Her grin widens.
“You don’t have to look so amused,” I say.
“Oh, but I do,” she says. “I find the look on your face right now very amusing.”
Ellen knows of my severe distaste for her choice in lighting fixtures. She doesn’t care. It’s pretty and it adds charm, she says. There’s nothing charming about a five-hundred-pound hanging lantern.
“Whatever,” I say, moving down the hall. “I’ll fix your precious chandelier.”
“I love you!” she calls after me.
I shake my head but can’t help smiling.
After turning off the main electricity, I retrieve the inn’s only ladder from the maintenance closet and set it up in the lobby beneath the chandelier. It wobbles as I climb to the top, and I make a mental note to add “ladder” to Ellen’s New Crap list. This one is probably older than the alarm system.
I carefully begin unhooking a few chandelier wires under the close and obnoxious scrutiny of one of the inn regulars, Earl Whethers.
I’m not sure what it is that draws retired men to my side while I’m fixing things—maybe they find handiwork fascinating, or maybe they’re horribly bored—but I sometimes feel like the Willow Inn sideshow.
Take Earl for instance. He’s pulled up a chair in the lobby and is now watching my every movement with expectant eyes.
And for my next act, I shall fall from this prehistoric climbing contraption and break both legs—with no hands, because they’ll be dangling from this hanging candelabrum after being torn from my body during my amazing fall!
I should set out a tip jar.
Earl scratches his white-whiskered chin. “You sure you know what you’re doing, son?”
“Yes, sir.”
The skin around his faded blue eyes crinkles as he squints up at me. “You look too young to be running the maintenance around here. How old are ya?” He crosses his arms over his short and stocky frame, once probably stacked with muscle, and leans back. His balding head shines a bit in the light streaming in from the lobby windows.
“Almost twenty-one,” I say, shifting the chandelier to my left arm and clenching my jaw under its weight. I find the problem wire and slowly untangle it from the others.
“Did you disconnect the electricity before climbing up there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you check for frayed ends before you started pulling at those wires like a chimpanzee?”
A chimpanzee?
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you—”
“Leave the poor boy alone, Earl.” Vivian, Earl’s wife and one of the inn’s more outspoken guests, enters the lobby with her short blue-black hair wrapped in pink curlers and her thin, pursed lips coated in pink lipstick. She’s tall and slender and manages to look poised even when she’s gripping a martini and slurring her words—which is often. “He doesn’t need you distracting him.”
“I’m not distracting him, Viv. I’m helping him.” Earl gestures to me, like I’m an idiot.
“Uh-huh.” Vivian glances up at me through a pair of dark brown eyes. “You just go on and do your fixing, honey. Don’t mind my meddlesome husband.” She walks to the front desk and starts complaining to Haley about the bar’s hours.
“Meddlesome, my ass,” Earl mutters.
Vivian and Earl travel from Georgia every summer to stay at Willow Inn. Their visits are never shorter than four weeks and they make themselves right at home, hence the pink curlers.
They make an odd couple, with Vivian being a good five inches taller than her husband and at least a hundred pounds lighter. Side by side, they look like a pink giraffe and a white-whiskered monkey.
Earl watches me wobble. “Have you ever had professional electrical training, son?”
Good Lord.
I steady myself and keep my eyes on the wire. “Did you catch the game last night, Earl?”
He starts rambling about idiot referees, and I know I’ve bought myself a few minutes’ reprieve from the tutorial on everything I’m doing wrong.
“All I’m saying,” Vivian’s Southern drawl carries through the lobby, “is the bar should be open before noon.”
“Yes, well. I’m sure Ellen has her reasons for the bar’s hours.” Haley lowers her voice a smidge. “It’s probably because of everything that happened with Mr. Clemons last year.”
“… things are different now.” Earl’s voice pulls me back.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“I was just missing the good ol’ days.”
For the next ten minutes, Earl picks apart my electrical skills and chats my ear off about how the world was so much better when he was young and how people these days don’t know anything about hard work. He says these things to me as I’m balancing on the world’s oldest ladder while holding a lighting device that weighs more than I do.
“What can I say,” I grit out as I finish with the chandelier. “We’re a lazy generation.”
I climb down the ladder and turn the electricity back on before returning to the lobby. Earl is still in his front-row seat, eagerly waiting to chat my ear off about politics.
Like hell I’m touching that subject.
On my way to the light switch, my eyes catch on a flyer pinned to the activities board by the front desk. It’s an advertisement for the annual Copper Springs Fourth of July Bash, one of the few festivities my hometown actually does well.
Every resident attends, and the town spares no expense on live music, games, food, and pyrotechnics. This will be the first year since I was nine and had a mad case of chicken pox that I won’t be in attendance.
I flip the light switch, and the chandelier lights up in all its ridiculously complicated glory.
The Amazing Levi, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll be here all week.
Just as I’m turning to walk back to my ladder of doom, Pixie rounds the corner and slams into me. Chest to chest, body to body.
The smell of lavender wraps around me as she looks up through startled eyelashes and, for a moment, it’s thirteen months ago and everything is okay. Nothing is broken. Nothing is lost. Her green eyes slowly sink into mine, soft and safe, and I like it. I like it a lot.
Panic floods my veins.
Desperate to rectify any hope, or memory—or God, anything good—I see reflected in her gaze, I give her an annoyed look and make my voice as sharp as possible. “Can I help you?”
The softness vanishes and a sneer twists her face. “Nope.”
She moves past me with a jerk and my heart starts to hammer. I head back to the ladder, my thoughts jumping in and out of memories.
The fourth grade when Pixie would drink all my chocolate milk when I wasn’t looking. Junior year when she would sing along with the radio at the top of her lungs as I drove her home from school.
It feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like yesterday.