Page 65 of More Than My Hometown

17

MAISEY

“Ta-da!”

Dolly does a little shimmy, showing off the back of her T-shirt, arms outstretched like she’s Simone Biles balancing on the high beam. I smile, not only thrilled to see the idea come to life, but that they made it in time.

The basic heather-gray tee has The Booby Trap logo across the front, looking fairly unassuming from this angle. Until you turn around. Across the back is a largemouth bass partially encircled by a rod and reel, with the tag line I like a big mouth on my rod printed alongside the curve of the fishing line. The double entendre makes me giggle—again—same as it has every time I’ve looked at the design.

“It’s perfect!” I tell her, taking a big sip of my coffee. And then another.

We have a long day ahead of us, and it’s only just starting. At barely five thirty.

The second annual Reel Madness, a charity fishing event The Booby Trap is hosting to raise money for Hayes Cares, the charitable arm of Hayes Industries, is up and running, with Silver Lake’s parking lot already full of tents, trucks, boats, and people. The volunteers finished up their safety meeting not long ago, and registration will officially open shortly— getting this show on the road for the more than one hundred and fifty teams that are registered.

As one of the EMTs on for the day, all I can do is hope that it’s a calm, uneventful day. At least for the humans. The fish are on their own.

“We’ve already sold six,” Bronwyn Ainsworth-Keller, Hayes’s Director of Marketing says, rounding the merch table. “We are absolutely going to sell out of the tees and the stickers and the koozies. I should have bought more stuff with that design on it.”

I laugh, excited that she’s excited. “I’ll make sure that Ewan stocks it in the store. I honestly don’t know how he and Milo didn’t come up with it themselves.”

“Because as smart-ass-y as all those boys are, they don’t think about using that skill for marketing. Actually, they just don’t think about marketing,” Bronwyn says.

Dolly and I look at each other, unable to argue that point. Neither of our Hayes men put any kind of effort into marketing. To be fair, Hux is over lumber and paper, so not an area that traditional marketing really applies to, but even if it did, zero thought would go into it. Ewan, though, does nothing. I know this for a fact because I’ve asked. Very specifically when I showed him the largemouth design and told him all about making shirts and stickers and how we could sell them.

He looked at me like I was an Oompa Loompa escaped from the chocolate factory, before asking, “People will buy stickers with my store name on it?”

That was the point I knew I needed to get Bronwyn fully involved.

“I’m working on hiring a social media manager who can focus on building an online presence and personality for Southern Brothers and The Booby Trap, so any other ideas like this you have up your sleeve, let me know. Unless you’re interested in the role?”

“Absolutely not,” I answer without thinking. “I’ll take an open wound to dance trends any day.”

Bronwyn laughs. “You can keep the blood and guts, but I’m with you on the dance trend part. Which is why I need someone who is good at all that stuff. I know a gal from my days at Coffman Witte who always had a pulse on hot trends, but if you guys know of anyone…”

She looks between Dolly and me, as if the two of us are going to be a wealth of knowledge in the area and have a ready-made list of names for her. Truthfully, Dolly might, since she knows people in this town still. Meanwhile, I’m over here wondering if it would be rude for me to Google Coffman Witte to figure out what that is.

“Here’s what I know. If I don’t make it back to the food tent, I run the risk of Huxley Hayes eating all the cinnamon rolls before the guests arrive,” Dolly says.

“Please don’t let that happen,” I say, my pulse jumping at the thought. “Ewan would lose his mind.”

“Have you seen him recently?” Bronwyn asks. “He was supposed to be bringing me a list of team names but then he disappeared.”

Sounds about right. He’s been running around like a chicken with his head cut off since the alarm went off this morning. I swear he hasn’t stopped for a single second, barely slowing his truck long enough for me to get out, or for him to kiss me goodbye when he dropped me off at the fire station this morning. Good thing I’ve practiced my tuck and roll. I think I’ve seen him maybe twice—both times in passing—since Landon and I arrived in the ambulance.

“Not recently, but I’ll text him and let him know you need him,” I tell her, pulling out my phone.

My fingers fly across the screen, my text thread with Ewan on top of the list, tapping out a message for him to head to the merch tent whenever he gets a chance.

Saying our goodbyes to Bronwyn, I loop my arm through Dolly’s and head back toward the food tent. Jace Hayes’s voice carries through the early morning air, his safety first reminder to the volunteers hopefully not landing on deaf ears.

“Sooooooo…” Dolly prods, her single word drug out for multiple syllables. I look over at her, our arms still linked, and there is no mistaking the smirk on her face. She’s up to something.

“Soooo, what?”

“You finally got what you really wanted,” she says, her shit-eating grin growing. I start to respond—to make a smart-ass comment about how does she know—but she cuts me off. “It’s written all over you. If we thought you were glowing at that Sunday dinner, you’ve been radioactive this last week.”

Well, shit…