Page 8 of Playing for Keeps in Starr's Fall
She arched an eyebrow, her friendly, freckled face that everyone said was so approachable looking decidedly not. “Then whatdoyou mean?”
“As I believe I’ve said quite a few times before, I’d just like to be informed about what’s going on,” Zach told her evenly. “We’re supposed to be running this store together, remember? Making decisions together, deciding what direction we’re going in…together.”
“And you’re supposed to be doing 50 percent of the work,” Jenna reminded him, her tone just as dangerously even as his. “Which you’re not. So.”
“I would do more if you’d let me,” Zach replied. He flung his half-eaten slice back into the box, his stomach churning too much to eat anymore. “Which I’vealsosaid before, many times. We keep having this conversation, and nothing ever changes.”
“Maybe that’s becauseyoudon’t change,” Jenna fired back. “You’re more interested in dating the female population of?—”
“Oh, for the love of—” Zach blew out a breath as he raked a hand through his hair. “Please do not bring my dating life into this. It hardly interferes with my work.” And he hadn’t gone on a date in over a month, since Kayla from Bridgewater had told him she was only interested in having fun. “But you always make these decisions and tell me after,” he continued flatly. “And Idodo 50 percent of the work, although not the managerial part, because that’s apparently what only you can do. But then I don’t see you doing the stuff I get left with—stocking shelves or unloading trucks or doing anything a sixteen-year-old on minimum wage could do, easily.”
This time both her eyebrows rose as his sister sat back in her chair, her arms folded, the look on her face making Zach think she was merely humoring him by having this conversation. “So, what, you want to start taking an interest? Doing the hard graft?” She sounded so skeptical that Zach had to bite back a sharp retort.
He loved his sister. He really did. When they’d been little, he remembered running to Jenna when he’d fallen and scraped his knees; as a toddler, he’d climbed into her bed after having a nightmare. She was the one who had had the guts to tell him he was a jerk when he had been one in high school. In some ways, she’d been more of a parent to him than his own mom and dad, who admittedly had often seemed like their children came beneath both the store and their marriage in terms of priorities.
He and Jenna had history, a lot of history, but there were things she didn’t know about and others she didn’t understand. And sometimes, alotof the time, she could be an annoying know-it-all, especially when it came to him. Jenna, like everyone else in this town, had frozen him in time as a seventeen-year-old baseball star who had, he could admit, liked to party and been more than a little full of himself. But he was thirty-one years old now, and those days were long, long behind him.
“I’m not opposed to some hard graft,” he replied, doing his best to keep his voice measured. They’d had these discussions before, plenty of times, if not quite as plainly, and he wanted to get the words right. “In fact, I think I’m the one doing a lot of it. But in terms of the decision making… when Mom and Dad left the store to both of us,” he stated slowly, “we agreed we’d both be involved.”
Jenna sighed, the sound a decidedly reluctant acknowledgment. “I know, I mean, I get it, but Zach… come on.” She rolled her eyes, inviting him into a joke he already knew he wasn’t going to find funny. “Let’s be real. You’ve always seemed more interested in your love life than making this store work.” Those were not mutually exclusive, but Zach held his tongue. Jenna gave a little what-can-you-do shrug. “I always thought you were happy doing the manual labor kind of stuff. You didn’t seem to complain, anyway.”
“Maybe that’s because I’m a good person,” he retorted, and she gave another sigh.
“Do you really want to be involved inallthese decisions?” She gestured to the laptop. “This isn’t exactly earth-shattering stuff. I’m thinking about how many kinds of soup we should stock—chicken noodle, tomato, and beef barley. The beef barley is the one I’m not sure on.” Her eyebrows inched higher. “Care to offer your opinion?”
She didn’tmeanto sound condescending, Zach knew, but the truth was, she did. Ever since they’d started on the store together, Jenna had been passive-aggressively possessive of it, grudgingly giving him any information about the managerial decisions—a fact that was especially annoying because Jenna had moved to San Francisco and then New York to make her way in the big wide world, while Zach had stayed in Starr’s Fall and done all thathard graft. That seemed to count for nothing now, though, because Jenna was older, wiser, and as she occasionally liked to remind him, had a degree in marketing while he’d dropped out of college in the middle of freshman year, something that she knew hadn’t been his own fault, but still, he’d never gone back.
