EVERETT WASN’T ENTIRELY sure why he found himself idling in his truck outside the farmhouse’s front door that next morning.
June.
That was what he told himself. It was what June wanted him to do. And he wasn’t about to argue with what June wanted.
It had nothing—so he told himself—to do with the current occupant of the farmhouse.
When she burst out of the house, hair curling and flying wildly behind her, her body draped in a ridiculous mixture of scarves, fringed boots, a long, flowing sweater, woolen leggings and a short dress, she reminded him much more of that girl he’d known.
But she wasn’t a girl, and he couldn’t ignore that.
“I emailed my files to the shop,” she said as soon as she got in the car.
“Okay,” he said.
“They said they would get them printed right away since it’s such a small order.”
“Okay,” he said again.
He wasn’t sure why Lila thought he needed to know about the minutiae of the entire thing. He certainly felt he didn’t.
And yet, Lila continued to talk about every minor detail during their ten-minute drive down a winding two-lane road that led into the redbrick-lined main street of Jasper Creek.
The little print shop at the end of the main drag also served as a post office, a place where the townsfolk could accomplish any number of small office-related tasks. In a town like Jasper Creek, where many of the residents were aging, and most didn’t own their own computer, the place did pretty good business.
Everett parked his truck and Lila bounced out before he could go and open her door for her. Then she was into the shop ahead of him in a flurry of movement as she gave her name and all the details of her order, and was handed a small stack of paper a moment later.
She paid, and Everett barely had time to tip his hat to Tim, the owner of the place, before they were back on the street.
“We should walk,” she said. “And that way we can canvass the whole town.”
“I thought you brought me with you to help limit the canvassing.”
“Well, I suppose so. But I haven’t been down into town in...ages. When I come visit Grandma June, I...” She trailed off. “I’m going to miss her. I already do.”
“June was one of a kind,” Everett said.
He wasn’t very good at comforting people, particularly women, but he would miss June, too, and he knew well enough that sometimes the only way to help people with grief was to let them know you shared in it.
“I don’t know that she was an optimist,” Lila said, musing. “But she was determined, and in the end, that’s almost the same thing. She never gave up. Not on anything or anyone. And I’ve always admired that in her.”
“Are you an optimist?”
“Yes,” Lila said cheerfully. “I’m an optimist, because pessimism does not produce a different result, just a different attitude on the journey.” She looked up at him. “What are you?”
“A realist.”
She barked out a laugh. “Right. So you’re a pessimist, then.”
“No.”
She stopped, standing in front of a little corkboard that was hanging on the side of one of the little cafés. “In my experience, pessimists tend to think that they’re more realistic, when in reality the odds that things turning out badly aren’t actually any better than all the things turning out well.”
“Absolutely untrue,” he said. “In many cases, it’s pretty apparent how things are actually going to turn out.”
“Right. Doom and gloom?”
“Not at all. But look, avoiding things doesn’t change the outcome. Wishing for better doesn’t change the outcome. The only thing that changes the way things work is action. There are things you can do, and things you can’t do. I guess pessimists focus on all the bad things you can’t change, and to my mind, optimists often engage in blind hope without doing much. A realist does what needs to be done.”
“Okay. So you are a practical soul,” she said dryly, moving on down the street, her heel catching on one of the cracks in the weathered sidewalk. She made an exasperated sound but traipsed on.
“Why are you an optimist?”
“Why not?” she asked.
“It seems to me that then you’re always blindsided by bad things.”
“I’m never blindsided by bad things. What will be, will be.”
“You’re a fatalist,” he said.
“Maybe,” she said. “But a cheerful one.”
“I don’t believe in fate, either. If you work hard, and you work smart, you can make things better for yourself. If you go to a doctor when you have symptoms of a disease, you might be able to have that disease be cured. Sitting around, hoping it’s nothing bad, isn’t going to help you. Sitting around knowing it’s bad and doing nothing won’t help you, either.” He shrugged. “If you die because you didn’t go to a doctor, that’s not fate.”
“I suppose not.”
All of it skated a little bit too close to his actual life, and he didn’t need to be talking about his dad.
“Well, it’s not like I do nothing,” she said. “I do. I just don’t see the point of doing it with a bad attitude.”
“Are you little Lila Frost?”
Both he and Lila turned and saw a small older woman standing there, her hands clasped in front of her, the smile on her face broad. Everett knew that it was Linda Anderson, but he didn’t know if Lila did.
“Yes,” Lila said, returning the smile with equal breadth. “I am.”
“So you’re June’s granddaughter. The one that she put in charge of the Red Sled this year.”
“I am.”
“We were all so sorry to lose your grandmother, dear. She was truly one of a kind.”
“Yes,” Lila said, her smile turning wistful. “She was.”
“But I’m sure that you’ll do a wonderful job running the bazaar. I sell handmade jewelry,” she said. “Very popular. Last year alone I earned a thousand dollars with my booth for the local school. I would really love to have booth number seven.”
“Oh... Well, the booth reservations actually open up in two weeks’ time. All the information is on the flyer.”
“Never mind that,” Mrs. Anderson said. “I just thought that I would make it clear how important my contribution to the Red Sled is. And how much I would like booth number seven.”
Lila’s smile stayed firmly fixed. “Well. Two weeks. The information is on the flyer.”
Mrs. Anderson reached up, took the flyer that Lila had just freshly tacked onto the board and removed it. She folded it up and put it in her handbag. “Thank you, dear. I will keep that date in mind.”
The older woman crossed the street, leaving Lila standing there staring after her. “What just happened?”
“I believe they call that being railroaded.”
