One Frosty Night. Janice Kay Johnson

experience made him a godsend working with contractors. Olivia guessed him to be in his mid-forties.

      Lloyd chuckled. “Yes, it would.”

      She let herself into her office and settled behind her desk with a sigh, cradling the mug of coffee in both hands to warm them.

      Most days she was glad to be here. Until she’d had to face the realization that Mom might sell the business, she hadn’t let herself understand how much she was enjoying herself. Before Dad’s first heart attack, she’d worked as an account manager at a major Portland investment firm. Dissatisfied, she’d been thinking about making a change, and she had quit without a second thought when her parents needed her. She could take some time off and help her parents, she had reasoned.

      At the time, Olivia had expected to be here three or four months, tops. Now—she had no idea what she wanted to do next. She’d begun to wonder if she wasn’t a small businesswoman at heart.

      Something else, too. Thinking about what a tomboy she’d been had sparked a minor revelation. It wasn’t like she’d make career decisions based on what she was required to wear to work every day, but...she wasn’t missing having to wear suits and heels, do something elegant to her hair and put on makeup every morning. Jeans, flannel shirts, comfortable shoes, a ponytail—this felt really natural to her.

      It’s me, she thought.

      She shook off the reflection, in part because, as Ben had pointed out, any possibility of her staying to run Bowen’s Hardware & Lumberyard wasn’t really hers, but also because brooding wasn’t productive. She wanted to make time for sure today to talk to old Mr. Swenson about his plans for the appliance store. No point in starting to dream if it turned out he had a long-lost nephew planning to move to Crescent Creek to take over his store or already had a buyer.

      Olivia spent the morning working the floor, as she frequently did, answering questions and helping people find the screws and bolts they asked for, pick out the best caulking material or identify the washer needed to stop that drip from the kitchen faucet. She loved the old building, with wood floors that creaked and weren’t entirely level, those high ceilings and the cold drafts that came every time someone opened either the front or back entrance doors. Given a spare moment here and there, she considered the layout and eyed stray corners, trying to envision how she could expand the stock without aisles becoming claustrophobic or displays too cluttered.

      The cash registers were the old-fashioned kind, although the credit-card machines weren’t. Dad had modernized only as he had to.

      “Nobody in Crescent Creek is interested in hurrying,” he liked to say. In general, it was true. Like she’d told Ben, standing in line at the hardware store was as good a place to gossip as any.

      This morning, passing by the short line at the front of the store, Olivia heard Bernard Fulton saying, “That damn wife of mine thinks we’re going out to dinner tonight. Why can’t she cook seven nights a week, I ask? She says, God didn’t work seven days a week, either. I say, but this isn’t Sunday—it’s Monday. God liked Sundays, she says, I like Mondays.”

      Olivia stifled a laugh. June and Bernard had eaten at the Crescent Café every Monday night for as long as she could remember, and most Fridays, too. So did all their friends. Most of the men had once worked at the lumber mill. Lloyd and his wife would be there, too, just as they’d play bingo at the grange hall every other Saturday and plant their butts in the same pew every Sunday morning at the Grace Lutheran Church. Bernard and June were Presbyterian, if Olivia remembered right. Pete Peterson, currently listening tolerantly to Bernard, was Baptist. If your inclinations were for anything else, you had to drive at least as far as Miller Falls. Not many locals did.

      Was this really what she wanted? she asked herself with some incredulity. By the time she’d graduated from high school, the predictability of every day, of everyone she knew, had begun to drive her crazy. She’d yearned for something different. For adventure. For a future different from the one that had been her dream, when it had included Ben.

      And now here she was, taking a ridiculous sense of comfort from the very predictability that had once been such an irritant. Not minding gossip, because...oh, because it meant people were genuinely interested in each other’s doings. Intrigued by the mystery of why Stuart wasn’t talking about what was wrong with his Ford F-250, when her eighteen-year-old self would have pretended to be interested while really thinking, Who cares?

      Discovering she did care gave her a funny ache beneath the breastbone, one that didn’t want to go away no matter how busy she got.