departed. As Clark dug into his pancakes, he hoped the only frustration he’d have to deal with was the treacle-sweet music pouring out of the juke box, but his new guest proved him wrong.
“You’re that Woodward guy, aren’t you?” he asked through a mouth of biscuits dripping with gravy.
“Clark.”
“I’m Michael.” Clark nodded once, an acknowledgment that he’d heard the introduction, but his new companion took his silence as an invitation for more conversation. “Some people call me Buddy, but I’ll answer to anything, really.”
The urge to roll his eyes was unbearably strong. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be called Buddy when Michael was perfectly suitable. Buddy wasn’t a name for a man. It was a name for a puppy or a background character in a Flannery O’Connor novel.
“Small towns,” he muttered.
“Buddy was my grandfather’s callsign during the invasion of Normandy. He won a Medal of Valor.”
Clark choked on his bacon, ready to splutter out some kind of tense take-back of the insult, but he was awarded with uproarious laughter from the man across the table.
“I’m just messing with you, Dallas. Buddy used to be my nickname, but getting a medical degree changes how people see you. I mostly just go by Michael now. How’re the pancakes?”
“Good.”
“Mel makes the best pancakes in the whole state, I think. On Christmas morning, he sets up an assembly line in the town hall and a bunch of volunteers chip in to help him make, like, two thousand pancakes so everyone in town can have breakfast before the festival starts. The 25th is our busiest day of the year.” Michael’s hurried excitement tapered off when he realized a tradition would be ending. He got a hollow look in his eyes, which Clark did his best to ignore. “I mean, he did. And it was. When the festival was still on.”
The festival. He was tired of hearing about the festival. If these people loved the festival so much, why didn’t they put it on themselves instead of using his family’s money? Better yet, why didn’t they raise the price from a measly $10 a person to $25 a person? A fifteen-dollar increase meant big things for their bottom line, yet when he’d proposed it to Carolyn, the Director of Operations, she’d assured him she’d rather quit the whole thing altogether than keep poor families out and only cater to rich folks. She then glared at him as if the mere suggestion of raising ticket prices cheapened the entire heart of her operation.
Clark said, “Listen, Michael. I’m not really looking for company. I’m fine on my own.”
“Yeah. Of course. I was just thinking I could maybe show you around, you know, give you the lay of the land since you’ll be here for a few days. I can show you everything. Library, bank, even the parking lots so your car doesn’t get towed again.”
News travels fast. He’d only told Kate and the tow truck guy about his car; twelve hours later, everyone knew. If I walk around with you for twenty minutes, will you leave me alone? Something in this town’s water must have made them especially persistent. As with his first interaction with Kate, Clark saw no other way to get rid of this guy than giving him a little bit of his time.
“Sure,” he agreed, trying to hide his displeasure behind a half-hearted smile, only to be practically blinded by Michael’s blinding one.
“Mel! Make my muffin to go!”
What Clark hoped would be a brief twenty-minute introduction became an almost three-hour walking tour of the most important historical and contemporary sites Miller’s Point had to offer. By the time Michael ran out of steam, Clark knew more about the remote ranching village than he’d ever known about Dallas. For example, he’d had no idea his family founded Miller’s Point outright. He assumed they’d settled and prospered here, not set up the first encampments of ranchers.
At the first half-hour mark of the extensive tour, Clark considered bailing out and begging off to his office, but he couldn’t actually find it in himself to do it. Save for the workers taking down the decorations in the town square (as he’d instructed the night before), the town was empty and Michael was every bit the enjoyable host. Not that he ever let on, but he actually had a good time walking around the town and taking in its sights, provincial though they were.
But he drew the line at a cemetery tour. Close inspections of ghosts and tombstones where Jesus wore cowboy boots did not fit his description of an acceptable way to spend a morning. He checked his watch.
“I have to go to my office. I have things to do,” he said, curt and direct as possible. The tour may have been a fine diversion for a few hours, but it couldn’t last all day. He needed to be in the office, taking care of work, even if no one in this town seemed to understand the concept.
“Great! I’ll walk you there.”
“I’m fine, thanks—”
“No buts! Besides, I know where they hide the spare key.”
The Woodward Building was two blocks east off of the town square, and unlike the Dallas offices, it was not an imposing block of concrete and steel, made up in an intricate Art Deco style. It was a humble, two-story building with a flat roof and little else to speak of besides the embarrassment of Christmas lights decorating the front windows. A hand-painted sign with flippable numbers read: “0 DAYS ’TIL CHRISTMAS.” Clark ripped it from its hook as Michael went for the spare key.
“You really aren’t into this Christmas stuff, are you?”
Given he’d only known this guy for a few hours, Clark spared him the tragic backstory and instead took the key and let himself in. The building’s exterior appeared humble, befitting a small-town center of business operations, but the inside ruined his every hope of a muted, respectable workplace environment. It was too fancy. Though years of red-clay-covered boots marked and stained the carpet, the wood finishes of the desks and the crown molding belonged in a palace rather than a satellite office building. Christmas decorations, no doubt charged to his family’s accounts, cluttered every available space. Even the coffee machine was top-of-the-line, but something else bothered him more. He made a beeline for the wall beside the receptionist’s desk.
“What are you doing?” Michael asked.
“Turning the heating off,” Clark replied, searching for the temperature gauge instead of asking what in the world he was doing standing around here when Clark had made it clear their little tour had ended at the graveyard gates.
“It’s, like, forty degrees outside.”
“And we all carry coats, don’t we? Heating is expensive.”
The other man’s shocked gaze bore into Clark’s skin. He paid it no mind. He was a practical man in every sense of the word; he didn’t indulge in luxury. He wore fashionable but reasonably priced clothes, even stitching buttons and cuffs himself when they showed signs of wear. He wore his father’s timeless suit jackets, having them tailored to fit perfectly. He wasn’t very well going to heat an entire building, especially when no one worked inside to enjoy it. Besides, chill increased productivity. Hundreds of workplace studies said so. He’d stopped heating the office in Dallas; everyone here would get used to it. His next order of business, while Michael underscored his movements with a warbling whistle
