The Prince Charming List (10 page)

Amanda dutifully recited the contents of her wardrobe and the number of pairs of sweatpants she owned didn’t surprise me. By the time I dried her hair, we’d decided that the interview called for a man’s tailored white shirt, a macramé belt (old-fashioned but still on the funky side) and a khaki skirt. I nixed the flip-flops but okayed a pair of leather sandals. No open toes, though, because she was in desperate need of a pedicure and there wasn’t time.

I spun the chair toward the mirror, hoping she liked the results. “Ta-da.”

“Heather, you’re amazing.” Amanda looked at her reflection in the mirror for the first time since she’d come into the salon. I considered that progress. And the expression of shock on her face was the same one I’d seen on Marissa’s face after I’d cut her hair. Why were these women so surprised they were beautiful?

“Look what you gave me to work with.” I refused to take the credit. I’d just brought out the best of what she already had. Just like I’d done with Marissa.

“My grandmother always said you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

“Grandma Lowell says a girl should make the most of what God gives her. Which is what we just did. And you know, she wasn’t just talking about what’s on the
outside
.”
Attitude, Amanda. Lift up that chin!

“I like your grandma better.”

“What time is your interview tomorrow?” I was going to pray for her. Highlights were great, but they could only get a girl so far.

“Ten o’clock.” Amanda pulled out her checkbook. “How much do I owe you?”

Color: forty dollars. Haircut: eighteen dollars. Giving Amanda Clark back some of her confidence: priceless.

“Just for the haircut.” I cut her off when I could see she was about to argue with me. “The rest is compliments of the Cut and Curl—just let me know how the interview goes, all right?”

“I will.” She looked me in the eye when she said it.

I
took a deep breath before I went into the apartment. I’d been so busy at the salon I hadn’t had time to think about what was happening right above my head. Who knew what Bernice’s kitchen was going to look like? It occurred to me that I should have told Dex I wanted to okay the paint sample before he started. After all, the color of his Impala had already given me serious doubts as to whether he could find the number five, made up of little green dots, hidden in the background made up of little red dots. Yet I’d trusted him to go to the hardware store alone.

I blamed the canoe paddle.

The smell of fresh paint hit me when I cracked open the door, and there was no escaping the inevitable.

“Dex? Are you still here?” I hadn’t seen his car parked outside, but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe the police had hauled it away for disturbing the peace.

No answer. The coward. He was like those graffiti artists who ran away after they painted the side of a train.

Snap bounded up and rubbed against my ankles, which gave me a reason to look at the floor instead of the kitchen.

“Okay, Snap. Tell me that Dex doesn’t think fuchsia has visual impact.” I forced myself to look up.

Wow.

The cupboards were green. Not leprechaun-green or pea-soup-green but a pretty, subdued ivy-sort-of-green guaranteed to instantly lower a person’s stress level. And it brought out the earthy red and gray tones in the brick in a way I wouldn’t have expected.

It had to be a fluke.

“Knock, knock.” Jared’s voice came through the open door. Followed by Jared. My heart returned his greeting with a joyful skip.
Down, girl!

He hopped over the stack of paint cans. “I saw you on the landing so I thought I’d make sure you got my message.”

“I got it but I should point out that a sticky note is much easier to deal with than a canoe paddle.” Wait a second. Did I bat my eyelashes? Jared’s teasing dared my inner flirt to come out and play.

Jared grinned. “I’ll try to remember that. What are your dinner plans?”

“Chicken salad.”

“Sounds good. Got enough for two?”

“I do.” Did I really say that? See Heather blush.

“Why don’t we eat at my place? It has less atmosphere but at least we’ll be able to breathe.”

I hesitated.

“Or we can eat in the park.” Not a drop of sarcasm in the suggestion. He was too good to be true.

“The park sounds great.”

“Good color choice.” Jared nodded toward the kitchen cupboards. “I think Marissa spent an hour at the hardware store this morning with that guy…I can’t remember his name.”

“Dex,” I murmured. “
Marissa
helped him?”

“He came to the studio this morning and asked her opinion on some paint samples. She closed up the place and they took off together. I didn’t realize it was your kitchen he’d been commissioned to paint, though.”

“My…Alex hired him to do some remodeling this summer,” I explained. Quickly. There’d been a question in his voice that called for immediate clarification.

