Page 93 of More Than My Hometown

“…grab dinner with me?”

Well, sir…I’ll give you this, you’re shooting your shot. Good for you. Here’s hoping you accept rejection gracefully.

I muster up my best nurse smile, the one I use when I know that I am going to have to use all my defense. “Thank you, Seth, but I’m with Ewan. He’s actually why I came back to Hickory Hills.”

There, nice and easy. Plus, it’s the truth. Hard to argue with that.

Seth’s face morphs into something unreadable. In a split second he went from average, everyday affable, rural, small-town, blue-collar guy to something harder. Grittier. Like someone ripped off a piece of him and left the rough edge.

“Even though he’s leaving?”

Leaving? Excuse you?

“Leaving?” I laugh nervously “Ewan’s not leaving.”

Seth nods, his face still hard as stone. “Yeah, he is. Selling the store and going…somewhere. Which pisses me off since he bought it off my grandfather and gave it that obnoxious name, to now just turn around and do this.”

My jaw goes slack, my brain trying to catch up with what Seth is saying. I don’t bother correcting him—letting him in on the fact The Booby Trap was my idea and that obnoxious name, as he put it, was a nod to a joke I made. That’s a different conversation. Right now I’m too focused on why he would think Ewan was selling the store.

That’s the last thing Ewan would do. His sole proprietorship of The Booby Trap is one of the things he’s most proud of. Something he’s fought with Gus over for years. There’s no way he would simply up and sell.

“Seth, I think you’re mistaken.”

“No. I overheard him talking to Gus yesterday about selling the store. I was at Pour Decisions fixing a toilet and they were holding a secret little meeting over there so no one would know about it.”

And yet here you are talkin’ about it… Fucking small towns…

“He was adamant too. Told Gus to draw up the paperwork.”

The earth shifts underneath me. Suddenly, I feel even more unsteady than when I tried to steamroll Seth a moment ago. Although, right now I’m starting to wish I had knocked him on his ass and kept moving.

This doesn’t make sense. He had to have misheard them. Of all the things on this earth that the oldest and youngest Hayes brothers were not discussing secretly in a bar on a Friday morning, it was that.

Unless…

We'll make it work.

Those four words echo in my brain, ricocheting off every corner like a wild cue ball on the billiards table. With each new bounce they get louder, more piercing, until they are so sharp that everything else ceases to exist. I’m no longer standing under this tent surrounded by more than a hundred people on a bright, sunshiny, spring afternoon. Instead, I’m completely surrounded by a weird multicolored palette of four words that suddenly make even less sense than before.

He can’t do this.

I can’t let him do this.