Copyright © 2020 by Megan Montgomery All rights reserved . ISBN: 978-0-578- 76827 -4 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review . Formatted by N. Malone I was elbow-deep in vintage cookie cutters and stacks of pink Pyrex casserole dishes when I realized the Three Harpies of the Chesapeake were arguing about me. That is, me as in “the situation in need of remedy .” My brain throbbed against its confines. If I had to listen to one more comment about my looks, needs, or ought-tos, I was going to close up shop and move somewhere they appreciated outcasts and recluses . I stood, collecting my dust rag, and heard Mrs. Sylvia Rae Andrews chastise her friend. “I don’t know why you bother, Lorraine. All those tattoos and those clothes with the holes. She’s never going to get a nice man to want her looking like that.” Yep. She was talking about me, alright. No doubt she thought she was whispering, but when deaf old ladies don’t turn their hearing aids on, a whisper becomes a stage voice . “Hush up, Sylvia Rae,” Lorraine snapped. She needn’t have bothered. I’d heard it all before. In fact, Sylvia Rae repeated her assessment of me nearly every time she came into the shop. I don’t 2 MEGAN OLAVARRIA know if it was due to dementia or some latent passive-aggressive tendencies . I pretended I was completely engrossed in my task of sorting the rolling pins according to size into giant glass jars until they’d moved on to other gossip. When the coast was clear, I quietly resurfaced from my hiding place between a kitchen hutch and a bureau with a rippled maple veneer. I made a mental note to inject some glue between the pieces of wood and clamp it together tonight. It wasn’t too far gone, but nothing was leaving this shop in less than optimal condition. Or as optimal as a two-hundred-year- old piece of wood can be . I brushed the dust off my hands. I certainly didn’t need to feel guilty for performing covert operations in my own shop. Not if it yielded a necessary repair . I couldn’t help but listen in again when Lorraine raised her voice, exasperated with her friend. “You can’t expect John to work the high tea fundraiser, Sylvia Rae. It’s nothing but old women like us attending .” “You’d think he’d volunteer for everything being that he doesn’t have a wife,” Sylvia Rae said. Oh, good. They’d found someone else to marry off. Maybe this poor, wifeless guy would divert their attention away from me and my tattoos . “Just because he goes to Mass doesn’t mean he’s looking to get married,” Lorraine said . “Now, Lorraine,” Phyllis jumped in, “You know that I rarely agree with Sylvia Rae, but this time, she’s right. Why else do hand ‐ some, single men suddenly start going to Mass every week? And eight o’clock Mass, too? ‘Cause they’re looking to catch themselves a good Catholic girl who’s gonna be a good Catholic wife and raise up some good Catholic babies .” “I never see you in church, Emerson.” Sylvia Rae turned back around to me. Delightful . “I’m not looking for a good Catholic boy,” I said, resigning myself to join them as they dispensed their complimentary coffee WELL…THAT WAS AWKWARD 3 from the air pot and settled into a Victorian settee in the center of my shop . “She’s not even Catholic, you idiot.” Lorraine always had my back . Sylvia Rae didn’t respond and Lorraine automatically repeated, “I said, SHE’S NOT CATHOLIC. Turn your ears on.” Lorraine shouted into her friend’s ear . “Alright, alright.” Sylvia twisted the tiny device in her ear canal . “I knew you didn’t hear me ‘cause I got the last word.” Lorraine was almost as grumpy as me this afternoon. Thankfully—or perhaps not—there were no customers in the store . In an attempt to lure any and everyone off the street to come in and swipe their cards in my store, Blue Heron Antiques in Solomons Island, Maryland, I’d taken to offering free coffee and pastries to my customers. The pastries were things I tried to recreate after dates with my brilliant blue-eyed boyfriend, Paul Hollywood. Okay, my “dates” were technically Netflix binges of The Great British Baking Show during which I pretended to know the correct proportions of a Bakewell tart and drank too many IPAs. And I was alone, except for my mutt, Rousby. But it all yielded some fairly impressive results that brought in : Precisely. No. Customers . In fact, my brilliant attempt to ply tourists with deliciousness to boost the store’s business only hindered both my own personal grocery budget and my peace of mind. While the coffee hadn’t exactly attracted customers, it did garner groupies of a different, more octo/nonagenarian distinction, the exact sort that loved to gather daily to gossip about their friends, remark about the place ‐ ment of vintage luggage stacks on desks, and find potential husbands for single, tattooed, holey-clothed, antiques saleswomen in their early thirties. Too bad only one person around town fit that description . “You ain’t Catholic?” Mrs. Gordon accused me with a dramatic 4 MEGAN OLAVARRIA flair of her eyebrows. Apparently, I had been pulling the wool over her eyes all these years . “No, ma’am. Presbyterian. But that’s more of a technicality. Dad’s a lapsed Catholic. Mom’s more of a ‘spiritual’ type of person. She floats through religions with the tides, picking up the stuff that sounds like blessings and leaving anything that sounds like work. The worst was when she was Seventh Day Adventist for a few months, and she threw out all my jeans and forced me to wear dresses. The second worst was when she discovered yoga and we had to stop eating bacon .” Bacon and jeans. That was my religion. I wanted little to do with any other higher power . “Girl,” Phyllis intoned. “Why do I always see you at the church helping out at the spaghetti dinners and pancake breakfasts —” “And bingo,” chimed Sylvia Rae . “I assumed I never saw you at Mass because you went Friday nights,” finished Phyllis . “It’s good business to help out the community.” I shrugged. “And…they asked .” Maybe that wasn’t entirely accurate. Maybe I did feel a bit beholden to Our Lady, Star of the Sea, the church that dominated the horizon on the Chesapeake side of the island. After all, I had been raised hearing its bells tolling the hours and almost everyone I knew worshipped there. Maybe I was a sucker for being needed. Maybe a part of me felt robbed of the experience of not having grown up in the parish that was now in my backyard . Only a small part, though, because still…bacon and jeans . “I don’t think you’ll do at all for John then,” Sylvia Rae said . Phyllis and Lorraine both admonished her with “hush” and “keep your mouth shut,” but I knew they were thinking it too. Sylvia Rae was the only one with the guts to say it aloud . I didn’t even have to know this John to know that they were wrong. Whatever guy who manipulated and groveled his way through church attendance in order to shop for a “good girl” was WELL…THAT WAS AWKWARD 5 undoubtedly a misogynist, and the problem wasn’t that I wouldn’t do for him. It’s that he wouldn’t do for me . AT FIVE O’CLOCK on the dot, I threw the lock on the front door and turned off the showroom lamps. I was itching to start the restora ‐ tion of my newest treasure, an eighteenth-century Queen Anne high boy. Mixing up a batch of wood cleanser, I spread it like frosting on the grimier corners and crevices of the cabinet. While I waited for it to eat into the centuries of grime, I found my favorite metal playlist and cranked up the speakers . I only worked for an hour or so before I couldn’t look at another brown corner or brass handle in the dim light. The stale air and the fumes worsened my headache, and my legs ached from crouching down in a squat. More importantly, my best bud and furry-coated business partner, Rousby, had been looking at me with sad, sleepy eyes for the past twenty minutes . Rousby and I raced home. My stomach complained loudly that I’d missed lunch, so after doing all the usual coming home stuff, like the dawdling around, the dropping of the keys somewhere, the kicking off of the shoes, the feeling of panic that the keys had already been lost, the vague look around a disappointingly dull apartment, there was nothing left to do but eat, make more food, and eat that too. I preheated the oven . I wasn’t one of those cool, cosmopolitan, never-have-any- groceries-in-the-house kind of single girls. I cared way too much about food. I also lived within walking distance from an absurdly awesome grocery store that specialized in foodie delights. We even had a cheesemonger, and yes, Kim and I were on a first name basis.