When he woke up, he was convinced he was a new man.Or maybe the man he’d been before Hurricane Matilda rolled through his life last night and this morning.The man he’d always been, since back when he’d had to grow up fast and act like the grown man his father should have been.
He felt like himself, right when he’d been beginning to wonder if he’d been doomed.If Matilda Stark had crossed some wires in him that he couldn’t uncross.
It was already getting close to full dark when he went outside before 6 PM, and sometimes he found that disorienting as the year took its time turning back toward summer.But tonight he welcomed it because it felt like a reset.
And he did not really want to dwell too much on why he felt he really, really needed that reset.
It wasn’t snowing tonight, but the temperature had dropped so low it seemed to kick straight through him.He welcomed it, rolling his shoulders back in his heavy coat, and was glad he’d shoved a hat on his head before he left the house.He shoveled a path from his house to the General Store and down to the road every few days, and it was a little packed up again tonight.But he didn’t mind.
He walked through the snow and then out into the main road, where folks maintained sets of tire ruts going in each direction, and didn’t bother much about the state of the road until spring came to melt the snow.
Tennessee made his way across the road, waving at neighbors passing by, and decided he liked the bright glow of Mountain Mama Pizza as he approached it.He hadn’t been the biggest fan of the Bennett sisters when they’d first showed up in town, but then, he was always suspicious of newcomers.He liked good ideas as much as the next guy, but new ideas tended to freeze over and die quick deaths in a Montana winter.
But the Bennetts had been here a good five years or so now, he thought.They’d been the first in a series of other changes—glow ups, his sister would call them—in Cowboy Point, though some of those changes were harder to see in the middle of a cold, dark February.He peered past the pizza place toward another one of the previously abandoned old buildings that had stood there in varying degrees of disrepair for years.And where, rumor had it, a group of college friends were planning to open a restaurant.
Farm to table,Shane Johnson had told him, having heard it from the gossipy Sheens in the feed store, in a voice that suggestedhedid not intend to darken the new place’s door.
But farm to table certainly worked for Tennessee.The kind of farm to table that folks meant when they used that term wasn’t diner food, and that meant there was no direct competition to what he did.That was a good thing, to his mind.
And hell, he might like a nice dinner from time to time himself without having to drive down into Marietta to get it.Though he’d reserve judgment on that until the new owners showed themselves, the restaurant actually opened, and they actually lasted through a winter or two.
He knew that his siblings thought he didn’t like anythingnew.They were wrong.He didn’t like to get his hopes up, that was all.New was great—but he wanted Cowboy Point to thrive.That was a good thing for everyone.A long line of failed businesses, on the other hand?That didn’t exactly reel in the summer season tourist dollars.
On the other side of the road, he headed toward Mountain Mama’s brightly lit front door that beamed out into the thick darkness.In the summer, their patio was hopping with live bands and folks sitting around enjoying the late summer light.In the winter, they kept the happy lights strung up no matter how snowy it got, because everybody liked a little cheer in the darkness.
Tennessee knew he certainly did.
He was almost to the front door when it flew open and then he found himself face-to-face with Matilda Stark.
Again.
Like she was haunting him.
And even more when she blinked at him.“Oh.Hi.”
She sounded surprised but then she smiled at him, and the smile was so bright that it took him a moment to realize she was holding a carryout pizza box in her hands.
“The puppies are doing great and I’m sure that’s because of you,” she said, in that cheerful, matter-of-fact way that she’d informed him she’d be leaving puppies with him overnight, too.“Thank you.”
But unlike last night, she didn’t wait for him to respond.She kept smiling at him as she sailed past him, leaving him standing there in front of the door to Mountain Mama Pizza like some kind of statue.
A statue who’d been blindsided by Matilda Stark’s smile, that was.
Again.
And Tennessee didn’t have to dive too deep inside himself to understand that somehow, overnight, he had managed to get himself into the kind of trouble he normally avoided like the plague.
Entirely against his will.
Chapter Four
It was themiddle of a frigid February and that was why it was easy to get a table for six, no waiting, right at dinnertime.Mountain Mama wasn’t empty—and Tennessee found he couldn’t really remember the last time it had been—but it wasn’t as packed as it usually was when the weather was nicer.
Last summer the place had been overflowing every night of the week, and Tennessee had to think the Bennett sisters were probably as happy as he was that there was going to be another dining option here in Cowboy Point.Hell, next thing they knew someone would be making those excessive social media posts about thevibrant arts and food scenein thiscozy cornerof the Rockies, and they’d all be overrun with flatlanders and fools.
Even more than they already were in the summer months, that was.But wasn’t that how it always went?If a good thing could be commodified, it would be—until it lost all its value.That had been his father’s stock in trade, certainly.Before that happened to a whole community, there was usually the phase where the summers-and-holidays-only folks put down their part-time roots and started throwing their weight around in town meetings.
Which reminded him to check when the next one was, down in Marietta.Some people liked to call Tennessee the unofficial mayor of Cowboy Point, and he couldn’t say he objected to that, but Cowboy Point was actually no more than a neighborhood of Marietta.A remote neighborhood, sure, but Cowboy Point still had a Marietta zip code.
