that case, I’ll be out in a couple of minutes.”
Jane nodded and closed the door. She seemed a quiet, competent sort of woman, and he hoped she would be able to keep the seniors from expecting him to socialize too much. Having the Senior Center located within City Hall was a dynamic he hadn’t anticipated.
Closing his laptop, he stood and walked into the hallway, carefully locking up behind him, though he had nothing confidential yet to keep private. A group of gray-and white-haired citizens were gathered and chatting near the double doors leading into the dining area.
Jane called for attention. “Everyone, this is Daniel Whittier. He’s our new city manager.”
“Hello,” he said as various individuals stepped up to shake his hand and introduce themselves. “Nice to meet you,” he said, over and over again, the names blurring together.
A vaguely familiar woman smiled. “We were so disappointed you couldn’t stay to have lunch with us yesterday, but Mandy explained you’d traveled all night and needed rest more than food.”
“Yes,” another lady added. “And it was so nice of you to still stop and say hello after your long trip.”
Apparently Mandy had gone back to the Senior Center and put a positive spin on his decision not to eat with them. Daniel wasn’t sure what to think about it.
“You should be at the head of the line,” said the woman who’d introduced herself as Caroline White—mother of the mayor, he presumed.
He protested, but they insisted he was the guest of honor and should go before everyone else.
The first person he encountered at the serving table was Mandy Colson, carrying a large pan of a rice dish.
“Hi,” she said. “I see you were recruited to help eat the food. We’ve got pilaf and meat loaf, with mixed vegetables and salad. And dessert, of course.”
Meat loaf. He might have known. What else could you expect from lunch at a senior center? Memories rose of his mother’s flavorless meat loaf, dry but greasy, accompanied by a heap of smoldering anger because his father was late from work as always. The only good thing Daniel could say about his childhood meals was that he’d learned how to eat anything and still dispense a compliment.
* * *
MANDY SIGNALED TO the volunteers to begin serving the plates. One table had been set aside as the official welcome table, with the mayor’s mother as the designated hostess. Not surprisingly, Margaret Hanson and her husband were among those seated at that table—Margaret constantly wanted to be in the center of things.
While listening to Mrs. Brewster chatter about her grandchildren, Mandy watched Daniel fork up a large bite of meat loaf and shove it into his mouth with the air of a man determined to swallow without tasting.
He gulped slightly and she hoped he wouldn’t choke, not that he wouldn’t have plenty of help if he did. Half the crowd knew the Heimlich maneuver since she’d sponsored a first aid class two months earlier.
Instead of choking, Daniel’s eyebrows shot up and his gaze dropped to his plate with a startled expression. He began chewing with renewed attention. Caroline White leaned closer and said something, while the others around the table nodded and laughed.
Mandy could guess what was being discussed. The first time she’d put “barbecue loaf” on the monthly menu, she had received a number of discreet phone calls, warning her that meat loaf wasn’t a popular entrée, no matter what it was called. Basically, they’d said the men wouldn’t eat it and the women didn’t enjoy it that much, either. But Mandy had persisted. They’d had a lighter group than normal that day, and shortly afterward the phone had begun ringing off the hook...with requests for the recipe. She’d shared it happily, giving full credit to the author, a woman she’d met during her travels.
As one pan of meat loaf disappeared, she carried out another, and still more as folks returned to refill their plates. The volunteers took seconds around to the folks who found it hard to get to the serving table.
She slid back into the kitchen for a minute of solitude, then picked up one of the pans of warm blackberry cobbler she’d prepared for dessert. The berries had come from the youth group at the church down the street, picked the previous evening for a service project and proudly delivered that morning by Shawn, the pastor’s son.
A smile tugged at Mandy’s mouth as she recalled her conversation with Shawn; he’d shamefacedly confessed to being in on the goat-snatching prank after Saturday’s practice game. She’d just grinned, understanding all too well what it was like to grow up with everyone expecting you to be a miniadult with the discretion of a senior citizen, simply because your parents were in a respected public position. Her hometown wasn’t small, but the private university where her parents taught was its own little world, probably similar to a town like Willow’s Eve.
After carrying in several pans of cobbler, she fetched vanilla ice cream from the freezer.
“Hey,” Clyde Bonner called from the serving table. “You going to eat today?”
“Sure.” Mandy took the plate he had prepared and she joined the rest of the volunteers. It was hard to ignore Daniel’s presence a few tables away.
After she’d finished eating, she went to her office, wishing for once it was her habit to keep the door shut.
“Mandy?”
Great. It was Daniel. “Uh, hi. Everything okay?”
“Fine. I understand I have you to thank for the meal.”
“Nope,” Mandy denied. “Everyone chipped in. They were debating who got to pay, so I suggested everyone throw in a nickel. Not that it was necessary. There’s always plenty of food. The meals aren’t free at the center, just cheap. They say that Fannie considered fully funding free lunches, then decided that having to pay something kept people invested.”
Daniel looked taken aback. “I wasn’t talking about the cost. I was thanking you for preparing such an excellent lunch.”
She shrugged. “I don’t usually cook on consecutive days, but it sometimes works out that way when the volunteers aren’t available. Normally I do it eight or nine times a month and fix my favorite recipes, such as meat loaf.”
“The meat loaf was a nice surprise. I don’t usually care much for it.”
“Yeah, I saw your expression of horror when you heard the menu.”
“You’re imagining things. I did not have an expression of horror.”
“Maybe, but tell the truth. You were trying to swallow without tasting it, weren’t you?”
His voice was stiff. “As I said, meat loaf isn’t my favorite dish, but I enjoyed yours.”
For Pete’s sake, why was he acting as if he had a stick up his butt?
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” she asked politely, stifling a yawn. He might be gorgeous, but didn’t he have a scrap of humor in his body?
“Yes. I heard something that made me wonder if you
