like something baking, I think.”

  A twinkle played in the old man’s watery eyes. “That’ll do nicely.” He took the bar she held out for him and sniffed it. “What do you know? It does smell kind.”

  “There’s a Bible verse inside each wrapper about the value of kindness,” Emily offered, pitching her voice up a bit to make sure Gil heard her. “That’ll help more than the soap.”

  “The Good Book’s always a help, little lady. You’ll wrap both those up all pretty for me, won’t you?”

  Gil could barely believe she’d just sold another bar of the stuff. “See what I mean?” Gil barked the minute the old man left.

  “So I’m not supposed to sell him what he came in for, just because it might be a bit misguided? Do you know how many truly misguided gifts are given in this world?”

  “Well, at least we agree on the misguided part,” he replied. Hadn’t they just talked about how to redirect his guys from their foolish purchases? Now she was defending frazzled mothers inhaling the soaps and old men squandering their fixed incomes on them? No, this had to stop now. “You know what? I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think there’s any need for us to agree on verse assignments. My guys aren’t going to spend one more dime on your soaps.”

  Gil was sure she was going to haul off at him after he said that. She was probably counting on a nice bundle of sales from those boys. He waited for her to lay into him. He wanted her to see how little effect her ranting and raving would have.

  She did neither. He’d essentially just announced a Homestretch Farm boycott of her store, but she just stared at him, as if examining him under a microscope. Was that supposed to be threatening? Could anyone even begin to look threatening in a sweater that color?

  She came around the counter and crossed one fuzzy yellow arm over the other. “You don’t spend much time with your niece, do you?”

  Gil didn’t see what that had to do with anything. “Huh?”

  “How many teens have you had up at your stables? And you still don’t know that the fastest way to get anyone under twenty-five to do something is to forbid him to do it?”

  Well, of course he knew that. But this was different. He wasn’t sure how, but it was. “I can handle my guys.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you can. There’s no one in Middleburg who would argue that Gil Sorrent can’t get the job done.” The way she said it wasn’t entirely complimentary. “You and I can go a round on the ethics of forbidding your farmhands to buy these bars, but I’ll tell you one thing: if you outlaw these soaps, I’m one hundred percent certain those guys will find a way in here.” She fished out the stack of index cards she’d brandished earlier and clicked the top of her pen. “Wouldn’t you rather have them coming in on terms we set than sneaking in behind your back?”

  He stared at her. She had him. He knew it, she knew it. “I ain’t got time to do this now.”

  “Then I’ll just come by the farm this afternoon. I have to go out that way anyway.”

  If he were half as smart as he ought to be, he’d just walk out and put this fiasco behind him. The whole thing seemed wrong anyhow. He didn’t see how adding Bible verses to the mix—or having Emily up to the farm—was gonna solve anything. Then again, he’d had no luck getting the guys to memorize verses in the past. Could he ignore the possibility that the ultimate motivation was right in front of him? If he went along with her plan, the guys would find out soon enough that soap isn’t the way to a woman’s heart. They actually had been cleaner this week than any time in recent memory. The smell, while not his favorite by a long shot, wasn’t that much worse than anything else a nose could come across in a stable.

  When you ask God for a match, don’t go griping when he hands you a gallon of gasoline.

  He tossed his business card down on the table. “One-thirty?”

  She picked up the business card and headed back around the counter. “Fine by me. And thanks.”

  “For…?”

  “For Howard.” She tucked his card into a little old-fashioned looking handbag she pulled from a drawer. After a pause she added, “And this.”

  Gil stared at the handbag and wondered if this woman owned any shoes that had any business being hear a horse barn. “I still think I’ll regret it.”

  Chapter Eight

  Emily was just getting ready to leave when Dinah Hopkins poked her head in the store. “Whatcha got in the sneaky thank-you department?” Dinah’s bakery down the street had probably been overrun with farmhands this morning. Emily didn’t mention that the sugar rush had come straight to her store after visiting Dinah’s—it seemed too complicated an issue to get into just then, although she was sure Dinah would have backed her up on her creative sales scheme.

  Emily and Dinah had become friends in the months since Dinah moved to town and took over the bakery. Emily liked Dinah’s enthusiasm for life. She was a lot like a young Sandy Burnside—the same kick but far less nail polish.

  As she always did whenever she saw Dinah, Emily began humming “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah” from the old song almost no one remembered anymore.

  “You know, Emily,” Dinah said as she pulled off her gloves and began fingering through a stack of vintage tea towels on the shelf by the windows, “there wasn’t ever a time when that was funny. Ever.” Dinah still had flour smudges on her pants and she wore flip-flops even though it was almost February.

  “Thank-yous aren’t supposed to be sneaky.” Emily walked over to her. “They should be heartfelt and gracious. If thank-you is worth saying, it’s worth saying face-to-face. What’s up?”

