Jan’s kitten-heeled pumps click-click-clicked like dainty hooves as she vanished down the now-empty hall of the school, and then the huge door at the end of the hall thunked open and she was gone.
Oh, crap. Shehadsigned up for the carnival decorating committee, hadn’t she?
Well, she ought to be good at that, given that her life was essentially a hybrid of Whack-a-Mole and Schedule Tetris. Guitar lessons and soccer practice and Hummingbird scout meetings and homework and the dentist and the doctor for her and Annelise, not to mention other people’s weddings, deaths, birthdays, and marital spats, all the things that kept Eden’s Garden, her florist business, profitable.
And as for Jan, well, she’d sussed her out from the moment they’d met at one of Annelise’s Hummingbird meetings. Helicopter mom, a bundle of nerves and restless, vague unhappiness wrapped in a cheerful candy coating and all tied together with a control-freak bow. She always tried to ease the discomfort of feeling inadequate by attempting to make other people look just a little worse, and Eden was an easy target—too busy to form any mom alliances.
Jan needed to be the first to know anything about anyone, and had a knack for ingratiating herself with people she thought might have some kind of influence or status.
She sighed. If only Annelise and Caitlynn hadn’t decided to bearchrivals.
But what softened Eden’s attitude toward Jan—toward everyone, really—was that she felt just a teeny bit of tender pity toward everyone who didn’t get to live with and know Annelise. She was pretty sure she had the best kid in the world, and she could think of nothing at all she’d done to earn that particular blessing.
So Jan didn’t scare her a bit.
Principal Gabe Caldera, on the other hand, scared the crap out of her.
All six foot infinity of him.
Big-shouldered, smoldery-eyed, bass-voiced, easy-charm Principal Caldera, around whom women collected the way fruit flies had swarmed the peach Annelise had left in her backpack for a couple of weeks. At soccer games (he pinch-hit as coach), at school open houses, at PTA meetings—sometimes it seemed the only reason he seemed visible at all was because he was tall. His behavior, however, always seemed beyond reproach. Not one whiff of scandal.
She actually did knowfearwasn’t precisely the right word. It was some other emotion that shortened her breath and kicked her heart into an approximation of a gallop. (She could hear her brother Jude now: “Hearts don’tgallop,Eden.Theybeat.” Which was the kind of thing that made her and Avalon and their other brother Jesse want tobeatJude. But that would deprive the community of a fine cardiac surgeon.)
Eden didn’t have room in her schedule for emotions she couldn’t identify. She couldn’t delegate emotions to her mom or her sister, or reschedule them or negotiate a favor-trade, the way she could everything else in every square on her magnificent kitchen whiteboard, liberally and whimsically illustrated by her and Annelise.
However...
Last Christmas she’d been Room Mother for Annelise’s classroom lunchtime Christmas party, and as she was leaving at the sound of the recess bell, she’d seen Principal Caldera standing in the hallway, deep in conversation with a teacher, students swarming and eddying around them as lockers were flung open and slammed shut.
And suddenly from the opposite end of the thronged hall some little bastard appeared, gleefully running, slaloming through the crowds. Which was strictly against the rules, for so many obvious reasons.
Seconds later, time suspended in the way it did when you’re about to witness a disaster you could do nothing about: another kid was just about to open his locker right into the damn kid’s face.
Suddenly Principal Caldera pivoted, stepped to the left, shot out an arm, snatched the running kid by the coat collar, and hoisted him straight up into the air. Literally plucking him from the milling stream of kids. Thereby saving him a certain concussion or expensive orthodontic surgery.
As far as Eden could tell, Mr. Caldera hadn’t even turned his head. Or blinked. She had a hunch his heart rate hadn’t even elevated. There had been no evidence he’d even seen that kid coming.
She knew then that all the while he must have been eyeing the entire hall the way Joe Montana eyed a football field.
From time to time, say, at a stoplight, or while she was washing dishes, she replayed that moment in her head: that sidestep, that arm shooting out to pluck the kid from danger. It was unnerving and soothing and thrilling all at once, in a way she couldn’t quite put a finger on. Except that some part of her she’d scarcely been aware of, a tiny part she’d unconsciously apportioned to remaining tensely hypervigilant the entire time Annelise was out of her sight at school, relaxed. She felt ever so slightly... lighter.
Her phone vibrated again right where her hands were rooting in her purse.
“Gotcha!” She captured the phone and fished it out. It was her sister, who was staying with Annelise at the shop on Main Street while Eden attended the meeting. “Hey, Ava. Sorry. The meeting ran a little longer than I anticipated. On my way. I might even go at least five miles over the speed limit.”
“No worries. I just talked to Mac. He’ll meet the contractor up at the house. He’s expecting a friend to come over and help with hacking some old stumps out of the field, but they can spare a few minutes away from his company.” Avalon and Mac were building a new barn on their property for their goats and a few other animals they hoped to welcome into their fold, hence the necessary field-clearing and stump-hacking. “Leesy and I are having Popsicles. Hope that’s okay. So what happened?”
Eden sighed. Leesy had clearly just talked her auntie into Popsicles before dinner, usually a pretty significant no-no, but Eden would let this one slide. Avalon was helpless against the charms of her niece.
She hesitated. “Let’s just say the principal defused the situation.”
“That big hot guy we saw at Annelise’s soccer game?” Avalon said with relish. “I’ll just bet he did.”
Avalon had recently reunited with and was freshly installed in a gigantic Victorian love nest at Devil’s Leap in Hellcat Canyon with her first and only true love, Mac Coltrane, a turn of events that had astonished—Avalon often astonished people—and ultimately pleased her family. She was back in Hellcat Canyon to stay, which was fabulous for many reasons, not the least of which was she was now an option in Eden’s game of Schedule Tetris and even voluntarily went to the occasional soccer game.
“I somehow don’t think that’s the last I’ll have to deal with Jan Pennington, though.”
“I met Jan Pennington,” Avalon said thoughtfully. “If Jan Pennington was a dog, she’d be the anxious kind who pees a little every time the doorbell rings.”