A Broom With a View (5 page)

T
here wasn’t much reading material in Liza Jane’s house. Her grandparents’ eyesight had gone bad way before she came along and the only reading material she’d found so far was a whole stack of Jackie Collins’ novels and a
TV Guide
from 1993. Oddly enough, given how things eventually re-gained popularity, she could still find
The Facts of Life, Designing Women
, and
Dallas
on TV even now…the times were a little off, though.

The county library was contained in a single room that was only slightly bigger than her downstairs area. A block of computers were set up against a wall. There were eight seats in total, filled with men and women of various ages, all pecking quietly away at the keys.

A sign above the row of computers read:

For official use ONLY. Only job hunting and bill paying. NO games or social media!!!!!!

Liza paused to appreciate the irony that all but one of them were currently scrolling through their Facebook newsfeeds.

“Hi,” she began in a quiet, but what she hoped was a friendly, voice as she approached the desk. “I need to see about getting a library card.”

The middle-aged man on the other side of the desk looked up from a Styrofoam container containing what smelled like fried fish. He finished chewing, for which Liza was grateful, and studied Liza Jane with interest. His nametag read: Cotton Hashagen. He was hefty with shockingly red hair, huge front teeth, and a tie-dye sweatshirt with a picture of a chubby pig. The shirt read “Bobbie’s Buffet Barn: Don’t Stop ‘til You’re Happy as a Pig.”

It listed a Kudzu Valley address.

Liza immediately thought of all the jokes comparing buffets to troughs and wondered if the owner had even considered that when naming their restaurant after a structure that housed farm animals.

Who was she kidding? That’s probably why he’d done it.

“Can I see a photo ID?” Cotton finally asked as he deftly wiped his big, meaty hands on a tiny napkin and then daintily dabbed at his mouth.

Liza poked through the knock-off Coach bag she’d bought from a street vendor in Boston while Cotton sat by and watched her, occasionally huffing with impatience. “Here you go,” Liza declared at last, sliding the card across the desk. She watched as the man glanced at it, brought it closer to his glasses, and frowned.

“Oh, I know,” Liza said in a hurry, leaning over the desk and pointing at her picture. “I had black hair back then. I had that done back over the summer when I was going through my divorce. Got a tattoo, too. Cheaper than therapy,” Liza joked.

Cotton did
not
look amused so Liza slowly let her own smile fade. “I’m back to my original red now. I promise that’s really me, though.”

Like he hadn’t even heard her, Cotton held the card up to the light and examined it from all angles, as though trying to determine if it was counterfeit.

Yeah man,
Liza said to herself.
Because there’s obviously a lot of people who want to open fake library card accounts. It must be your biggest percentage of crimes here.

She plastered the friendly, polite smile back on her face, though, and reminded herself that she was in a public place and not everyone appreciated snark. Still, she’d kind of thought that small town places would be a lot friendlier than their Big City counterparts. So far Cotton was
not
rolling out the welcome wagon. 

“It’s just that your address here says
Massachusetts
,” Cotton replied sternly. He sent Liza a hard, withered look then, as though trying to determine what kind of scam she might be trying to run on the county.

“Yeah, well, I just moved back here,” Liza explained. “I’ve only been here a few days so far and I am still trying to settle in and everything.”

Cotton narrowed his eyes until they were thin little slits. “Do you have anything with your local address? A utility bill? Renter’s contract? Cable bill?”

“I own my house,” Liza said in return. “My grandparents left it to me.” She had no idea why but now she was slightly miffed that the man would assume she was renting, although she wasn’t sure why
that
would bother her. She’d been a renter until they’d bought their house and, up until recently, she’d been renting her condo.

“Well, I’m sorry but I just can’t issue one without
at least
a photo ID with a local address,” the insufferable man sniffed self-righteously, handing Liza back her card. Liza felt like she’d just been called out at the video store for trying to rent porn with a fake ID.

However, Liza Jane knew the surly librarian wasn’t being honest with her as soon as their fingers touched. In a single meeting of skin, Liza was able to read his mind like a book, no pun intended.

