Page 97 of Beat around the Bush
I picked up two at a time, loading them into her small cart. “You must have lots of new birds coming around.”
She adjusted her grip on the handle of the cart, watching as I loaded the bags. “Oh, yes. I’ve been getting a lot of finches coming around, mingling with my sparrows and robins. I’ve seen a few starlings, too. They’re beautiful. And have you ever seen a mountain bluebird? I thought blue jays were pretty, but those ones have them beat.”
She rambled on about all the birds visiting her bird feeders lined up outside and which ones loved which bird baths as we made our way back to the register. I scanned one bag, enteringa quantity of four into the register, then read off her total. Her hand shook slightly as she inserted her credit card, then pulled it out when the machine beeped at her.
Handing her the receipt, I said, “I can help you load these into your car.”
“I don’t want to trouble you,” she said hesitantly.
“No trouble at all, Margaret. As you can see, we aren’t too busy today.” I rounded the register, holding the door to the store open for her. She walked past me, and I resumed my slow pace next to her as we headed for her car.
“This one’s mine,” she said as we came to a stop behind a gray sedan. She began fishing for her keys in her purse, muttering to herself how she needs to keep better track of them in the black hole that was her handbag.
As I waited, my gaze landed on Lennon at the side of the store, loading hay bales into one of the locals' truck beds. The muscles under his flannel strained as he loaded them. Even being this far couldn’t hide his solid form.
He tossed another bale in the bed and caught me staring, flashing me a smile with his hat backwards. My cheeks flushed and I hoped he couldn’t see them from where he was.
“Ah, here they are,” Margaret announced, beeping the locks on her car and popping the trunk.
I forced my gaze away from Lennon and back to Margaret. Opening the trunk the rest of the way, I began loading the bags of bird seed, but the last one caught on the edge of the cart and ripped open.
I covered the hole with my hand before too much could spill out, setting it back in the cart positioned in a way that the seed would stop flowing out of the hole.
“I’m so sorry, Marg. Let me get some tape for this. I’ll be right back,” I told her before I rushed back inside the store to get tape from Lennon’s office.
Rifling through the drawers in his desk, I found a roll sitting atop a paper with a small note scrawled on it. My name was printed on the top of the folded paper. Furrowing my brows, I picked up the paper, unfolding it.
Lennon must have stowed my resume paper in here after our interview and forgot it was here. My eyes fell to the bottom of the page where he’d written a short note.
Stop getting lost in her eyes and pay attention to her damn answers.
I bit into my bottom lip, remembering watching him scribbling something down and worried he was disappointed in my responses. But he hadn’t been disappointed. He’d been besotted. With me.
Swallowing a gulp, I folded the paper and shoved it in my back pocket, making sure to grab the tape. As I made my way back through the store, I grabbed another bag of bird seed to make up for the bit that spilled on the ground.
“Sorry about that, Margaret,” I said as I set the spare bag in her trunk and taped up the hole on the other bag. “Keep both. I feel bad for ripping the bag.”
She watched as I set the ripped bag in her car. “Don’t worry about it, dear. The birds out here will love the spilled seed. Keep that other bag, I didn’t pay for it.”
“You lost some on the ground, and I don’t want to upset your birds at home.”
Margaret gave me a sweet smile, her thin lips pulling tight. “You’re too sweet. I’ll let the birds know it came from you.”
I closed her trunk gently. “Thank you. Want me to help you put the cart away?”
She waved me off again. “I’m old, but I can still dosomethings by myself. You’ve done enough. Have a nice day, Oakley. And tell Lennon I said hi,” she added with a wink.
I smiled. The people in this town didn’t miss a thing. “I will. Drive safe, okay?”
“Always do,” she said before coming up to the back door of her car and folding the cart up to stow away in the back seat.
I watched her drive out of the parking lot, then headed over to where Lennon was finishing up loading the hay bales.
“Hey,” I said, looking up to him. He was standing in the truck bed, arranging the bales.
“Hey to you. Margaret doing okay?” he asked, wiping a bit of sweat from his brow despite the cold temperature.
“Yeah, she is.” I gnawed on my bottom lip, watching his gloved hands wrap around the bailing twine as he picked up the bales and plopped them down in an order that would allow him to fit the most in the bed of the truck.
