Trouble When You Walked In (Contemporary Romance) Read Online Free PDF Page B

gone.
    Cissie sighed, sat in a rocker. “I’ve got some bad news about the library.”
    “Spit it out.”
    “It’s shutting down. We’re merging with Campbell. At the Harris Teeter strip mall.”
    Nana paused a moment, took a sip of whiskey. “It was a good run. Over a hundred years. Not much in mountain time, but in human time—in USA time, especially—it’s pretty damned good.”
    “But we can’t just give up.”
    Nana took a puff of her cigar, and a strong, sudden gust lifted her hem up over her knees. She smoothed it back down. “We’re getting that old northwest wind, the one we get once a decade or so. Last time it was here, it blew off Billy Shoemaker’s hairpiece and knocked half the letters off the theater marquee. They found an M two miles away in Leena Douglas’s garden.”
    “Nana. Let’s get back to the subject.”
    “The wind is the subject, honey. Sometimes things happen you have no control over.”
    “You’re the spitfire of the family,” Cissie insisted. “You can’t be telling me to sit there and take it.”
    “It depends. Sometimes weathering the storm is better than fighting back, and sometimes it’s not. What can you do about this problem, anyway?”
    “I don’t know. I really don’t. They’ve already signed the papers.” Cissie thought a second. “I could write a letter to the editor.”
    “You could.” Nana leaned down and picked up Dexter one-handed. He circled a couple times in her lap and settled down.
    “You don’t seem very riled up,” Cissie said. “I thought you would be.”
    “At my age, nothing is big enough to rile me. I’ve seen it all.”
    “But this means…”
    “What does it mean?” Nana tapped her cigar on an old porcelain bowl on a wrought-iron table to her left.
    “It means—” Cissie thought about everything she’d always counted on, including true love. These mountains. Chocolate cake to drive away the blues.
    “Out with the old, in with the new, as they say.” Nana’s eyes twinkled.
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because old matters.” Cissie leaned over and pet Dexter’s smoky ears, and he let out a rusty meow. Cissie took Nana’s hand and squeezed.
    Nana squeezed back. “You mean Dexter, not me, right? I’m not old. Yet .”
    Cissie laughed and kissed her grandmother’s bony knuckles. “Of course, I mean Dexter. But old Rogers family papers matter, too. And—and folklore.”
    “Kettle Knob library folklore, especially.” Nana chuckled. “My, oh, my. You don’t really believe in that old story, do you?”
    “What harm is there? You still throw salt over your shoulder when you spill it.”
    “Habits. They’re easy to fall into.”
    “Tell me about it.” Cissie sighed. “Nana—”
    She couldn’t bear to say it out loud.
    “Honey.” Nana’s voice wasn’t pitying. But somehow, Cissie’s eyes and throat stung. “You don’t have to say it. I know what you’re thinking—that you’re in a rut.”
    Cissie nodded. She started rocking, too, and kept her eyes on the farthest peak. “But the fact that you guessed I’d say that … You must have been thinking I was in one, too.”
    “Not at all.” Nana blew a big smoke ring, which lengthened and twisted into a figure eight and was carried away by that pesky wind. “It’s not like you don’t get out. You go to work. The store. The occasional birthday party, show, or church thing. Stop being so hard on yourself.”
    They rocked in silence a minute or two, Dexter perfectly content with the motion of Nana’s chair.
    “I want more.” Cissie stopped rocking.
    “That’s my girl.” Nana smiled.
    “Hey, you said I was fine —”
    “And you are. If you’re satisfied. But I suspected you weren’t, and if you’re not”—Nana shrugged—“you have to do something about it. Or become as petrified as that old stump.” She angled her chin at a tree stump a hundred yards off that had been used over several generations for splitting wood.
    Cissie sighed.