And we didn’t.
Word from Orlando was,well…hilarious.
All my friends who had become acquaintance/friends with Bryce drifted away from him due to his constant bent to be so messy.
But God love my gal, Olivia.
She kept her ear to the ground.
Though, it wasn’t Olivia who called to tell me Tara was pregnant with her new hubby’s baby.It was Tara.
She sounded so happy on the phone, bright and free.
It was amazing.
Bryce, on the other hand, never ponged back to me, thankfully.
Instead, he married a woman who, six months in, went on a cruise with her girls, fucked the steel drum player in the ship’s band, came home, filed for divorce and moved to Curaçao.
Olivia said he was crushed.
That wasn’t what I was feeling.
Abigail and I had our girls’day, during which we took Jill’s history tour.
I’d read the whole book, returned it to the library, and got my library card.But Jill’s tour—which cost twenty bucks, lasted two hours, and you walked a lot further than a mile—was fascinating.
She knew her stuff, and she was correct.
There was a ton of fascinating history in Misted Pines.
After the tour, Jill went with Abigail and I to Aromacobana for coffee and treats, and we all talked about how great an idea the museum would be.We then started planning how we could get the town council to agree.
We were going to start with petitions while Jill and Abigail drew up a plan to present to the council.
Money was money, and although Misted Pines thrived, it wasn’t like it was populated by billionaires (not that any of them paid much tax anyway), so it was a long shot the council could find enough tax dollars to build a museum.
But we were going to try.
And we had hope.
Getting Hutch’s permission,later, I invited Jill up to see the Tate kitchen.
She was suitably enthralled.
Not long later, she came home to find that leather chair she wanted in my shop outside her door with a big bow on it and a thank-you note from me (though, Hutch delivered it for me).
She called, crying, asking how I knew she’d always wanted a reading chair just like that, but she could never afford it.
I told her shopkeepers had their ways.
Sure, refinishing that chair had taken a lot of time and energy.
But in the end, it found its way to where it was supposed to be.
The shop kept goingstrong under Abigail’s management, and we both took my cross-marketing thing with Kimmy and ran with it.
I found a big old wood-framed, school green chalkboard, and Hutch and Brett mounted it on the wall just inside the door to my shop.
