listening to Titania drone on about ‘thee amiable flower beds’ and ‘thy coy cheeks,’ and I’m falling asleep onstage? Who will make sure I don’t fall off my log and get fired?”
“Hey, guys?” Evie spoke up. “Where’s my General Tso’s?”
After the crinkling of more bags, Bree replied, “Shoot. They’ve forgotten the spring rolls too.”
“I’ll go—” Evie began.
“Oh no you won’t. There will be no sneaking out of this house, missy. You’ll never come back and then we can’t play at all.”
“Then I can—” Birdie began.
“Shh,” Bree said. “And I won’t have you sneaking away to go practice. Everybody stay here. Mrs. Lewis, use whatever force necessary to keep them here. By golly, ladies, we are going to have fun tonight if it’s the last thing I do.”
Chip listened as the creaks of Bree’s footsteps followed her out the door.
So, the Barter sprite was about to be out a job, Chip thought, snipping around a second staple. What kind of job would a girl like that go for next? The town of Abingdon was Hallmark-Christmas-movie-town small, after all. Only so many places would even have openings.
Unless, perhaps, she wasn’t opposed to moving? Going elsewhere?
Despite himself, he found his brain scrolling through his contacts in town for any mention of employment opportunities. His mother had said something about needing a new house cleaner, hadn’t she? And that someone from the board was frantic because their manager quit and left a restaurant on Main Street to run itself into the ground. Which restaurant was that?
Of course, it didn’t matter to him where the woman who’d made his life more difficult lived.
He hadn’t started thinking of her as difficult until the issue of the Invisible Fence came up. When Russell began knocking Bree over at her own front door, she had demanded Chip pull out the dough for yet another painfully expensive, unplanned project. And after the money it had cost him to get the water line sorted out, coughing up cash for a buried electrical fence was not an easy thing to do.
But yesterday, two days after he put the line in, Bree started complaining that the fence was on her side of the property line. That she couldn’t park and get out of her car without Russell attacking her. That the dog lay in wait for her all day in the tiny grass median between their driveways (that part was true). That she had taken to crawling through her passenger door every time she got in or out of the car (also true, but funny).
At this point he had taken to dodging her when he left in the mornings and sneaking from his truck to his house—once with an actual dive behind the bushes—at night. To any bystanders it would seem he was either a burglar robbing his own home or out of his mind, but it was worth it. He didn’t have the money, or the time, to make himself a more neighborly neighbor. Even if, technically, partially, he was to blame.
Wasn’t his sister-in-law’s bank looking for a teller?
Ten minutes later Chip stood on Mrs. Lewis’s porch—phone flashlight nestled between chin and chest as he faced the wall sconce. He was just disconnecting the wire from the wire nuts as the headlights of Bree’s car turned into her parking spot. His eyes drifted as he watched her brake lights turn off. Beneath the pale yellow of the streetlight, he watched her long lean leg reach for the pavement as the driver’s door cracked open.
My, but she was beautiful.
She was wearing black leggings and ratty house shoes that had seen better days. In one of her arms she gripped the take-out bag no doubt containing the missing Chinese food.
What if he was eating Chinese tonight? The thought, the desire, flicked in his thoughts in a heartbeat. An image of him sitting on the back stairs of the Barter with a box in his lap, watching her sit cross-legged on that top step holding chopsticks, that long, burnished red braid of hers carelessly draped over one shoulder. Laughing. Daring.
A dog barked.
He blinked.
Russell swung out of nowhere, his legs racing around her open driver-side door.
Where had he come from?
Bree screamed and threw herself back into the driver’s seat, slamming the door just as the dog pounced.
For a moment or two Russell just stood there, propped against Bree’s door like a six-foot Frankenstein monster with his paws pressed to the top of her window. Finally he dropped down.