Page 7 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“Absolutely not.”

“Absolutely yes.”

“Dollie, I have paint in my hair, I smell like hand sanitizer and apple juice, and I’m wearing a shirt that a six-year-old wiped his nose on. I am not going anywhere.”

Dollie McKinnon looked at me from across the teachers’ lounge table with the serene, immovable expression of a woman who had already decided how this conversation was going to end. She was five-foot-two, had red hair that she claimed was natural but definitely wasn’t, and possessed the kind of stubborn charm that made it nearly impossible to say no to her about anything. We’d been teaching at Pinewood Ridge Elementary together for two years, and in that time I’d learned that arguing with Dollie was like arguing with the weather. You could complain all you wanted, but it was still going to rain.

“I made cookies,” she said, tapping the tin on the table between us. It was decorated with little hand-painted sunflowers, because of course it was. “Chocolate chip. Josh’s favorite. I want to bring them to him at the sawmill, but I’ve never been there before, and I am not walking into a place full of large men with sharp tools by myself.”

“You’re dating one of those large men with sharp tools.”

“Which is exactly why I need moral support. What if I say something embarrassing? What if I trip on a log? What if there’s sawdust in my hair and I look like a before photo?”

“You want me to be your emotional support friend at a sawmill.”

“Yes. That is exactly what I want. Thank you for understanding.”

I groaned and let my head fall onto the table. The Formica was cool against my forehead, which was nice, because the day had been approximately nine hundred degrees of chaos. Marcus had outdone himself by stuffing an entire crayon up his nose during art time, requiring a level of calm, steady extraction that I felt should qualify me for some kind of medical credential. Two of the girls had gotten into an argument about whether unicorns were real that had escalated to tears, shouting, and one dramatically thrown glitter pen. And the fire drill had gone off during story time, which meant I’d had to wrangle twenty-three small humans across a parking lot while half of them cried and the other half treated it like a field trip.

“I’ll buy you coffee after,” Dollie said.

I lifted my head. “Large?”

“The largest they make.”

“With whipped cream?”

“I’ll ask for extra.”

I sighed. “Fine. But we’re not staying long. I need to go home and become a person again.”

Dollie beamed and clutched the cookie tin to her chest like she’d won a prize. “You’re the best friend a girl could ask for.”

“I know. Remember that when I ask you to cover my recess duty next week.”

Twenty minutes later, we were pulling up to the Pinewood Ridge Sawmill, and I was starting to regret my decision.

The sawmill sat on the east edge of town where the road curved toward the mountains and the trees grew thick enough to block out the afternoon sky. It was bigger than I’d expected, a sprawling compound of weathered buildings, stacked lumber, and heavy machinery that hummed with a low, persistent vibration I could feel through the soles of my shoes. The air smelled like fresh-cut pine and diesel, and there was a fine layer of sawdust coating everything, the ground, the fences, the trucks parked along the perimeter, like the whole place existed inside a snow globe filled with wood shavings.

“It’s so… rustic,” Dollie said from the passenger seat, clutching her sunflower tin.

“It’s a sawmill, Dollie. What were you expecting? A spa?”

“I was expecting it to be smaller. Josh made it sound like a little operation. This is like a whole compound. There are vehicles. And machinery. And men.”

“Yes. Men tend to be present at places of employment.”

“Large men.”

“Dollie.”

“I’m going.” She took a breath, checked her reflection in the visor mirror, and got out of the car. I followed.

We walked through the open gate and into the main yard, where the noise level tripled. Saws buzzed. Machines clanked and groaned. Somewhere to our left, a truck was being loaded with lumber, the logs swinging from a crane with the kind of casual danger that made my kindergarten-safety-trained brain go into overdrive.

I spotted Josh before Dollie did. He was near the main building, stacking boards onto a pallet with another guy, his sleeves rolled up and his arms dusty with sawdust. When he saw Dollie, his entire face changed. It went from focused and working to soft and stupid in about half a second, the kind of expression that belonged on a greeting card.

“Babe!” He dropped what he was doing and jogged over, a grin splitting his face. “What are you doing here?”