  “Peter Epson was in the bakery yesterday.” Peter, a slightly geeky young man just a few years out of high school, was Howard Epson’s son. For as large a character as Howard the Mayor was, Peter stumbled along in his father’s shadow. He was a nice kid, polite and all, but somehow he’d never lived up to the high-achiever expectations his father had for him. Peter was, mostly, average. A nice average, perhaps a meek average, but not anyone who’d ever show up in the “most likely to” column of the yearbook. His one and only achievement was that he was a reporter for the local paper.

  “Doing an exposé on the fat content of your fudge brownies,” Emily teased, “or just taste-testing?”

  “Ha-ha.” Dinah pointed at her with a Victorian hat pin she’d just pulled from one of Emily’s displays. “You’re in a fine humor today, Ms. Montague. No, he was just in looking at some very Valentiney cake designs.” Dinah raised a red eyebrow. Dinah had the brightest red hair Emily had ever seen and insisted it was her natural color, although Emily had her doubts. “I think our cub reporter’s got a crush. Be on the lookout, he might end up in here. He took forever deciding, then decided not to get a cake. But that’s not really why I’m here.”

  “You’re here looking for sneaky thank-yous.”

  “You got it.” She pulled Emily over to the counter by the elbow, whispering in the voice of someone revealing a juicy secret. “While Peter was in, I heard him talking to a buddy of his about being at
the library. He said he freaked out when he stumbled upon Audrey Lupine crying way back in the periodicals section. She was talking quietly to someone about leaving the library. Said she didn’t feel appreciated. That no one cared much about librarians anymore.”

  “Audrey? How could she be feeling down when she’s just done such a fabulous job in the musical?”

  “Well, I think that’s just it—all that attention in the musical made her feel invisible at work. I think she needs a pick-me-up. A little goody from the Library Board to let her know we appreciate her years of service. She’ll have been there ten years tomorrow.” Dinah was about the least likely Vice Chairperson of the Middleburg Library Board Emily could ever imagine, but she’d done an outstanding job of balancing out Howard, who was, of course, Chairman of the Library Board and nearly everything else.

  Emily grinned. “Aren’t you in the goody business?”

  “That’s just it. If I whip something up for her, everyone’ll know it was me. I want this to be dramatic. Sort of a ‘secret admirer.’ But heartfelt. Come on, you gotta have something in here that’ll do the trick.”

  Emily drummed her fingers against the counter, inventorying the possibilities. This sounded like a job for Edmundson’s Faithfulness Soap and a few of those exquisite petit-point bookmarks she’d picked up last month. “I’ve got to run out on an errand later this afternoon. I’ll pack up something—free of charge as my bit toward the cause—and leave it all wrapped at the bakery in about twenty minutes. That way even you won’t know what it is, and it’ll all be a grand surprise.”

  Dinah grinned. “I knew you’d think of something. Sign the card from the Library Board. I’ve got a meeting over there tonight so I can slip it in without anyone noticing. It’ll be sitting pretty on her desk when she comes in tomorrow morning.”

  As she pulled her car onto Old Frankfort Pike that afternoon, Emily found herself rethinking the wisdom of her offer to visit Homestretch. Had she suddenly forgotten she didn’t like horses? That she was actually afraid of horses?

  This was a distinct disadvantage in a place like Middleburg, where most of the town owed its livelihood—directly or indirectly—to equestrian pursuits. Despite living in “the horse capital of the world” for so many years, Emily had never managed to transform herself into a “horse person.”

  Homestretch Farm sat nestled between two rolling hillsides just north of the Pike. It was a modest farm by bluegrass standards, where equine housing could run well beyond nice and into luxurious and even opulent. Many farms had stables nicer than most homes, and twice as large. Homestretch was mid-size, about 250 acres by Emily’s guess, with a friendly dotting of green-and-white buildings across the compound. Given Gil’s usual state of dress, she wasn’t sure if she would find a rough-and-tumble farm, or if his tight-ship mentality would mean he ran a neat operation.

  Pulling up to the iron gate that led onto Homestretch, Emily could see that Gil ran an efficient farm. Two curving stone walls with green-and-white light fixtures held an electric iron gate. At the center of the gate was a green square with a white galloping horse—she recognized that as the Homestretch Farm logo. She’d noticed it on some of the guys’ T-shirts when they’d come into the shop, and a smaller version of it hung from Gil’s keychain. She hit the intercom button, announced herself, and watched the gates swing open. “You don’t have to go near the horses,” she told herself as she steered her powder-blue VW down the lane. “Just because he told you to meet him in the largest barn doesn’t mean you’ll be near horses. She drove past the enormous rustic white main house with its green trim and gray slate roof, past the dorm-type building she guessed to be where the hands lived, and still farther back to where the offices and barns were. There were five barns in all, but as Gil had said, it was obvious which was the main barn.

  A black horse looked up as she drove by, its gaze following her as she drove past. The animal’s dark round eyes stared over the white fence as if to say “Are you sure that’s a real car?” Emily reckoned you could fit her entire VW bug in the bed of Gil’s big red truck and still have room to spare.

