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A flicker of irritation crossed his green eyes. “Oh. That would explain it.”
“Was there something you needed?”
“Nah. I guess I should get the money out of petty cash, anyway.” In other words, Mom’s purse, since I wasn’t letting him near the store’s petty cash, and he knew it. Still, that didn’t stop him from trying.
He gave me his most charming smile. “You could spot me a twenty, couldn’t you?”
“Sorry, Deano, but I’m immune to your charms.” When you’ve spent enough time around a wizard like Rod, who used every trick in the book to charm people, normal smooth-talking loses any impact it might have had.
He shrugged. “Hey, it was worth a shot. You seen Sherri?”
“She’s been taking a break for half an hour. If you see her, maybe you could tell her she needs to get back to work.”
I barely made it into the office before the phone rang again. This time I answered it on the first ring.
“Hey, girl, can you get away for lunch?” the voice at the other end of the line asked. It was Nita Patel, my best friend from high school.
“You’re working days again?” She worked in the motel her family ran, and she was even more trapped by the family business than I was. At least I’d made an escape, no matter how temporary, to New York.
“Yeah, something happened last night that really spooked my brother, so they freaked out and put me on days. Now I’m stuck here at the front desk all day. It’s not like anyone’s going to check in anytime soon. But it would really brighten my day if you could pick up some lunch on your way over and join me.”
A glance at the front counter assured me that Sherri had finally returned. “That sounds like a great idea. What are you in the mood for?”
“My dad’s gone for the day. What do you think?”
“Okay, Dairy Queen it is. Double cheeseburger, no onions?”
“You read my mind.” Needless to say, Nita wasn’t a very good Hindu. Since moving to Texas, she’d developed a taste for hamburgers that she had to indulge behind her more traditional father’s back.
“I’ll be right over.” After I hung up, I nudged Teddy’s jeans-clad leg where it stuck out from under my desk. “I’m going out to lunch. Back in about an hour.”
“Okay,” he said, and I doubted it had even registered on his brain.
I got my purse and headed out. The pickup truck handed down to me from Dean when he got his new one sat in the gravel parking lot in front of the store. My New York friends would probably be equally fascinated and horrified to know I was driving something like this. It had definitely been a change from commuting to work on the subway. The feed store was on the edge of town, but in a town our size, it took less than a minute to get to the Dairy Queen on the edge of downtown.
The lunch rush, such as it was in Cobb, had only just started at the Dairy Queen, so I didn’t have to wait too long to get burgers for Nita and myself. Once I had the food, I headed over to the motel on the outskirts of the other side of town.
Once upon a time, the town had been on one of the main routes between Austin and Dallas, but the interstate had been built about fifty miles to the east, which meant nobody came to this town who didn’t absolutely have to. It wasn’t the most profitable place to run a motel, but the Patels had been doing a good job of it ever since they’d moved to town. I’d been in fourth grade, and the teacher had assigned me as a buddy to Nita to help her get used to life in a new country. We’d quickly become best friends, and now Nita was probably more Americanized than I was.
“Omigod, I just had the best idea,” she said as soon as I walked into the lobby. She opened the little gate that let me go behind the front desk as she kept talking. “I’m thinking we could put some potpourri in each of the guest rooms, have bagels and juice in the lobby, call it a bed-and-breakfast, and raise our rates by about twenty bucks a night.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “But who in their right mind would come to Cobb on purpose?”
She took a big bite of her burger, pausing to savor it. “That’s the genius of my idea. We hook up with the antiques stores in town, put together a brochure and a website, and advertise antiquing weekends.
We could also throw in a spa package. Do you think Kiki at the Kut ’n’ Kurl knows how to do facials?”
“More important—would anyone want a facial from a place called the Kut ’n’ Kurl?”
“Good point. I’ll give it some more thought.” I smiled, imagining it would probably get about as much thought as any of her previous wild schemes, which included theme-decorated rooms and taking the motel’s look back to its 1930s glory, complete with the metal lawn chairs she’d found on eBay. I recognized her impulse as the urge to do something bigger and better with her life than sit around in a small town and work for the family business. She wanted to stretch and grow, but she didn’t have an outlet for it. I knew the feeling. Not for the first time, I wondered if I’d made the right call leaving New York.
As I suspected, Nita was ready with a new plan before she finished her burger. “What do you say we take off and get out of here? We could get a place together in Dallas or Austin! I’m sure you and I could get jobs.” I looked at her expectantly. “Okay, so my dad might declare me no longer a member of the family, but I’m almost twenty-seven years old, so it’s not like he could bring me back forcefully, and I’m sure he’d get over it eventually, especially if I managed to find myself a nice Indian boy to marry, since it’s not like this town is crawling with them. I just know if I have to stay here one more second, I’m going to explode from boredom.”
“If you do, at least the explosion would give the rest of us something to talk about for a while.”
She threw a salt packet at me. “You know what I mean. What I don’t get is why you came back here.
You’d escaped. You were free! New York can’t have been so bad that you had to come back.”
