The Cold Front

Lainey POV Four days later, Travis came through the back door holding his phone over his head like a trophy. "I got it." I was on the kitchen floor with a box of pots, trying to remember how I'd had them organized in a kitchen that had made sense. "Got what?" "The security job. The one at the hospital in the city. They want me Monday." "Travis!" I got up and he caught me around the waist, and for a second he actually lifted me off the floor. He hadn't done that since he was twenty-two. "It's nights," he said, setting me down. "Ten to six, Monday through Friday. It's forty minutes each way, but at that hour there's nobody on the road. And nights pay more." "Nights," I said. "Just for now. I get my foot in the door, and then I move to days." He was already pulling a beer out of the fridge, at eleven in the morning, to celebrate. "I told you, Lane. I told you this place was going to turn it around for us." He had told me. He'd told me about nine times a day. I was happy for him. I was. I had watched him sit on a couch for months believing he was worthless, and now he was standing in a kitchen we owned, grinning. I would have taken that grin over just about anything. "I should get something too," I said. "Yeah?" "I'm going to go out and look today. If I can find something in town, I can just walk. It's fifteen minutes to Main Street." "That's a great idea," he said. He said it right away, and he meant it. He didn't ask what kind of work I wanted. He didn't ask if there was a vet's office anywhere in Cedar Ridge, or whether I had looked. He was already scrolling back through the email to read the offer again. I went upstairs and put on the one blouse I had managed to hang up. I looked tired. I had not been sleeping well, and I was not going to think about why. I stacked the three clean casserole dishes by the door. Nobody had put a name on any of them, so I had no idea who to give them back to. Maybe somebody on Main Street would know. "Good luck," Travis called from the kitchen. "Thanks." I stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind me. It was already hot. Alder Lane was empty, and three different curtains moved as I came down the steps. Four blocks of Main Street. A diner, a hardware store, a post office, and a bar. How hard could it be? Well, it turned out to be very hard. The man at the hardware store told me no before I had finished the question. "No, sorry, we're not hiring," he said, to a spot just over my left shoulder. The girl at the register in the little grocery said, "No, sorry, we're not hiring," and then looked toward the back of the store, where somebody I couldn't see gave her a thumbs-up. The woman at the feed store said it too. Same words, same order. By then I was starting to wonder if the town had printed them on a card. It didn't help that I was job hunting with three casserole dishes stacked in my arms. The library was a single room with a ceiling fan and one librarian, a small woman with reading glasses on a chain. She looked at the dishes before she looked at me. "Oh, the blue one's mine," she said, and she lifted it off the top of the stack. "It was delicious. Thank you. Which note was yours?" She went a little pink. "The one in capitals. I was nervous." I liked her right away. The little plaque on her desk said OPAL FINCH. I asked her about work, and I watched her mouth start to form the word "no." Then she stopped. She glanced at the door. She leaned across the desk and dropped her voice to a whisper, even though we were the only two people in the building. "Have you tried the bar?" "The bar?" "The Hollow. They're always shorthanded." I shifted the two dishes I had left. "I haven't tended a bar since college." "I'm sure it's like riding a bike." "I fell off bikes a lot." She laughed, and then she looked like she wasn't sure she was allowed to. I thanked her and went back out into the heat. I did think about it. I stood on the sidewalk and thought about it for a whole minute. I had been good at it once. I had paid for two years of school with a bottle opener and a decent memory for faces. That was five years ago, though. These days I couldn't have told you what went in half the drinks I used to make with my eyes shut. No. There had to be something else. The diner had a sign in the window. HELP WANTED. START IMMEDIATELY. I could have kissed it. I walked in, and a waitress with a coffee pot met me at the door. She looked at me. She looked at the sign. Then she reached over, without breaking eye contact, and pulled it out of the window. "No, sorry," she said. "We're not hiring." "That sign said…" "It's old." "It said 'start immediately.'" "It's very old." She tucked it under her arm. "That green dish is mine, hon. You know where you ought to try? The bar." I gave her the dish. "The librarian said the same thing." "Well, she's a smart woman." "Who would I even talk to?" "The owner." "Who's the owner?" She opened her mouth. She closed it. I watched her think harder about that question than anybody should have needed to. "A man," she said finally. "He'll be in there. You can't miss him." Then she turned me around by the shoulders, gently, and aimed me at the door. I stood on the sidewalk again, down to one casserole dish and zero prospects. Across the street, the man from the hardware store was watering a hanging basket that was made of plastic. Something was going on in this town. I couldn't have said what. But everybody in it wanted me in that bar, and nobody would give me a paycheck anywhere else. And we needed the paycheck. Travis had one now, but one wasn't much of a cushion when every dime we'd had was in the walls of that house. Fine. It was a bar. I had worked in a bar before, and I'd been good at it, back when I was good at things. The Hollow sat at the end of the last block, with a dark green door and front facing windows. I tucked the last dish under my arm and smoothed my blouse down with my free hand. Then I pulled the door open before I could talk myself out of it.