The front portion of the store had a tin ceiling. The rest had an open ceiling, high rafters, and wood floors. A long time ago, it had been a furniture store, which made it the perfect place to house the antiques and fine furnishings Meredith planned to sell here. The work was nearly completed. Track lighting had been installed below the rafters, the entire place scrubbed and painted. She’d made the curtains at the windows herself, and with the help of several local teenagers, the antiques were arranged at one end, the few pieces of new furniture she could afford to stock at the other. The paint she would sell was due to arrive later in the week. Every day she worked from dawn until late into the night down here before retiring to the tiny apartment upstairs. It was all coming together, the kids, her store, her life.
She spread her arms wide and tipped her head back. Whoa. Woozy, she closed her eyes.
“Aunt Meredith, ’Livia,” Logan called. “That alley cat’s gone and had kittens in an old barrel that tipped over back here.”
Olivia ran to see. Meredith blinked, focused, then followed. Logan was on his knees just inside the back door. Olivia was bent at the waist a foot away.
“She must’a just had ’em,” he said. “They’re still ugly and their eyes aren’t open yet.”
“They’re not either ugly,” Olivia exclaimed. “They’re beautiful.”
Meredith braced herself for the argument that was sure to break out, but Logan shrugged good-naturedly and simply said, “You know what I mean.”
“How many are there?” Olivia asked her big brother.
“Six.”
“Six?” Meredith exclaimed. What on earth was she going to do with an alley cat and six kittens?
“Wait. I was wrong.”
Oh, good.
“There are seven,” Logan amended.
“Seven?” Meredith asked. “Are you sure?” The scraggly orange-and-white mother cat stared up at her, blinking tiredly, as if sharing Meredith’s dismay.
“Yup. There are seven all right. Uncle Wes says seven’s lucky.”
“We’re lucky!” Olivia exclaimed. “Aren’t we Aunt Meredith?”
Meredith took a closer look at that cat and her seven kittens, and then at the brown-haired children whose blue eyes, so like their mother’s, were wide with wonder. A lump came and went in her throat, but she managed a small nod and a genuine smile.
“Seven kitties,” Olivia declared. “Plus the mama. We’re gonna need a lot of names.”
Since Meredith knew that a named cat was a claimed cat, she had to think fast. “Those kittens need to take a nap right now. If you two want to think of names, why don’t you help me decide what to call the store?”
“You want us to name a building?” Logan asked in that preadolescent, know-it-all attitude universal to males.
Meredith swiped a finger along his nose and said, “Not the building, silly. It’s going to be my business, a way of life, an entity with its own unique personality.”
The kids looked up at her blankly for a full five seconds before turning their gazes on each other. “I think we should name the white-and-yellow one Fluffy,” Olivia said.
“And the one with the two white paws is…”
“Paws?” Olivia asked.
“No, silly. Boots.”
Meredith knew when she’d been beaten. Retracing her footsteps to the front of the store, she began arranging throw pillows and lamps and candles on shelves lining one wall. The kids spent the next hour pondering names for kittens Meredith couldn’t possibly keep. Logan made a bed for them in an old drawer he found in the back alley, and he and Olivia coaxed the mother to let him help her move the kittens to what they considered a better lodging place. As far as Meredith was concerned, those two voices were more musical than the resonant purl of the wind chimes swaying overhead in the gentle breeze.
By the time Jayne was due back to pick up the children an hour later, all the kittens had been duly petted and examined for any unusual, interesting or identifying markings, three of them had names, and Logan and Olivia were arguing over a fourth. Mercy, those kids could argue over nothing.
“You can’t name the mother cat Haley!” Logan exclaimed.
“I can name her Haley if I want to!” Olivia declared with equal exuberance.
“Can not.”
“Can so.”
“You can’t either name her Haley. That’s a real person’s name. Tell her Aunt Meredith.”
Before Meredith could open her mouth, Olivia said, “We named the barn cats Carolyn, Sherilyn and Tom, and those are real people names. You just don’t wanna name this one Haley on accounta you kissed Haley Carson and she gave you a black eye.”
All at once, the store was absolutely quiet. Logan was the quietest of all. Wanting to help but not sure how, Meredith said, “Olivia, you don’t know that’s the reason Logan doesn’t want to name this cat Haley. I don’t really think she looks like a Haley, do you? Besides, kissing is private.”
“Kissing’s icky,” Olivia said. “Do you think kissing’s icky, Aunt Meredith?”
Two pairs of trusting blue eyes turned to her. Kissing? “Well, er, um. That is…”
The bell over the front door jangled, signaling Jayne’s return. Meredith was saved from having to try to come up with an answer that wasn’t mostly a sigh. Icky? Oh, that depended upon who a woman kissed. And the last man, the only man she’d kissed in a long, long time, hadn’t been icky at all.
Jayne dashed in long enough to pay due respect to the mother cat and her kittens, recount the high points of the meeting she’d attended, and say, “I’ll see you at the town council meeting tonight!” before bustling the kids away.
Ugh, Meredith thought when she was alone again in the store. Tonight, at the town council meeting, she would have to stand in front of the women of the Ladies Aid Society and several of the bachelors in town. She prayed she passed everyone’s scrutiny so that she might be accepted in this small town.
That was what she wanted. To be accepted, to be near Logan and Olivia, and for her store to be a success. In order for her store to be a success, she couldn’t afford to make any enemies or hurt any feelings, which meant she had to let the overeager bachelors down gently, which wasn’t easy to do when she received requests for dates every day. She could hardly blame them. There simply weren’t enough women to go around out here. An old copy of the advertisement the local boys had put in the local papers to lure women to Jasper Gulch still hung in the post office and in the diner. Not a lot had changed since then. As far as Meredith could tell, in the three years since the ad had appeared, there wasn’t a single man in town who wasn’t still shy but willing. She paused for a moment.
That wasn’t true. There was one. Oh, Skyler Buchanan had been more than willing a month ago, and she
