Page 3 of Sweet Surprises

A beautiful, snowy park took up most of the square. There was an enormous evergreen tree on one side, and an honest-to-goodness pavilion on the other that was hung with evergreen boughs and strung with golden lights that would be gorgeous when the sun went down.

The shops surrounding the park were all three-story, brick Victorians with big windows and wide sidewalks in front. Charlotte couldn’t help noticing that nearly all of them were decorated for the coming holiday. Holly branches, twinkling lights, and evergreen wreaths were everywhere she looked.

I feel like I stepped into a movie,she thought to herself.

Just like Allie had told her, the ice cream shop was in the middle of Maple Street, across from the park, right in the heart of town. Charlotte pulled into an empty spot and sighed with relief.

Maybe she had stopped a lot along the way, but she had finally arrivedsomewhere. And this somewhere looked almost too good to be true.

She got out of the car and headed to the shop, where a piece of paper taped to the front door fluttered in the chill breeze.

Charlotte, I’m so sorry, but I have an emergency parent-teacher meeting tonight. The key is under the mat. Please let yourself in and make yourself at home. I’ll call as soon as I’m done.

love & kisses

Allie

Charlotte read the note again in amazement. Surely Allie hadn’t written this note, left it on the door where any curiousperson could read it, and then actually slipped a key under the mat…

But when she lifted the corner of the welcome mat, there was a key attached to a plastic keychain sporting a logo of a woodchuck with a hockey stick that saidFighting Woodchucks—’89 Champions—Go Chucks!

“Unbelievable,” Charlotte murmured to herself.

She grabbed it and let herself into the shop.

The space was deep, with high ceilings and wide-plank wood floors. Plain white paint on the walls and ceiling made it feel as bright as possible with only the front windows to let in the last of the sunlight.

A glass-topped wood counter began at the center of the space and went almost halfway to the back wall on the left side of the shop. Behind it, the old-fashioned cash register looked like something out of the old black-and-white movies her dad liked.

The right-hand wall was set with cute little tables, with a few more over by the big front windows.

If she was being honest, the whole place felt a little faded and plain. But it was clean, and spacious, andall hers.

Charlotte headed behind the counter right away and took in the view over town that she was going to be seeing every day.

This place is a blank slate, she thought to herself.But so am I. And we’re both ready to be transformed.

2

TAG

Tag Lawrence tromped through what snow was left from the big snowfall on Thanksgiving morning, his eyes skimming the fence line as he made his way across the field toward the farmhouse.

Of course the kids had been thrilled to see the big flakes covering the green hillside. They had a great time bundling up for the trek across the snowy meadow to his parents’ place for the Thanksgiving feast.

But a week later, with plenty of snow still on the ground, Tag knew that the dairy farm’s already slim margins were about to get even slimmer.

He could hear the cows lowing happily in the barn behind him as they munched on the hay his brothers had forked into their feeders—quality hay that cost a pretty penny, but was necessary to keep them producing. Normally, they wouldn’t be feeding the cows hay like this in early December.

Happy cows mean sweeter cream, Tag’s father was fond of saying. The family had been repeating that motto since the days when Stone Lawrence helped to found the town generations agoand settled his own family here by the creek that still bore his name.

And the saying was still true. But in this day and age, it was harder and harder to make a living with a small herd and the kind of practices that allowed the cows to be content.

It was also hard to justify hanging onto extras, like the little ice cream shop in town that had started as a pet project of his grandmother’s and never really grew into anything more. They’d had a good offer on the building from one of the flatlanders who was new to town, but once again, the family turned it down. When the elderly lady who had been running the cash register finally retired, he’d thought they would sell at last. But then Allie’s old college roommate had agreed to come and work there and live in the shop above—though how Allie expected a college dropout to bring the place up to speed Tag would never understand.

He shook his head and drank in a deep breath of cold, sweet air before heading to the old farmhouse where everyone planned to gather for supper.

Tag and his wife, Iris, had taken over the big Victorian across the meadow when Olivia was born. His parents had downsized from it into this original stone farmhouse. The first thing they did after moving in was to take out a wall and create the massive open kitchen and family space that everyone loved for gatherings.

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