She could feel the aggravation in her growing as she pulled herself to her full height and let her eyes bore into him. “Well that’s not true, is it?” she asked, hardly recognizing her own steely voice. “There
are
things you can do for me today. For one thing, you can offer me a temporary card for thirty days, until I get my new license. I just have to leave a credit card number with you.”

Lightning flashed through Cotton’s eyes. “No ma’am,” he sputtered, his face growing hard and her fingers tapping nervously on his desk. “We don’t do that
here
. Now you’ll just have to come back later. I can’t do a single thing to help you.”

Liza didn’t know
why
this man was being so difficult and the simple act of checking out a book from the library so challenging. It was a library, for crying out loud. She was paying taxes there now, shouldn’t she be allowed to check out books?

Furthermore, Liza couldn’t figure out why the whole thing was making her so enraged, but she suddenly found herself more than mad–she was livid. This day had
not
gone as planned.

As Liza stood there and seethed inwardly, Cotton picked up a silver container, and took a sip from it, and then went back to his fish. It was clear that he was over Liza and had no intentions of continuing the conversation.

“Look Mary Elizabeth,” Liza hissed, wanting to get her point across but still trying to remember the library manners and rules that had been ingrained within her since childhood.

Cotton looked up, a piece of white fish meat stuck to his bottom lip. “My name’s not Mary Elizabeth,” he said with a scowl. “My name is–“

“I know what your name is,” Liza snapped. “It’s from a book. Now you and I both know you can help me. For one thing, I know you did it for that man over there.”

Liza gestured towards the row of computers where a portly man in a Cincinnati Bengals cap typed happily away on Facebook Chat. “You gave Eddy there a temporary pass and he’s just here in town for railroad business. He doesn’t live here at all; he’s only going to be here for two weeks.”

Cotton’s eyes grew wide and his mouth dropped open as he quickly looked first at Eddy and then at Liza Jane. “Well I. How did you–“

Liza knew she should just let it go and go back another day but she’d taken it that far already. Might as well go the rest. “I don’t know
why
you don’t want to help me but I do know you have those contracts behind you in the top drawer of that black filing cabinet. It would only take a second, you’d be doing the right thing, and that would be the end of that. Do you really want me to call Phyllis?”

Phyllis, as Liza Jane shouldn’t have known since that was the first time she’d ever been in the library, was the head librarian.

With his eyes still wide and mouth agape, Cotton was too stunned to protest. Instead, without taking his eyes from Liza, he stood, wiped his hands on a napkin and trotted over to the filing cabinet. He continued to watch Liza as he reached blindly into the drawer and pulled out an application form for a temporary card. He got the right form on the first try without even looking, which made Liza shake her head. She’d known all along that he could issue a card to her. 

Neither Liza nor Cotton spoke another word to the other. 

Ten minutes later Liza held a new library card in her hand. It was still warm from the laminating machine.

However, she’d somehow lost all interest in checking out any books.

So
far the day had been a bit of a bust. So far she’d gotten herself riled up by her ex, destroyed some of her favorite bottles, freaked out her neighbor, and jumped onto the town librarian in front of a room full of people.

She hoped none of those things would hurt her place as resident healing therapist and day spa owner in Kudzu Valley.

To her annoyance, she’d gone to that buffet on Cotton’s T-shirt and the waitress had refused to bring her a drink. Instead, she’d glared at Liza and made someone else wait on her.

And the fried chicken hadn’t even been that good.  

“Well, I can’t go home,” she muttered to herself as she turned onto Main Street. There was nothing for her to do at the house. She’d already unpacked, didn’t have any books, and the internet guy wasn’t scheduled for another three days. Back in Boston she might have dropped in on a friend or gone to the movies.

Well, that’s what she would’ve done before the separation and divorce filings. Her friends had all kind of scattered after they’d learned she and Mode had zero chance of reconciliation, as though the divorce was an illness and might rub off on them. Besides, they’d been
his
friends anyway. She didn’t win them in the custody battle.

Of course, she had zero friends in Kudzu Valley and the nearest cinema was an hour away.

“I’d like a cocktail please,” she said to her steering wheel. “Oh yeah, can’t get one here!”

She leaned over and turned the radio on, but the new artist was lauding the benefits of living in a small town and claiming that anyone who didn’t appreciate it was just wrong.

