Page 19 of Make Me Love You

“Ugh,” she muttered. “When will this heat wave end?”

“I hear temperatures might go down to the sixties,” he said before he could stop himself. It was a mistake. They didn’t joke. They didn’t tease. They weren’t friends.

She spun around on her toes. “When?” she demanded.

He grinned. “October.”

From her half-groan, half-laugh, she had forgotten, too. But not for long. He saw the instant she remembered. Her lips flattened and the light in her eyes turned cold.

“So,” she said. “I’ll see you Saturday. For the walk-through.”

“Right. Saturday.”

She gave a crisp nod and took a step toward her truck...and then stopped. Her head tilted. He watched, fascinated, as she slowly circled the lamp post.

“Dammit,” she muttered, making the most adorably grumpy face he had ever seen.

“What?” he asked. He looked from Emma to the lamp post and back again. “What’s happening?”

“The lamp post is in terrible shape, that’s what’s happening,” she said, looking like it was a personal affront to her. “They’re all in terrible shape.”

He took a good, long look. She wasn’t wrong. The paint was chipped and peeling pretty badly. He shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, they’re what? A hundred years old? Of course they look bad.”

“They would look better with a new coat of paint.” She tilted her head back, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, as she studied the top of the pole. “See those curved hooks? It looks like they were meant to hold something. Maybe flower baskets? That would probably look nice.” She was visibly annoyed by the idea. “Dammit!”

“What’s wrong with flower baskets?” he wanted to know.

“Because now I have to figure out how I’m going to do that. So I can leave Hart’s Ridge better than I found it.”

His heart stopped. A physical impossibility, maybe, but it was the only way to explain the sudden halt of blood flow to his brain, making him light-headed. “You’re leaving Hart’s Ridge?”

“No.” She frowned. “It’s an expression. Leave it better than you found it. It’s—” She turned away abruptly, leaving the sentence unfinished.

He remembered suddenly, with a flash of nostalgia that punched him in the gut. A picnic by the river that ran down Hart Mountain. How old were they then? Ten? Eleven? The empty beer cans littering the riverbank hadn’t been theirs, but Mrs. Andrews had insisted they pack them up anyway to throw away at home. Leave it better than you found it.

“It’s what your mom always told us,” he said quietly.

“Yes.”

He nodded. “Okay, then. So the lamp posts. Fixing them up, that will be your contribution as mayor? To leave it better than you found it?”

“Well, what else am I going to do? I can’t stop the processing plant from closing. I can’t do some math magic that fixes the deficit without raising taxes. I’m not...” She made a noise of frustration. “I’m not smart. Not the kind of smart a person should be, if a person is mayor. I got B’s and a few C’s from elementary school up through high school, and failed out of community college. You know that.”

“Stop it,” he said, more sharply than he intended. He hated it when she put herself down like that. It didn’t happen often. Emma was pretty confident in herself, for the most part. But this had always been a sore spot with her. She had never been a great student, despite the fact that both her parents were teachers.

In ninth grade, they had subjected her to all kinds of testing, trying to figure out what the problem was. He had hated that, watching her hope fade each time another test came back negative. No ADD, no ADHD, no dyslexia. No explanation at all. Generally speaking, Eli liked Emma’s parents, but in those moments he had wanted to shake them. What was wrong with B’s, anyway?

“There are lots of different kinds of smart,” he said now, and meant it.

Her wry smile made his heart twist in his chest. “Ever noticed how people only say that to people like me? No one ever says that to straight-A students.”

“You’re smart.”

“Not the right kind of smart, the kind who’s a whiz with numbers. That’s the kind of smart Hart’s Ridge needs right now. I can’t do that, but this, I can do. I can paint a lamp post.” A look of doubt crossed her face. “I think so, anyway.”

Eli didn’t say anything to that. Not because he had any doubts himself in her ability to paint a lamp post. He didn’t have a single one. He had known her since the first day of preschool, and not once had Emma Andrews had an idea that she failed to follow through on.

No, he stayed quiet because Emma always did her best thinking out loud, and he didn’t want to miss a word of it.

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