Page 3 of Snowflakes Over Starr's Fall
Amusement gave way to anger as she glared back. If he never darkened her door again, it would be too soon. All right, she could have been alittlefriendlier, but he’d been sneering at her store from the moment he’d crossed the threshold. Stupid city idiot. They were all alike.
At least you treat them all the same.
She pushed that little voice away as the man suddenly burst out in exasperation, “How long does that damned machine take?”
“It’s just about finished,” Jenna informed him icily. She took the card out of the machine, glancing at the name on its front. Jack A. Wexler. She thrust the card at him as the receipt began to print out, another laborious process.
“Would you like the receipt?”
“No,” he stated flatly, and without another word, he grabbed his box of cornflakes and marched out of the mercantile, making sure the screen door banged hard behind him.
“Jerk,” Jenna muttered to no one. Saying it out loud didn’t make her feel much better. She glanced back at the pile of receipts and then pushed them away, annoyed as much at herself as at Jack Wexler. Well, almost. She knew she shouldn’t have been so snippy, rising to his stupid bait time and time again, but men like himreallygot her back up—privileged, arrogant, so sure of their own effortless charms. And shewasn’tstereotyping, she told herself, even though she knew she pretty much was.
But Jack Wexler had shown his colors several times over in the space of ten minutes. At least if he made good on his promise she’d never see him again, although she had to wonder why an obvious city type like him had moved to Starr’s Fall. It was far off the beaten track when it came to ex-Manhattanites. They usually didn’t venture past Litchfield, and they thoughtthatwas the boonies.
Never mind. She was putting it—him—out of her mind right now.
There was enough to be occupying her time, anyway, dealing with the store. Now that her brother Zach had started his own furniture restoration business out of the back barn, Jenna managed the mercantile pretty much on her own… which was how she liked it.
Zach had struck out on his own because he hadn’t felt the store was big enough for both of them, and in truth it hadn’t been. Jenna knew she might have been theteensiestbit controlling when it came to managing this place, but it was because it mattered so much to her… and it was all she had.
Which was a somewhat depressing thought, and not one she wanted to dwell on overmuch. She was nearly thirty-nine years old and Miller’s Mercantile was pretty much her life. Not herwholelife, of course. She had a great group of friends; in fact she was meeting Annie Lyman for dinner tonight at Starr’s Fall’s only diner, The Starr Light. And then there was Laurie and Liz and Maggie and Zoe… but why was she thinking this way, as if she had to add up all the good things in her life like a column of numbers, making sure the profits were more than the costs?
It was stupid Jack Wexler, Jenna knew. Being so scornful about her store and sneering at her, calling her ashrew, of all things, like something out of Shakespeare. That had been some serious misogyny there, and none of it was any reason to feel like her life was lacking, because it wasn’t. So, Jenna told herself, she simply wasn’t going to think about him anymore.
A couple of hours later, her equanimity was mostly restored. Stacking shelves, ordering inventory, chatting with a few friendly customers, familiar faces she knew and liked… it all grounded her in the reality of her life, which she enjoyed. Shelikedbeing part of this community; she enjoyed being known. She’d chosen to come back to Starr’s Fall after a whirlwind year in San Francisco and two more miserable years in New York, attempting to make a dead-on-arrival relationship work, and this town had helped to heal her. Jack Wexler might think he was above her country ways, but she’d had her time in the city, too, and she’d turned her back on it for good.
But why was she thinking about Jack Wexler again?
By late afternoon, the store was empty, the summer air still and drowsy, and Jenna pulled out her laptop—she had all her accounts on a spreadsheet like any normal business-minded person of this century; she just liked counting the receipts, seeing the tangible evidence of her profits, something she wished she’d mentioned to Jack Wexler—to work on the store’s website. Her friend Laurie, who ran Max’s Place, Starr’s Fall’s new pet store and bakery, had convinced her that she needed one.
“Everybody looks online first, Jenna,” she’d told her. “You have to have apresence.”
And so Jenna was, slowly and painfully, navigating her way through one of those websites-from-a-box jobs, pointing and clicking and trying to make it look personalized. It was, she’d discovered, a lot harder than Laurie had made it sound, but she knew she needed to make some changes to how she ran things, and a website was one she could handle.
After an hour of tinkering, she went on Google to see if the website came up in the search for Miller’s Mercantile; Laurie had said that “search engine optimization” was important, and Jenna could see why. She wasn’t acompletetechnophobe, after all. She scrolled as much as the next person, but making websites felt like a whole other level.
As she scrolled down through the hits—an article inThe Litchfield County Timeswhen they’d had their twenty-fifth anniversary, years ago—she suddenly stilled as six words jumped out at her.Worst Store in the Whole Area. It was a review on TripAdvisor, and it had been made that morning. Sucking in a hard breath, she clicked on it and read the single scathing paragraph.
Went here for some basic groceries but never again. Store is badly stocked with subpar items that are past their expiration date, and the woman at the counter was one of the rudest and most unpleasant people I have ever encountered, insulting me personally multiple times, and for no reason. I moved to Starr’s Fall for the community and was sorely disappointed by one of my first experiences of it. Hopefully someone in the town will start another grocery store and put Miller’s Mercantile out of business, as it surely deserves. If I could give it less than one star, I would have. Do NOT recommend!!
Jenna blinked, reeling from what felt like an intensely personal attack. She felt both hurt and painfully exposed, like Jack Wexler—because he had obviously written the review even if the username was simplyA Concerned Resident—had peeled back a layer of her skin. All right, she’d been snippy, but then, so had he. Could he not see that?
Of course he couldn’t.
The hurt—she had tears stinging in her eyes, and shenevercried—was fast morphing into a far more comforting fury. Anger she could do, especially when she was not in the wrong. At least not as much as Jack A. Wexler made her out to be.
Pursing her lips, Jenna typed out a response to the review.
I’m so sorry you had such a negative experience, Mr. Wexler, but perhaps next time you could make fewer offensive comments about my person, my business, and my inventory before you’ve barely crossed the threshold. Amazingly, you managed to find the one box of expired cereal in the entire store. I hope you found your smoked salmon, zooming over to Litchfield in your Porsche, while this “shrew,” as you called me, continues to serve the good people of this wonderful community.
She pressed publish before she could overthink it, smiling grimly as it appeared on the screen.
This, Jenna thought, was war.
2
By the time Jenna was walking into The Starr Light that evening, she found she was still fuming, although she was trying to hide it. She’d stopped by Your Turn Next, the town’s new boardgame café, to rant about Jack Wexler to her brother Zach and his new girlfriend, Maggie, who ran the place. Unfortunately, she’d had an uncomfortable feeling they’d been more amused than outraged on her behalf, which was incredibly aggravating.