Liza wasn’t in the mood to rejoice in small-town life at the moment.  Instead, she turned the music off and stared down the quiet little street in front of her, trying to decide what her next move was. She was at the greenlight that would allow her to turn left to go home or right to go eat somewhere and she was suddenly struck by a lack of motivation. It had been a long day.

Liza sat through three lights before finally moving. It was fine, though. Not a single vehicle drove in either direction the entire time she sat at the greenlight.

The town only had three fast food restaurants: a Taco Bell, Hardees, and McDonald’s. Mode would’ve complained for the rest of the day if she’d so much as looked at a menu with him in the car with her. He took great pride in the raw vegan diet he’d been trying for the past year. That was one thing Liza couldn’t get on board with, though. Sometimes she just needed a steak.

Now, however, nothing sounded better than a McChicken and caramel mocha. Cholesterol levels and waistline be damned. It wasn’t like anyone was looking at her.

“Not like I’m trying to impress anyone around here,” she sang cheerfully to herself as she zipped through the line.

She had her food beside her and was about to pull back out of the parking lot when the red sign caught her eye. “Well, hot damn!”

The town might not have had a Walmart or a cinema, but it
did
have a Red Box attached to the front of its McDonald’s. She closed her eyes and thanked whatever franchise owner had the foresight to include such a beacon. There were few things Liza Jane enjoyed more than renting low-budget horror movies starring people nobody had ever heard of–Redbox’s specialty.

Armed with some ghastly looking zombie films and a romance tearjerker from an author she didn’t like to admit she enjoyed, Liza happily got back behind her wheel and zoomed away. She could handle another lonely night in the house as long as she had zombies and romance to keep her company.

“But not
The Wizard of Oz
,” she told her caramel mocha before taking a sip. “That witch and those creepy-assed monkeys scared the hell out of me as a child and I still haven’t gotten over it.”

Liza Jane found her heightened anticipation of movie night at the house wearing off about five miles outside of town, however. It was barely 4:00 pm and she was already finished for the day, all ready to head back home and barricade herself in for the evening.

“Girl, you are one cat and tattered bathrobe short of being pathetic,” she chided herself, shaking her head in disgust. “You need to figure something else out.”

Up ahead, off to her left, she could see a sign that read “Lake Wilgreen” and without putting much thought into it, she made a quick exit from the country highway. She liked the water. Maybe she needed to hang out by it for awhile and regroup. It was important to get to know all the elemental signs, and not just yours.

Right away, the panorama view of the mountains on either side of her took her breath away. “Okay, now this is what I’m talking about,” she said happily, trying to keep her eyes on the road and look at the same time. “I’m a country song!”

For awhile she’d been listening to songs about chilling on dirt roads, going for drives and parking on the dirt roads, spending the evening at the river side, having bonfire parties with friends…

There weren’t many choices in terms of radio channels at the moment, though. It was either Top 40 (and she wasn’t really digging the current trends), an out-of-place classical channel, farm talk radio, or what sounded like an excited preacher who never stopped to take a breath and ended every word with “a.” Something was either wrong with the country station or her antenna; it wouldn’t come in.

Liza did, however, have a stack of CDs in the passenger seat. Without taking her eyes off the road she let her mind shuffle through the titles until she landed on sunglasses-wearing Eric Church. Still dividing her energy between traversing the narrow country lane and opening the jewel case, she didn’t break concentration until the CD had floated up from the seat next to her and dove into the awaiting slot. Only then did she release her breath and relax.

Soon, the lyrics of “Springsteen” were pumping through her car and, with her windows down, she sang along as loudly as she could, flat notes and tone deafness be damned.

“Huh, this is a lot farther than I thought,” Liza murmured to herself as that song ended and faded into two more. She was enjoying the drive, but she’d been on it for awhile. Not much farther and she’d be in another county. Up ahead, Liza saw a gravel road and pulled into it. It didn’t look like it went to a house or anything so she didn’t think she was blocking a driveway.

Liza didn’t have a map or a GPS so, with nobody else around, she turned the radio down, cleared her mind, and closed her eyes. She envisioned the road she was on and forced her eyes to travel down the winding pavement. She took in more barns, the rolling farmland, towering green mountains off in the distance, more burnt-out trailers and old farm houses…but she didn’t see a lake of any kind. She traveled all the way to the end where the road literally made a dead end into a barn that was leaning precariously to one side.