“She took my flyer.”
“She probably wants to make sure that she’s the only one who knows when the booth registration opens up.”
“You weren’t kidding,” she said.
“Do I look like someone that kids?”
She turned to face him. “I guess not.”
“I don’t. For the record.”
“No. Kidding doesn’t fall into the realist code.” She took another flyer off the stack and pinned it back to the bulletin board.
“That’s just a taste of what’s to come,” he commented.
“Well,” she said. “Just well.”
“Still think you’re not going to make a list?”
Her expression turned fearsome. “I will not make a list.”
“She’s just the beginning.”
After that, Lila became extremely cagey about the hanging up of the flyers. By the time they reached the coffeehouse at the far end of the main street, she was hunching over her task. He might have left if he hadn’t known that all of this was serious small-town psychological warfare. And Lila was not local enough to deal with it. Oh, sure, she might have spent scattered summers in Jasper Creek, but it wasn’t the same as being local.
Before they left the coffee shop, she got herself some insanely oversweetened concoction that she called a breve, which she explained to him was made with half-and-half instead of milk. He stuck with tried-and-true black coffee.
As they walked back to his truck, Lila in all her excess and he in his jeans and long-sleeve black shirt, he felt like their personalities might have been written across them for all the world to see. She with her bright hair, trailing yards of fabric and excessive beverage. He with his...
Well, nothing other than what was strictly necessary.
“I’ll drop you back by the house,” he said when they got back to the truck. “But I have to go be about my business.”
They got into the truck together, and suddenly he became aware of how cramped a truck cab was. “What is your business?”
“Irish Cob horses,” he said.
“What does that...mean? You...train them, eat them, teach them to dance wearing toe shoes?”
“No.”
“Then explain to me what you do.”
They began to drive back toward the farmhouse, and he found himself counting the seconds until he had deposited this chatterbox off where she belonged.
“I breed them. They’re very versatile horses. Good for showing, good for cart pulling. Just in general and all-around great temperament. They’ve become an incredibly sought-after breed.”
“That’s interesting,” she said. “Your father owned a farm, didn’t he?”
“Yep. And he died poor.”
It was clear to him that Lila had no idea what to say to that.
“I didn’t intend on dying with an empty stomach,” he said.
“Right. So...not a passion project for you.”
He shrugged. “As much of one as any. This is where I’m from. I love the land. I love the community, the people in it. I imagine that I would raise a family here.”
“Right.”
“I didn’t want to go off and be a banker or a doctor. School was beyond us financially, anyway, and it’s not like I got good enough grades to justify anyone giving me a scholarship. So I figured I had to find something that I could do that connected to this place. The land.”
She paused for a beat. “And you don’t think you’re going to raise a family here anymore?”
“I don’t think I’m going to raise a family anymore.”
“Why?”
He shot her a glare.
“Just because you got divorced once?” she pressed.
“How many times does a man need to get divorced to find out that marriage doesn’t suit him?”
“Did marriage not suit you, or did she not suit you?”
“Optimist,” he said. “Realist.”
“Pessimist,” she insisted.
“I don’t bend,” he said. “I don’t know how to. Marriage, in my experience, requires a bit of bending. I couldn’t do it. She left.”
“That sounds like an incredibly abbreviated version of whatever actually happened.”
His expression shifted to something sort of resigned. Lila recognized that look. People often got it when she was tenaciously digging for something, as if they knew they’d been beaten. She didn’t feel guilty.
“She thought that working the land made me miserable. She thought living here made me miserable. That I worked too hard, didn’t have enough fun. She thought that I was consumed with getting the place off the ground and being successful. She wasn’t wrong. She thought we could pull up stakes and go somewhere new. She didn’t want my kind of life, and in the end, I didn’t want her kind, either.”
“Well, you’d think that’s the kind of stuff you talk about before you got married.”
“Tonya was local as they come. I didn’t have any damn clue she might want to live somewhere else. And she didn’t know that a life on a ranch would make her miserable. The fact is, Lila, we thought we knew what each other wanted. We were as ready as any two people could be for marriage. Still didn’t work.”
“Well, then, she wasn’t the one,” Lila said resolutely.
“Don’t believe in the one,” he said.
“How can you not believe in the one?”
“Because that’s magical thinking. It’s not reality. Two people get married, and they can either bend enough ways without breaking that they can pretzel into some kind of life together, or they can’t. Tonya and I couldn’t. It made me ask a lot of questions about whether or not I actually ever wanted to.”
Lila frowned, and right then, they pulled up to the farmhouse. “I don’t think that’s true,” she said softly.
“What? My experience of marriage?”
“Oh, I’m sure your experience of marriage was the experience it was. I’m just not sure your conclusions are correct.”
“Have you ever been married, Lila?”
She shook her head. “No. Because I haven’t found him yet.”
“How do you know he exists?”
“He has to. Everyone has a—a glass slipper. Or... The person that can change them from a frog into a prince.”
“Life is not a fairy tale,” he said.
“Not if you don’t want to be,” she said. “I think you have to at least believe in magic a little bit to have some in your own life.”
“I don’t believe in magic,” he said. “I believe in hard work. That’s it.”
He stopped the truck, and Lila sat for a moment before getting out. But he didn’t feel relieved. Not like he thought he should. No, instead it felt like she had taken some of the air right out of the cab of his truck with her, making it difficult for him to breathe around what she had left behind.
And as he watched her walk into the house, trailing scarves and sweaters in her wake, he wondered if Lila Frost was a little bit magic herself. At the very least she was the only person he’d ever met who made a case for it.