Once again she’d left something important until almost the last minute. Well, this wasn’t the last minute. The last minute would be two weeks from today, when her contract with the town of Walkers Ford ended and she left to drive back to Chicago. But her habitual distraction and procrastination meant yet again she was scrambling to do something she’d always meant to do, then didn’t.
Like work in a public library, the goal she’d set when she got her MLS then let slip through her fingers after graduation. The whole point of this diversion was for her to learn to be more proactive in her life, to make things happen rather than letting them happen to her. Including Lucas Ridgeway, assuming he had no objection to being one half of the oldest cliché in the book, a whirlwind affair between a repressed librarian and a cop.
She hurried down the street to her rented house as nature put on a show in the expansive sky at the end of the street. There was the Hanford house five doors down, then there was nascent twilight streaked with the sunset’s reds, oranges, and pinks. It should have clashed horridly, but the prairie sky wore the colors with a magnificent lack of concern that reminded her of her sister, Freddie. Freddie wore jeans, ballet flats, and a faded blue button-down shirt in front of fifty thousand people, and within minutes #preppiestyle trended on Twitter all over North America and Europe.
Nothing ever happened to Freddie. Freddie made things happen. Their mother often complained that one daughter got all the initiative and the other got all the absentmindedness.
She hurried up the driveway, trying to remember if the shirt with the rosettes was in her dresser or on the closet shelf, when Lucas’s police department Blazer passed her and pulled into the driveway next to her. The transmission ground when he shifted into park and cut the engine.
Too late. The story of her life, but she resisted the urge to write off the rest of the night. Instead, she climbed the front step and waited, pretending to thumb through the mail while she watched him greet Duke, his Belgian Malinois. Maybe it was the untempered affection he had for the dog that tugged at her heart. He hunkered down to scratch the dog’s throat and whisper You’re a good boy, yes you are into his upturned muzzle. Duke spent his days on the screened-in front porch of his house next door. Every time Lucas came home, Duke pranced and danced, rubbed his white-furred snout against Lucas’s legs, his fawn-colored tail wagging frantically. The raw blast of emotion from the dog and Lucas’s gentle scratching tightened Alana’s throat every time she saw it.
Tonight was no exception. When the reunion ended, Lucas got to his feet, then glanced her way. He wore a navy suit and a gray tie, with his badge and service weapon clipped to his belt.
“Evening, Chief,” she said.
“Ms. Wentworth,” he replied.
The way he said her name shouldn’t have made her heart beat a little faster, but her name on his lips always did. She could salvage this, still get a few minutes to get ready. “I wonder if you’d have a moment later tonight,” she said. “The bathroom sink isn’t draining properly.”
“It’s not the kitchen sink this time?”
“Sorry, but no,” she said.
He looked at his watch, a no-nonsense Timex. “I’ve got a couple of minutes now,” he said. “I’ll get my toolbox.”
Damn!
Alana carried her bags inside, turning on lights as she moved from the kitchen through the dining room and down the short hall to the bedroom she used as an office, where she dumped the bags, then continued down the hall to her bedroom. The house was lovely, with gorgeous hardwood floors, walnut cabinets built into the corners of the dining room, brick molding, and charming window seats in the three bedrooms. When she first looked at the rental property, Lucas had told her his grandparents lived out a seventy-year marriage in the house. Love seeped from the woodwork and floors to give texture to the light that poured through the picture window overlooking Mrs. Ridgeway’s famous rose beds. Chief Ridgeway had scrupulously pointed out the house’s defects—leaky windows, ancient plumbing, and a kitchen straight out of the 1970s—but to Alana, bundling up during the winter was a small price to pay for the chance to see those roses bloom in the spring.
After opening the kitchen door, she poured herself a glass of wine, turned on NPR, and more attentively sorted through her mail. The stack included the usual bills as well as invitations, personal notes, and birth announcements on Crane’s finest paper. She slit open the formal announcement of an upcoming party honoring her stepfather’s contribution to efforts to ameliorate global poverty. Her mother had set the date for the celebration months earlier, but receiving the formal invitation made it all real. Alana’s time in Walkers Ford was almost over. She should start packing, another task she was putting off, but she’d brought so little with her. A few hours one evening and she’d be ready to leave.
Lucas knocked at the kitchen door with the Maglite she recognized from the sports bag he carried to and from work each day. Glass of wine still in hand, she crossed the kitchen and let him in.