Elaine had led the charge on the consigned consumables, stocking the store with community produced homemade jams, pies and salsas, as well as quilting and other needlecraft projects. Rory pursued the metal and woodworkers. Like John Tracer, who designed his wooden birdhouses to look like famous houses or movie icons, such as Tara and Twelve Oaks from Gone With the Wind, or the Michelin man from Ghostbusters, his round mouth the perfect place for a bird to pop in and create a nest.
After taking over management of the store, Rory had also upped their social media presence by working out a deal with Forest, a tech geek he knew in high school, who ran a marketing business in Charlotte. Daralyn had shown an interest in maintaining the platforms, handling the online communication, posting pictures, notices of sales, that kind of thing.
His dad would have been pleased to see what they’d accomplished, even as he probably would have felt he’d lacked the current day savvy to make it happen. He was a farmer first, the store having originally been a way to supplement the flagging income from that. But that was okay. Rory was proud to have been a part of the family effort to take the idea his dad had started and make it work.
He glanced toward the painting mounted behind the cash register, and a faint smile touched his mouth. His brother had contributed to the consignment inventory with a few pastoral scenes, totally different from the erotic pieces he did for galleries. This one was just a picture of a clapboard farmhouse, backed by a field and the sun setting behind it, but there was something about the way his brother painted that caught the eye. The heart, too, since Rory was only admitting it to himself.
A tiny figure worked in the field, but even with that perspective, there was a sense of the farmer’s focus, his hard work, evidence of a real person. Rory suspected Thomas had been imagining their dad when he’d painted it. Just looking at it made Rory miss him, the never-in-doubt love of their gruff-spoken father, the feel of his rough hand tousling his hair, on his shoulder. The earthy smell of his skin and clothes, the lingering scent of his aftershave on Sundays.
Dad had been a simple man, a lot like Rory. But now Rory knew even a simple man could be complicated in what he felt or desired, and how he shaped those feelings into action to reach goals, handle disappointments, or care for those people and principles that mattered most.
A deeper grin wreathed his face as he remembered the conflicting pricing advice Thomas and Marcus had given him about Thomas’s handful of pictures for the store.
“If it’s a neighbor, give it to them for what you think they can afford,” Thomas had said. “No more than fifty dollars. For tourists, make your best call. Whatever’s fair and will bring in good money for the store.”
Marcus had rolled his eyes. “I’m selling your original work for four figures or more, and you want to price it like it’s yard sale junk.”
“What I’m selling in the store are local scenes and color,” Thomas pointed out. “They’re not gallery-level stuff.”
While Rory agreed with his brother’s logic on pricing, when he looked at that painting on the wall—hell, any of his brother’s work—he wasn’t so sure about Thomas’s downplay of its quality. But Rory liked that Thomas never let his success as an artist get away with him. And the bug up Marcus’s ass about selling it like “yard sale junk” only added to Rory’s pleasure in hinting that he might do so.
He looked up from the computer as the screen door slammed. Johnny muscled in another couple bags of weed and feed, restocking the few they kept on the inside shelves. Rory had given him the chance to hang around and earn some extra hours as they reorganized the landscape inventory outside. They were putting the lawn ornamentation and fall foliage in a more prominent viewing display with the road. A good percentage of their October beach traffic would be empty nesters who liked to do a lot of fall decorating, inside and out.
Daralyn was planting weather hardy ornamentals and native plants in different colored pots to arrange around the display. She’d even talked about having a fairy garden area, since those had been getting real popular.