Melvin is quiet for so long I start counting the seconds in my head. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three—
He wipes his hand on his jeans, a slow, deliberate motion, like he’s buying time. His mouth is pressed into that flat line that could mean anything from profound disapproval to the closest thing to joy his face knows how to express. Then he reaches out, picks up the chart between thumb and forefinger, and holds it at arm’s length, studying it with the intensity of a man reading a prescription he’s not sure he wants filled.
I hold my breath and wipe my damp palms on my jeans and immediately regret it because now I look nervous, which I am, but Melvin doesn’t need the visual confirmation.
He sets the chart back down on the counter and adjusts it by half an inch to the left, as if the placement matters before he looks at me from under his cap.
“About damn time,” he says.
That’s it. Three words, delivered in that gravel-road voice, and his eyes are doing the thing where they’re not quite smiling, but the corners have softened, and the lines around them have deepened just enough to tell you that whatever’s happening behind that weathered face, it’s something good.
With a sigh of relief, I reach for the roll of masking tape near the register and tear a fresh strip with hands that are definitely shaking. I tape the chart to the wall behind the register, right where the old vendor contact sheet used to hang, and I’m grinning so hard my cheeks hurt.
Melvin watches me tape it up, just standing there with his coffee mug, taking a long sip, and then turns and walks to the back room to refill it.
He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. For Melvin, “about damn time” is the equivalent of a twenty-one-gun salute, a parade, and a solid gold plaque with your name on it. It’s everything.
I step back from the wall and look at my org chart, now officially mounted. Three boxes. Three people. A hardware store in a town that most maps forget to label, and a future that, for the first time in longer than I can remember, belongs entirely to me.
The bell above the door jingles. First customer of the day, a woman with a toddler on her hip and a broken drawer pull in her hand, looking vaguely hopeful.
“Morning,” I say, and it comes out bright, easy, like I’ve been doing this forever. Like I plan to keep doing it. “What can we help you with today?”
Melvin emerges from the back with a fresh coffee, takes one look at the customer, and heads straight for the hardware aisle without being asked. No grumble, no commentary, just steady, reliable motion, the way he’s moved through this store for decades. The way he’ll keep moving through it, on his terms, on my terms, on terms we built together.
I catch his eye across the aisle. He gives me a single, nearly imperceptible nod.
We’ve got work to do.
Chapter 14
Ipush through the front door of Sleigh Queen, expecting the usual chaos—Patti on the mic, the familiar thump of whatever pop anthem Felix has decided to overplay and ruin this week. What I get instead is the equivalent of a glitter bomb detonating directly in my face.
Confetti cannons go off from both sides of the doorway. Not little party poppers…full-sized, industrial-grade confetti launchers that shoot enough metallic streamers into the air to choke a small mammal. Christmas lights, strung along every rafter and wall, blaze to life all at once, red and gold and blinding, and the bass drops so hard the ice rattles in every drink on the bar. The sound hits me like a physical wall, some remix of something I vaguely recognize pitched up to stadium volume, and the floor is vibrating under my boots so intensely I can feel it in my molars.
The club is packed. Not weeknight packed. Not even Saturday-night packed. We’re talking wall-to-wall bodies, shoulder to shoulder, every square inch of floor occupied by someone I know. Roz and Dev are by the bar, already three sheets to the wind if their matching grins are anything to go by. Anson’s waving a drink above the crowd like he’s flagging down a rescue helicopter. The entire garden club has colonized the booth in the back, Mrs. Pelletier and her crew of silver-haired busy-bodies lifting their glasses in unison. Half the drag roster is in full regalia of sequins, feathers, the works, and Patti is front and center with a half-empty glass, already hollering somethingthat sounds suspiciously like “Sweep my chimney, baby!” to the general delight of everyone within earshot.
I freeze in the doorway. My mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. A streamer of gold confetti has caught in my bun, dangling over my right ear like some kind of sad, celebratory antenna. I’m still wearing my canvas jacket, the one with the torn pocket and the permanent smell of cedar, and my boots are caked with the day’s soot because I came straight from a chimney clean on Maple without bothering to change. I look, in other words, exactly like someone who did not get the memo.
“SURPRISE!” The word comes from approximately seventy different throats at once, none of them in sync, which makes it sound like the world’s most enthusiastic car crash.
I stare, my brain doing that thing where it tries to process too much information at once and just gives up, leaving me standing there with my hand still on the door and my heart doing something complicated behind my ribs.
Then the lights shift, the music cuts, and May takes the stage.
May, in full Mary Poppins chimney sweep regalia. Top hat, soot-smudged cheeks, and a broom that’s been bedazzled within an inch of its life. She plants one foot on the edge of the stage, strikes a pose that would make Julie Andrews proud, and launches into “Chim Chim Cher-ee”.
The crowd loses its collective mind. I lose mine right along with them, because three more queens hit the stage in matching chimney sweep outfits, brooms held aloft, and the number slides seamlessly into “Step In Time” with a choreography so tight and so ridiculous I’m howling before the first chorus.
They tap-dance. They actually tap-dance, brooms clicking against the stage in perfect unison, top hats bobbing, and the whole room is screaming the lyrics back at them like we’ve been rehearsing for weeks. I am screaming right along, hands in the air, voice completely shot, because what the actual fuck, my jobis being turned into a Broadway production and it is the greatest thing I have ever witnessed.
A hand clamps down on my shoulder mid-chorus. I turn, still laughing, and Carlisle is there—tall, steady Carlisle with his insane muscles and the permanent look of a man who has seen everything and is still somehow surprised by humanity. He doesn’t say anything, he just wraps both arms around me and holds on. Not a bro-hug. Not a quick back-pat. A real hug, both arms, his chin on my shoulder, and he holds it for a beat longer than casual, long enough that the noise of the club sort of fades around the edges, and it’s just the two of us standing there in the middle of all this chaos.
When he pulls back, his eyes are doing that thing. That Carlisle thing, where they’re steady and a little sad and completely certain.
“Drew would be happy,” he says. Quiet. Just for me.
My throat closes and all I can manage is to nod once, tight, because if I try to speak right now, something is going to break, and I am not having my emotional collapse in the middle of a drag queen chimney sweep extravaganza, thank you very much.