“As a matter of fact, I think it’s the chicken noodle you should be questioning,” he told her. “Nobody eats that anymore. Canned chicken?” He shook his head. “That’s so 1970s, and you can pretty much guarantee it isn’t free range.”
Jenna pursed her lips, looking decidedly skeptical. “Oh, really? Because chicken noodle has been consistently selling since we started stocking it.”
“And how many cans do you stock?” Zach countered. “And for what return on the profit?” Jenna pressed her lips together and he decided to push a little. “By all means, keep selling grocery staples. That’s important since there’s no other grocery store in Starr’s Fall. But if we’re going to make a profit, or even break even, you know that we need some higher profit margins. Some luxury items, locally sourced, like candles or blankets?—”
“We are not Litchfield,” Jenna said, cutting him off, as she had whenever he’d tried to have this discussion before. “We will never be Litchfield. We are a simple store that serves a local community.”
“Which is great,” Zach agreed. “But we can also be a luxury destination for the discerning tourist.” He’d been pushing having a section for tourists in the store, just a corner, with luxury, locally sourced items. Beeswax candles, paintings by local artists, high-end jams and chutneys. There was so much they could offer, if she’d just agree.
Jenna rolled her eyes, the only response it seemed she was going to give. She was determined not to change the store from what it had been in their parents’ time—homegrown, lovable, its quaintness teetering on the edge of kitsch, all the while providing very basic staples for people who couldn’t or didn’t want to go to the Price Rite twenty minutes away in Torrington.
The trouble was, in this day and age, that wasn’t cutting it. It certainly wasn’t paying the bills. Zach might have dropped out of college, but even he could see when the numbers weren’t adding up, and they hadn’t been for over a year, ever since Instacart had extended its delivery service to the area.
“You know something has to change,” he said quietly. Jenna, too, could crunch the numbers. Whatever sentimentality was making her hold on to the past—if that was even what it was—she would only be able to do it for so long.
“I’m not opposed to change,” Jenna told him as she turned back to her laptop. “But it has to be the right kind of change. There’s no point selling high-end items that cost the earth and only out-of-towners will buy.”
“No point?” Zach repeated incredulously, even though he knew he’d already lost the argument. Jenna was back to tapping away at her laptop. “A few specially selected…” he began, and then stopped. She wasn’t listening.
Zach grabbed the pizza box and headed upstairs to his bedroom. Living in the same room as he had during high school could feel like something of a depressing time warp, but he’d gotten used to it, and there was no point—as well as no money—to get his own place, at least not yet. Sometimes, when he was feeling a little down, Zach wondered what his future might hold. Here he was, thirty-one years old, without a degree, schlepping boxes for the failing family business. If he could have had avisionfor the store, if Jenna would let him share some of the decision making, then maybe it would feel different. Purposeful. As it was, he felt like he was spinning in a hamster wheel with no real way to get off.
HelikedStarr’s Fall. He liked the store. He didn’t want to move away in a huff; he had no more wild oats to sow, not that many people believed that. He just wished things were different.
With a sigh, Zach flipped open the pizza box and took out another slice. He thought, briefly, of the mystery woman who was now most likely eating black olive and pineapple pizza with her son, a prospect that made him both smile and wince at the utter grossness of that combo. Would he see her again? Probably, since Starr’s Fall was a small place. The question was, he reflected, what would happen when he did.
* * *
Two days later, Zach was whistling as he walked down Main Street, a spring in his step because the sun was shining, there was snow on the hills, and the truth was, he just couldn’t stay grumpy for long, even when his sister was being a pain. As it happened, he’d looked at the latest invoices and had seen that Jenna had halved the order of cans of chicken noodle soup. A small victory, it was true, but he was still counting it as a win. She’d listened to him, if just in this one very small matter.
He waved to Laurie Ellis, who was behind the counter at Max’s Place—a cute store, even if Zach couldn’t entirely understand the idea of a bakery for pets—and then glanced across at Reilly’s Books. He and Joshua had been in the same grade at high school, but they hadn’t been friends, mainly because Joshua had been kind of a nerd, and Zach had been kind of a jerk. He hoped Joshua was starting to change his mind now that their social circles were more of a Venn diagram than they ever had been before, thanks to Jenna and Laurie being friends. He suspected it would be a slow process, but things could always change.