“Marissa mentioned she hired him to clean the studio twice a week after closing,” Jared said. “I wonder when the guy sleeps.”

Oh, I’m sure he fits it in somehow.

“I need a few minutes to put things together.” Including myself. “I’ll meet you over there.”

After Jared left, I went into the kitchen to give the cupboards a closer inspection. I probably should’ve been glad that Dex had asked Marissa for advice, but I was disappointed. Maybe I’d hoped the color he’d chosen was an indication there was some creativity underneath the surface. Something…interesting. A hidden ability that went beyond outsmarting two-headed dragons.

I piled the chicken salad onto the croissants I’d bought over the weekend and tossed in two peaches just to show him I understood the importance of a healthy diet.

Jared was waiting for me on our—correction,
the
—park bench when I crossed Main Street. There was a cooler at his feet and when I glanced inside, I saw two bottles of water and something wrapped in foil.

“My measly contribution. Not half as good as what you brought to the table.”

Did I tell him it was from the grocery store deli? Mom had taught me how to cook but I was still trying to find a balance between running the Cut and Curl all day and having enough energy to drag something out of the refrigerator when I got home. Lately, prepackaged was in the lead.

“You worked late tonight, didn’t you?” Jared balanced his sandwich on one knee while he reached down and grabbed a bottled water. Which he handed to me.

A series of little bells went off in my head. Ding, ding, ding. Major points for Jared Ward!

“A little.” More than a little, but it had been worth it to see the spark of life in Amanda’s eyes.

“I spent the day up to my elbows in clay, reconstructing Junebug.” Jared said. “Marissa and I cleaned out a storage room in the back of the shop so I’d have enough room to work. Her studio upstairs is pretty cramped.”

“How long do you think it’ll take to finish the statue?”

“I’ll be here all summer, but the grant covers the entire project no matter how many hours I put in.”

“Then what?”

“I’ve got one more semester of grad school left and then who knows? Italy sounds good. Or I could work in a gallery. Maybe apprentice with another sculptor. At our age, life is a buffet. We can wander through and pick out what we like best. We can even skip the salad and go straight for dessert if we want to.”

“You’re talking about having a lot of choices.” At least that’s what I
hoped
he was talking about. Otherwise there was a great big helping of
it’s all about me
in that philosophy.

“I guess so.” Jared shrugged. “I may not know exactly what I want to do yet, but I know what I
won’t
be doing—making soup bowls and coffee mugs.”

“Are you talking about Marissa?” The shock in my voice didn’t seem to faze him.

“She’s talented but she’s wasting it here. She might make a living selling dessert dishes but as for making a
life,
sorry, not seeing it.”

“Maybe it’s what she
chose
to do. You know, off the buffet.” It was snarky to throw the buffet analogy back at him but Marissa was a friend of Bernice’s so I was feeling loyal on her behalf.

“There’s choosing and then there’s settling,” Jared argued. “My dad settled and he was miserable his whole life. All he wanted to do was play jazz guitar and he wound up teaching music lessons to whiny rich kids after school instead.”

I didn’t know Marissa well enough to argue that she wasn’t miserable, but when I’d seen her in church on Sunday, her eyes closed and her hands lifted in worship, I remembered thinking how serene she’d looked. She didn’t look like someone who’d been given a handful of celery sticks from the salad bar of life.

“Look at you. You’re helping out a friend this summer, but I’m sure you wouldn’t be fulfilled if you stayed here and cut hair the rest of your life.”

“Maybe I would.” I lifted my chin. If that’s what God wanted me to do, wouldn’t I be happy doing it? Or didn’t
happy
matter? Maybe sometimes a girl had to accept the plan God had for her, like she would a dose of liquid cold medicine.

Jared stared at me intently for a second, and then he draped his arm over my shoulder and leaned closer until we were almost nose-to-nose. “There’s more to life than a steady paycheck, Heather. Ask my dad.”

It wasn’t fair that sometimes chemistry won. My brain heard the words but my heart ignored them and chose to focus on his blue-lagoon eyes. What had Jared said about dessert first?

I moved a fraction of an inch away from him and Jared sat back. “I have something for you.” He retrieved the foil package from the cooler and unwrapped it carefully, exposing a raspberry Danish in perfect condition. “I heard these are your favorite.”

