year, and—”
Vivien’s cell phone chose that moment to buzz from its place on the table. It was the bank. Her stomach dropped to the floor as she snatched up her phone. “Sorry, ladies, I have to take this—it’s the bank about the loan. More info to come, I promise. Rehearsals start next week, Maxine and Juanita.”
I hope.
She answered the phone as she hurried out of the tea shop, knowing Helga not only wouldn’t arrest her for dining and dashing, but would cover her tab.
Of course, then Helga would make her friend pay her back—and insist Vivien do so by going to Trib’s, the trendiest and therefore most expensive restaurant in the county.
The phone call with her small business loan officer was brief and successful, culminating in the very best news: the loan she’d applied for had been approved—and at the highest amount she’d hoped for. She did a little pirouette in the street, feeling like she was back in ballet class at age five. The only thing that kept her from doing a cartwheel was the fact that she was wearing a sundress.
She was here in Wicks Hollow and was one step closer to fulfilling her dream and making a life in this sweet, quaint town.
So different from New York! She’d loved the big city when she first moved there, when she’d been dying to get out of tiny Wicks Hollow right after high school graduation. It helped to get away from memories and gave her a chance to spread her wings. Which she’d done, but not in the way she’d expected.
But sometime over the last ten years, her desire to live in the frenetic, energetic, demanding city had waned. She wanted to be in a place where she felt at home, where she belonged, where—yes, all right—everybody knew her name. And she wanted to honor Liv and the memories Vivien had with her.
Not that she didn’t have people who knew her in New York. She did. Maybe too many of them. At least two or three times a month, she’d get contacted from someone in the business on either coast about doing a show or taking an audition or performing somewhere. As she no longer had an agent—she didn’t need or want one—Vivien fielded all of those contacts with a simple but firm “No thank you, I don’t perform anymore.”
Still, her name and reputation had helped build her marketing and PR business in the Broadway world, and it was partly because of that that Vivien was right where she was now: walking down the main street in the town she’d only lived in for five years—but it felt like the only home she’d ever had.
In a way, it was.
Vivien always thought George Wicks (who, in her mind, would have been Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady) must have been the optimistic sort, naming the two main roads that intersected in the center of the village after his daughters—and giving them lofty names like Pamela Boulevard and Faith Avenue. Neither could be considered hardly more than a street, let alone a boulevard or avenue, and when there were cars parked on either side, like there would be by noon today, there was barely enough space for two vehicles to pass each other.
But that was part of what made Wicks Hollow so charming—its quiet, tidy streets studded by urns spilling with bright geraniums, gerberas, and lush, dangling vines.
There were shops and establishments—very limited compared to what she’d passed every day in New York, but Vivien certainly didn’t miss the alleys smelling of urine, the constant blare of sirens and horns, the throngs of people everywhere all the time, and the perpetual odor of rotting garbage (every day was trash day somewhere in the city).
Vivien paused outside the window of the small florist to admire a springy, airy fern that she coveted for the kitchen in her tiny rental. But she’d probably kill it like she did the tomato plant she’d had on her windowsill one summer, and so she continued on down Pamela, heading toward Elizabeth Street—better known as B&B Row.
Vivien could have returned to the café and finished her scone (and paid her bill), but during the conversation with her banker, she’d automatically walked three blocks. Now she realized she’d almost arrived at the office of her realtor, whom she’d known a hundred years ago in high school. Though she was early, she decided to go inside in hopes of getting the keys sooner.
Twenty minutes later (hurray for a canceled