  A second horse thudded by on her right, trotting fast, carrying a bony young man who seemed eight sizes too small for his T-shirt. He had thick black dreadlocks hanging out from under a baseball cap he wore backward. She recognized him from earlier that morning as the one who didn’t want a haircut. He wore a gold chain so large she wondered how it didn’t knock in his teeth as he bumped up and down on the horse. In her rearview mirror, Emily watched him twist around to watch her car go by.

  She recognized Gil’s towering outline standing in the barn’s open double doors facing out into the pastures. It was like staring at the cover of a horse-farmer textbook: big man in blue jeans, work coat, boots and heavy gloves. He was even holding a rope in one hand while he rested his other elbow on some rake-like farming implement. Leaning casually against the door frame, Gil was shouting directions to another young man who was leading a small horse around a ring on what looked like an oversize leather leash.

  The noise of her car caught his attention, and he began to put down the equipment and walk toward her as she parked on the patch of asphalt that stretched out in front of the barn.

  It looked to be a well-kept barn, as tidy as Emily imagined barns could get. It was an unusual L-shape, with a round room joining the two wings of stables. That was distinctive enough, but as she got out of the car, Emily noticed what looked to be perhaps a dozen cats sitting on the roof of the barn.

  Gil Sorrent didn’t strike her as a cat person.

  A second look revealed that the cats weren’t real. The man had china cats—and a few other creatures, from the look of things—mounted on the roof of his barn. Gil Sorrent definitely did not look like the type of man to collect curios, either. Shielding her eyes against the sun, she pointed up with the other hand toward the faux felines. “Couldn’t afford the real thing?” she asked.

  “Real cats would probably be cheaper,” he said, a grin sneaking across his face. “And we have a few of those, somewhere. But these are a French tradition. Left over from the previous owner, mostly. Someone told me they’re worth a lot of money, but I didn’t believe him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cuz when I told him to climb up there and take the critters home himself, he declined.”

  “Maybe he was just afraid of heights?”

  “Maybe, but he didn’t look much afraid of money, so I figure if they weren’t incentive enough for him, I’d just let ’em be. They tend to surprise people, and the guys spend hours giving them goofy names each year, so they make for an entertainment of sorts.” French ceramics on the roof for entertainment? What next?

  Gil shouted a brief direction to the young man behind him and hung the rake on a wall peg. “And they never fail to start a conversation.” He walked over to a small fridge tucked under a table and opened it. He plucked out two green bottles of Ale-8 and held one out to her.

  “No thanks, can’t stand that stuff,” she said, pushing a hand out at him.

  “What? You don’t drink Kentucky’s official soft drink? I thought everybody here loved this stuff.” He angled the bottleneck on the edge of the table and whacked off the cap with a practiced move. “Want something else?”

  Emily was trying to calculate the distance between the small horse and her—it seemed safe enough. “I’m not really thirsty. And I didn’t start out a local, so maybe they’ll forgive me one day for not taking a liking to Ale-8.” And not taking a liking to horses, either, Emily added in the back of her mind.

  He caught her expression. “You don’t ride?”

  Ah, now here was a quandary. When, exactly, is the best time to admit to a horse farmer that you’re afraid of horses? Especially a born reformer like Gil Sorrent, who might just haul you up on a horse to prove to you that you just haven’t met the right horse?

  “Not much.” More like not at all. Do carousel ponies count?

  At this moment, the equine
in question decided to give a very nasty display of temperament and knock over the young man leading him around, sending him to the ground dangerously near a pile of…how to put it delicately…essence of horse. He muttered a string of what was surely impolite Spanish at the horse.

  Gil chuckled. “I’ve told you before, Paulo, you take your eye off that horse and she’s gonna show you why it’s a bad idea. Your brain can’t leave the barn every time a lady walks in, amigo. Next time we might be mending your bones instead of just washing your jeans.” He turned to Emily. “Now Lady Macbeth here,” he said, pointing to an enormous horse Emily had not even noticed because it was standing so still off to one side of the barn, “she knows how to behave. She’s the horse for someone like you.”

  An enormous horse. How had she not seen the huge, possibly dangerous horse right in front of her? Emily took a step backward. “I’m thinking there just really isn’t a horse for me. Riding’s not my thing.”

  “That’s what I said,” Paulo offered, dusting himself off as he returned from tying up the feisty little horse that had knocked him down, “until I met The Lady. She’s the horse for everyone. ’Specially people who say they don’t like horses.”

  “I never said I didn’t like horses,” Emily countered.

  “Back up any more and you’ll be clear out of the barn,” Gil snorted. “That screams ‘I don’t like horses’ to me.”

  “I tell you, Ms. Montague, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Nada. Not with Lady Macbeth.”

  “Have you read Macbeth, Paulo? Lady Macbeth is not a nice lady. If I aim to get on a horse anytime in the future, it’s certainly not going to be one named after a murderess.” Lady Macbeth stomped as if she found that insulting, which made Emily wonder if the horse understood English.

  “Well, I’m sure she hasn’t read Macbeth.” Gil replied, now checking the large horse’s tack as though he was going to hoist her up there any second. “She’s the gentlest horse here. I had a four-year-old up on her the other day.”