“I promised Conner I’d keep an eye on you, and the minute I turn my back, you’re teetering on the top rung.”
Tricia dusted her hands together and smiled, stepping back a little way to look up at the batik. “I was nowhere near the top rung,” she argued cheerfully, her face glowing in the sunlight pouring in through the big front window. She sighed. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
Carolyn, following Tricia’s gaze, nodded. Primrose Sullivan, the artist, had outdone herself this time. The weaver was indeed beautiful. “I think some of our online customers would be interested,” she mused. “I’m not sure it would photograph all that well from this angle, though—”
The hydraulic squeal of brakes interrupted.
Tricia moved to the window and peered through the antique lace curtains. “It’s another tour bus,” she said. “Brace yourself.”
The business, a combination boutique and art gallery, filled the first floor of Natty McCall’s venerable Victorian house—Carolyn lived upstairs in Tricia’s former apartment, along with her foster cat, Winston. The items the two women sold ranged from goats’ milk soap and handmade pincushions to one-of-a-kind dresses and near museum-quality oil paintings.
“I’m braced,” Carolyn confirmed, smiling and taking her customary place behind the counter, next to the cash register.
Tricia straightened an already straight display of handmade stationery.
The shop wasn’t going to make anyone rich, but for Carolyn, it was a dream come true. In Lonesome Bend, she had a comfortable place to live—not a small thing to a person raised in no fewer than fourteen foster homes—and an outlet for the various garments, decorative pillows and retro-style aprons she was constantly running up on her sewing machine. Formerly a professional house sitter, Carolyn had been selling her designs online for years. Her online business brought in enough extra money to build a small savings account and buy thread and fabric for the next project she had in mind, but that was the extent of it.
The little bell over the front door jingled merrily, and the busload of customers crowded in, white-haired women with good manicures and colorful summer clothes, chatting good-naturedly among themselves as they thronged around every table and in front of every shelf.
The store, loftily titled Creed and Simmons—Tricia’s great-grandmother, Natty, said the name sounded more like a law firm or an English jewelry shop than what it was—barely broke even most of the time. Tour buses heading to and from Denver and Aspen and Telluride stopped at least twice a week, though, and that kept the doors open and the lights on.
For Tricia, having sold property inherited from her father for a tidy sum and then having married a wealthy rancher to boot, the place was a hobby, albeit one she was passionate about.
For Carolyn, it was much more—an extension of her personality, an identity. A way of belonging, of fitting into a community made up mostly of people who had known each other from birth. It
had to work.
Without the business, Carolyn would be adrift again, following the old pattern of living in someone else’s house for a few days or a few weeks, then moving on to yet another place that wasn’t hers. House-sitting was a grown-up version of that old game musical chairs, only the stakes were a lot higher. Once or twice, when the figurative music stopped unexpectedly, Carolyn had been caught between houses, like a player left with no chair to sit in, forced to hole up in some cheap motel or sleep in her car until another job turned up.
Thankfully, there were plenty of opportunities around Lonesome Bend—movie stars and CEOs and highpowered political types kept multimillion-dollar “vacation homes” hidden away in private canyons, on top of hills and at the ends of long, winding roads edged with whispering aspen trees.
Carolyn still did some house-sitting now and then, for long-time clients, but she much preferred the cozy apartment above the shop to those enormous and profoundly empty houses, with their indoor swimming pools and their media rooms and their well-stocked wine cellars.
In the apartment, she was surrounded by her own things—the ceramic souvenir mugs she’d collected from cities all over the country, a few grainy photographs in cheap frames, her trusty laptop and the no-frills workhorse of an electric sewing machine that had been a parting gift from her favorite foster mom.
In the apartment, Carolyn felt substantial, real, rooted in one particular place, instead of some ethereal, ghostlike being, haunting lonely castles.
For the next forty-five minutes, Carolyn and Tricia were both so busy that they barely had a chance to look at each other, let alone speak, and when the tour bus pulled away at last, it was almost time to close up for lunch.
The cash drawer was bulging with fives, tens and twenties, and there was a nice pile of credit card receipts, too.
The shelves, racks and tables looked as though they’d been pillaged by barbarians, and the air still smelled of expensive perfume.
“Wow,” Tricia said, sagging into the rocking chair near the fireplace. “That bunch just about cleaned us out.”
Carolyn laughed. “That they did,” she agreed. “Bless their hearts.”
Tricia tilted her head back, sighed slightly and closed her eyes. Her hands rested protectively over her bulging stomach.
Carolyn was immediately alarmed. “Tricia? You’re all right, aren’t you?”
Tricia opened her eyes, turned her head and smiled. “Of course I am,” she said. “I’m just a little tired from all that hurrying around.”
“You’re sure about that?”
Tricia made a face, mocking but friendly. “You sound just like Conner. I’m fine, Carolyn.”
Frowning slightly, Carolyn went to the door, turned the Open sign around, so it read Closed, and turned the lock. She and Tricia usually had lunch in the downstairs kitchen at the back of the house, and sometimes Tricia’s husband joined them.
Tricia was still in the rocking chair when Carolyn got back.
And she’d fallen asleep.
Carolyn smiled, covered her friend lightly with a crocheted afghan and slipped away to the kitchen.
Winston, the cat, wound himself around her ankles when she entered, purring like an outboard motor. Like the house, Winston technically belonged to Natty McCall, Tricia’s great-grandmother, now a resident of Denver, but because he stayed with Carolyn whenever his mistress was off on one of her frequent and quite lengthy cruises, she loved him like her own.
Apparently, the feeling was mutual.
Or he just wanted his daily ration of sardines.
“Hungry?” Carolyn asked, bending to stroke the cat’s gleaming black ears.
Winston replied with a sturdy meow that presumably meant yes and leaped up onto a sideboard, where he liked to keep watch.
Smiling, mentally tallying up the take from the power-shopper invasion, Carolyn went to the fridge, got out the small bowl of sardines left over from the day before and stripped away the covering of plastic wrap.
She
