Page 1 of His Hot Mess

SADIE

Iheld my drawing up against the plate glass window of what used to be Debbie’s Place. The glass was lined with paper and a big “FOR LEASE” sign hung in the window. The store had shut down just last week and the sign had gone up only yesterday.

“See?” I said to my sister Lucy. “Perfect!”

Excitement pulsed through me as I pictured the racks of vintage leather jackets; the flowy skirts; the 90s band t-shirts pinned on the walls.

I knew there was a reason I’d chosen to take over Lucy’s apartment in downtown Barkley Falls when I moved up here instead of the cute cottages I’d found for rent scattered around Jewel Lakes County. It wasn’t just because I didn’t have a car. It was serendipity.

Then I made the mistake of looking over at her. Lucy’s lips were pinched together as if she were trying very hard not to say something.

My jubilation dropped a couple of notches.

I loved Lucy. She wasn’t just my sister, but my best friend too. I knew she was only worried about me. But hell, couldn’t she at leasttryto share my enthusiasm?

It was only two weeks since I’d moved from New York City two hundred miles upstate to Jewel Lakes County. Barkley Falls, at the south end of the county, was the smaller of the two towns within Jewel Lakes’s boundaries. Millerville, the bigger town at the north end, may have a Target and Trader Joe’s, but Barkley Falls was prettier—like a town out of a Hallmark movie, I’d said to Lucy when I’d first visited. Its main drag, where we now stood—called Main Street, naturally—was lined with striped-awning shops; their doors flanked with flower-filled barrels and cheery sandwich-boards out to attract customers, who were a fairly even mix of tourists and locals.

I never thought I could go from my completely cosmopolitan—okay, and messy, not exactly successful—life in New York City to a tiny country town like this. But each time I visited Lucy in Barkley Falls I felt like I was being embraced by the place. While New York chewed me up and spat me out, Barkley Falls and Jewel Lakes County, with its endless rolling hills and sparkling lakes, felt like it was always happy to see me. If a place could be happy to see me.

I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to follow Lucy around the rest of my life, the way I had when I moved to New York from our hometown at eighteen, two years after Lucy had done the same. But when Lucy decided to move up here after falling in love with Graydon, I’d felt that tingly spidey sense I sometimes got. That maybe Lucy sorting her own issues out around love was a sign I could figure my life out too. So I’d joined her.

The truth was, I’d been floating around for years. I was flighty. Lost.

A bit of a scatterbrain.

Before seeing thatFor Leasesign in the shop below my apartment on Main Street, I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I hopped from job to job—New York made that easy. I also hopped from guy to guy. But each time I found a new boyfriend, no matter how sweet and doting he was at first, he always turned out to be a bigger turd than the previous one. My last boyfriend, Steve, had been fooling around on me for months. Not to mention he didn’t believe in any of my dreams or ideas I’d shared with him. Never mind that I never took the steps I needed to see them through.

Even though he was a douchebag in the end, I was heartbroken when he dumped me. Just like I was every time before that.

To be honest, falling for the wrong guys was the only thing I did well.

Oh, and finding the worst possible roommates in New York—ones who steal your leftovers and make out with your boyfriends when you’re not around.

But all that was behind me. This move was going to be my fresh start. An apartment of my own. A real career. No more shitty boyfriends. No boyfriends at all, in fact, until I got my life sorted. If I started up this store, I’d be three for three. So seeing my sister’s skeptical face now, my excitement bubble sprang a leak.

“What?”

Lucy looked at my drawing. I’d sketched it out on a piece of paper torn from a random notebook just this morning.

Lucy was a life coach, but she used to be a designer. So she could have been assessing the drawing with a technical eye.

But I knew that wasn’t it.

Her look contained nothing but badly veiled skepticism. “Sadie,” she said. “I don’t understand what this is.”

I loved my sister, but the two of us couldn’t be more different. Lucy was a planner. I was a dreamer. She was matter-of-fact, I was… all over the place. Which was precisely why Lucy had her shit together while I kept flitting from one thing to the next, my life a total fucking mess.

But not anymore. I was going to rent the store below my brand new apartment and open the vintage clothing shop of my dreams. I’d leftSadie Fulham the Messbehind in New York. This was Sadie Fulham 2.0. The new me.

“It’s my vision for the store! Can’t you tell?”

“Sadie, it’s a great start, but you need more than a vision to start a business. You need a business plan. Among a million other things. Ask me how I know.”

Irritation flared in my chest, joining the nerves already jangling there. “Yeah, I know all about how you started your business.”

I’d heard it all before. Lucy left her high-end design job to strike out on her own as a life coach. But she didn’t just take off on a whim. She’d agonized about it for a year or more. With me.

“I was there, remember?” I said. “Anyway, I have more than just this drawing.

---