“Well. Damn,” she muttered. Now she’d have to turn around and go home, her little adventure over before it had begun. She was definitely going to stop somewhere and get a county map. She needed to learn about where she lived. 

Still lost in her own thoughts, Liza had no awareness of the outside world and jumped when the hand tapped at her window.

The man who stood by her car, his knuckles inches from her window and a worried expression on his face, was in his mid-to-late thirties. He was tall, gorgeous, and more man than she’d seen in a
long
time.

His thin frame didn’t look like it held an ounce of body fat. She might have been able to fit into his jeans (and wouldn’t
that
have been fun) but what she could see was all muscle. His biceps were bulging under his stained white T-shirt and his rugged jeans molded perfectly to his strong-looking legs. He wore what appeared to be a real leather belt whose ends were held together by a shiny silver buckle–a picture of a horse head. More cowboy than Godfather.

She could see shocks of reddish hair poking out from under a baseball cap. The same fine hints of red were woven throughout the stubble on his darkly tanned face. He had perfectly straight, white teeth, although his mouth was currently set in a grimace of concern.

“You okay?” he hollered. His voice was muffled by the window.

Feeling silly, she rolled it down and turned her engine off. “Yeah, sorry,” she apologized. “Am I in your driveway?”

She saw a four-wheeler parked a few feet from her car. Lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t heard it pull up.

“This just goes up to the barn and livestock pond. I was headed across the way to my house. You having car trouble?”

“Oh, no, sorry. Just got, er, confused for a minute. I thought there was a lake out this way?”

It was his turn to look confused now. He scratched his head through his cap in bewilderment and then broke out into laughter. “Oh! You mean Wilgreen. Well, you see, that’s kind of a joke around here.”

“What?”

“Yeah, see, Clementine Wilgreen lives about a mile from here. He’s eighty years old. Played the lottery, BINGO, whatever you got almost all his life. Said he was going to win one day and buy himself a big mansion on a lake.”

“Yeah?” Liza prodded. A man named
Clementine
?

“Yeah, so anyway, he got himself a lottery ticket about five years ago. Told everyone it was the one. Went around town bragging about all the stuff he was going to buy when he was wealthy. Even filed divorce from his wife so that the old broad wouldn’t get all his money when it come in.”

“Did he win?”

The man grinned. “Sorta. He won $500. I guess that’s a lot, especially considering he lives on Social Security. Hired a guy to come out and build him a pond and now he stocks it with catfish. That took all his money. Some of the fellows down at the Elk Lodge felt sorry for him about the divorce so they put that sign up for him. You know, so that he can finally say he lives in a house on a lake.”

Although she felt foolish for following a sign to a lake that didn’t exist, Liza Jane laughed in spite of herself.

“That’s just some small town humor for you I guess,” he blushed. “You’re not from here, right?”

“How did you guess?”

“The accent. The hair. The Massachusetts license plates…”

Liza found herself blushing now. “Well, I’m originally from here. I’m living in my grandparents’ old house.”

“Oh yeah. Rosebud and Paine. They were good people. Awfully sorry they’re gone. So you’re their granddaughter?”

“Well, one of them. But you won’t catch Bryar down here any time soon. She lives in Brooklyn and to her taking a vacation or leaving town means going to Manhattan.”

The man didn’t look like he knew what in the world she was talking about but he smiled politely all the same.

“I’m Liza Jane Higginbotham, by the way,” she said, holding out her hand to him.

“Colt Bluevine.”

His hand was rough and warm as it engulfed hers. She winced as a bolt of electricity shot through her arm and made her fingers tingle. Colt jumped back a little, pulling his hand away. “Sorry about that,” he said, wrinkling his brow. “I must’a shocked you or something. Could be my side by side over there. She’s cranky.”

Liza Jane didn’t think it was the four wheeler’s fault, though. She’d felt that bolt before, seen that flash of blue light.

Colt Bluevine was going to mean something to her, or already
had
in a time neither one of them could recall.

She’d have to investigate this further.