A double hit. Blue eyes and my favorite pastry.

“I…”
Can’t form an intelligent sentence to save my life?
“Do you want half?” Saved by good manners. Mom would’ve been proud of me.

“It’s all yours. I’m going to go back to the studio to work a few more hours. My muse usually comes out late at night, but I couldn’t pass up a chance to see you.”

I inhaled a chunk of frosting as I tried to process that information. He. Wanted. To. See. Me.

“Oh, that’s—” Unbelievable. Incredible. Amazing. “—nice.”

The kind of lukewarm response guaranteed to puncture a permanent hole in the male ego.
I didn’t mean it! I can come up with a better word!

“So, we’re going to give the canoe another try Friday night, right?”

Obviously Jared had a sturdier ego than most guys. Or maybe he thought I was playing hard to get.
Was I playing hard to get?
I wasn’t sure. I’d never
played
at anything before. And I’d never had a guy interested in me who was burning through every characteristic on The List, picky detail by picky detail, either. And we barely knew each other.

I silently scrolled through each blank square on my calendar. “I think I’m free Friday night.” Did I flutter my eyelashes at him?
Stop! You’re doing it again!

“Great. Come by the studio sometime this week to check out Junebug. I’m going to be putting in quite a few hours, so I could use an excuse to take a break.”

I could so be an excuse.

“Sure. I’d like to see it.”
You
.

“What are your plans for the rest of the night?”

“I’ll probably go horseback riding with my friend, Bree.”

Jared winced. “The one who already hates me for scaring the horses that night?”

“That’s the one.”

“So I suppose she wouldn’t let me go along with you two sometime?”

Hadn’t he just set up a Friday night canoeing date? And now he was filling in the empty spaces on my social calendar with coffee breaks and horseback riding?

“She would. If Bree can get someone on a horse, she’s a happy camper. Have you ever ridden before?”

“City kid. Remember?” Jared grinned at me and shook a swatch of hair out of his eyes. “But I’m up for it.”

Had I mentioned that
adventurous
was in my Top Five?

Bree was out with Riley when I called her, so I switched my plan. I called Mom and filled her in on what was happening in Prichett. I told her about lunch with the Carpenters, about Dex painting the kitchen cupboards and a very quick mention that Jared and I had supper together in the park. Mom wasn’t a worrier by nature, but I adhered to the unspoken rule between moms and daughters. Information was strictly on a need-to-know basis. If I mentioned our upcoming canoe trip on Friday, there would be questions. And the first question would be
where does he go to church?
Which made me suddenly wonder if moms had a list for their daughters’ future husbands, too. Scary. I was going to have to investigate the possibility. Mom was a prayer warrior in the truest sense of the word and I didn’t want her many fervent prayers to crowd mine into a corner of the throne room.

After we said goodbye, I straightened Dex’s paint cans and cleaned up the kitchen. Snap decided she’d had enough alone time and wandered into the kitchen, so I retrieved a wad of masking tape out of the wastebasket and turned it into a kitty toy. We chased it along the floor on our bellies and that’s when I saw it. The canoe paddle. Only it didn’t look quite the same as it had when Jared had left it at the top of the stairs. Six inches of the handle was covered in green paint. This was a mystery I didn’t need to hire a detective to solve.

Dex had used it as a stir stick.

“Dex!” I grumbled his name, even though he couldn’t hear me. I mean, it wasn’t like he’d drawn a mustache on the
Mona Lisa
with a Sharpie, but the paddle didn’t belong to me. I was pretty sure it was the equivalent of a coupon—I had to turn it in for my date with Jared. Now it had been vandalized. This would indicate I couldn’t be trusted with the care of a simple, inanimate object. Maybe guys remembered things like that when you wanted to borrow their iPods.

It wasn’t until later that I found out that that wasn’t all Dex had done. When I picked up my Bible, I noticed a scrap of color peeking out of Haggai again—a sticky note plastered over the one I’d left. I’d given Dex my interpretation of the
purses with holes
verse and he’d written back a cryptic message.

Or it could mean what they’re putting their time, energy and abilities into something that doesn’t last.

I chewed on the end of my pen while I tried to find a hidden meaning in the words he’d written. Was he talking about me? He had to be. Easy for him to criticize. He was going into the mission field and everyone knew a person hit the top of the spiritual measuring stick with that one.