She shook her head, grimacing.
No – don’t think like that. This is just a temporary thing. A short leave of absence! Just until I can stop writing emails with my face. I’m going back to the city in a month or so. I don’t have any plans of dropping my career and moving back here permanently. This is just… a thing. A momentary thing. I just thought it’d be nice to come see how the old stomping ground was doing. With the extra added bonus of there being absolutelynochance of running into a client or anyone I know from work, and having to answer awkward questions about justwhyexactly I’m on a mandated hiatus.
Well, the old stomping grounds, as it turned out, were doingbeautifully.
Back when she’d been a kid, Natasha had thought she’d scream if she had to see another tree – since that was pretty much all there was in Girdwood Springs. Trees and mountains. A few stores scattered along the way. A road.
She’d been so bored as a teenager that she’d spent all her time fantasizing about running away to the bright lights of the big city.
But now that I’m back…
Natasha shook her head again. No, no. She wasn’t about to turn her back on the career she’d spent ten years building. That was nothing but crazy talk.
By the time I’ve been here a month I’ll have gotten so bored I’ll remember why I wanted to leave in the first place,she thought, as she drove past what – she guessed – counted as the Girdwood Springs city limits.
It was a battered little sign that didn’t even bother to list the population of the town – mainly because it was so low Natasha thought it probably didn’t bear mentioning. And there was a tree painted on it.
Another tree!Natasha thought cynically.Just what the town needed! There weren’t enough live ones, so they had to paint some more!
But even as she thought it, Natasha had to admit to feeling just thesmallestamount of guilt. So Girdwood Springs was boring. So she hadn’t really been able to find a way to fulfil her ambitions here. So she might never have come back, if not for this forced break from her job.
But badmouthing it – even if only inside her own head – just felt plain oldmean.It was just a little mountain town, and it’d never hurt anyone.
And anyway, if I’m going to stay here for a month, I better start finding something positive about it,Natasha thought, pursing her lips. She was here for abreak, after all, not to complain endlessly and then go home even more miserable and stressed out than when she arrived.
Okay. Putting a positive face on things. Starting now.
That was what she was good at after all, wasn’t it? She worked in marketing – it was her job to make things people initially thought were unpalatable into a dream come true. She could work her magic on her own brain, surely?
The first thing she’d need to do, she decided, was find something good to eat.
Natasha wondered if the food scene had gotten any better here since she was a kid – back when she’d been growing up, there’d been a grand total of the diner (which she and her friends had joked kept itself in business by taking care of the town’s rat problem by putting them in the burgers) and the itsy-bitsy supermarket, which had always run out of bread by Sunday afternoon. Also apples. Also most other kinds of products anyone cared to name.
Maybe things have changed,Natasha thought as she turned down what passed as the main drag, not really believing it even as she thought it.Maybe –
Natasha wasn’t sure where she’d been going with thatmaybe, but wherever it had been, she forgot about it completely as her mouth popped open in surprise – or maybe it was to make room for the absolutely massive slice of humble pie she now realized she’d have to eat.
This is… this isnothinglike I remember it.
And it wasn’t.
Where in the past there’d been nothing but boarded-up storefronts and buildings that looked like they were about to fall to pieces at any moment, there was now… well, there was nowthis.
Natasha had to slow her car to stare, still open-mouthed, out the window.
Is that a gift shop?!
And not just a gift shop – a kind of adorable-looking gift shop, with cute hand-made-looking blankets in the window, dried flowers hanging up, and beautifully carved wooden figurines of bears and cougars and other local wildlife on display.
And there –a garden center?!
Natasha wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told her there was a plant nursery in Girdwood Springs, but that seemed to be the case: a beautiful one, too, with tall green trees outside the main gates, verdant ferns overflowing from their pots, and flowers bursting into color along the sidewalk.
There’s the old diner too… and…
And it lookednothinglike what she remembered. It wasclean, for starters – the windows were washed, the sign wasn’t the peeling disaster she’d known from her childhood, when she and her friends had only gone there because there was literally nowhere else for them to go. The trash can outside wasn’t overflowing with hot dog – or hot rat, as she’d called them – wrappers, and the canvas awning wasn’t falling away in rotten pieces. It looked…
It looks kind of like a place I’d actually eat at now,Natasha thought, suddenly all too aware of her stomach rumbling greedily. As much as she wanted to pull over though, her curiosity about what else she’d find kept her foot on the gas pedal, even though the car had slowed to a crawl.
