Page 15 of Ink & Snow
“Dwayne. Just don’t want anyone to freeze to death out in the streets. Oh, the theme for this Sunday is ‘Illumination.’”
“Excuse me? Is that supposed to mean anything to me?”
Dwayne hummed. “I thought Fran would have left you the paper with the schedule. We do a get-together in the park right across from your shop every Sunday before the holidays. It’s always themed. City council arranges most of it, but the volunteers carry the event. The first Sunday in December, Fran would usually sell her mistletoe wreaths there. Thought you might want to carry on the tradition.”
“Yeah, I had no idea. Thanks for bringing it up. I suppose I can make that happen in four days. You think I could sell the kitten too?”
The sheriff frowned at me as he came to a stop in front of the shop. “You want to sell Cherry? Why?”
“I’m not looking to be a pet owner. Your vet simply roped me into caring for her for a few days, but I wouldn’t mind shortening that period.”
Dwayne’s nostrils flared, and his beard moved as if he were pursing his lips. “Duncan would have to approve if you want to give her away. Look, I’ll deliver the formula to you if you’re busy.”
If there was one thing I really didn’t want, it was the sheriff-slash-road-maintenance-person dropping by my shop every other day.
“I think I’ll manage, but thanks.”
He turned off the engine. “I’ll help carry your stuff in. Cherry’s stuff.”
And he did, grabbing everything and getting out before I could. It struck me as wrong that such a small, trembling kitten came with no less than four bags of stuff, blankets, even toys, and special tiny animal food for when she could handle that.
“You’re not moving in with me,” I told the tiny kitten, who’d seemingly fallen asleep on my lap.
Well, fuck.
Chapter Five
Therewereofcoursestill three dead kittens in my yard, and if the circumstances had been really dark, their mom’s body was somewhere under the snow too.
I’d have loved to ignore frozen baby cats behind my pile of firewood, but I’d probably not have been able to sleep knowing they were there, so I’d decided to take advantage of the sheriff after he’d unpacked the vet stuff and had asked him to take care of Cherry’s siblings, which he’d done, offering no more than a grunt.
Once he and the dead kittens were gone, I put Cherry in a moving box, making sure she was snug under her new blanket.
“You stay there. I have work to do,” I said in barely a whisper.
For the fact that I hadn’t really done anything, I felt pretty exhausted, so I made myself a nice double espresso and took it downstairs with me, along with my laptop, leaving Cherry’s box by the radiator in the living room.
I knew I’d be able to move the car around the building and use an extension cord to charge it back there, but the snow made that impossible for now. But I did need to charge the car, and to get that done, I needed to open the door because the power cord needed to go into my shop. And if I opened the door for charging my car, I might as well open the shop for business.
With my inadequate jacket, I went outside and brought the charging cord back in with me. The good thing was the snow covered it for the most part and it wasn’t in anyone’s way that I could see. I plugged it in near the show window where I should probably decorate some to fit in. And to show potential customers I knew how to take petunias and roses and jasmine and make something beautiful out of it.
Once the car was charging, I took a look around. There were so many things to do here, but I picked something that should be easy enough to accomplish. The sheriff had said people would want wreaths.
I headed to the cool room, the temperature there nowhere near as biting as the outside. Fran hadn’t shortchanged me. On one of the shelves, glossy mistletoe branches piled high, waiting to be shaped and bound with ribbons.
The shop was stocked well, and I picked out a few wreath bases, straw and twig, and began making rounds of living green to brighten the darker season, something that people could hang on their doors or inside their rooms.
The pancake rule totally applied to wreaths too, and the first one was shit. After that, muscle memory or something set in, and they turned out nicely, the leaves folding over one another to cover the straw body I was winding them around. I added red, green, or gold bows to some, left others bare, and after about two hours of work, I had some stock I’d be happy to sell.
The pancake wreath I’d take upstairs and put on my mantle. I wasn’t the type to celebrate, not really, but I was… I sighed, running a thumb over a mistletoe leaf. I was glad to be here. To be away from my old life. To have started fresh. I could put up a damn wreath to celebrate that.
The pile of wreaths in front of me filled me with an odd, satisfied joy. Yes, in part doing this, buying this place, had been following an impulse. But in other ways, I knew I wanted this or something like this. To break out of the life as it had grown around me. I wanted to make my own, and this felt like Aunt Hedwig had set me up for it from the start.
“Maybe I am having a midlife crisis,” I said, shook my head, and grabbed the wreaths to take them out to my show room.
There were plenty of hooks above the front windows, and standing on my ladder, I adjusted them for a festive display. Outside, it was still snowing or snowing again. All that fucking snow. I could imagine being stuck here all winter, and I wasn’t sure whether that would be a horror story or a romantic one.
When I hung my final wreath, something truly uplifting approached through the drifts. I saw the pink pom pom early from my vantage point. I was still wrangling the wreaths when Amory came into my shop.
