Page 8 of Justice & Liberty

Finally, I headed out to the driveway.

To my dismay, the moving truck was still there, and it had not magically unpacked itself in the night.

Yeah, yeah, magic wasn’t real. Whatever. Hope springs eternal and all that.

So I opened the garage door and set to work. Sure, maybe I should keep both cars in the garage, and not fill half of the garage with my stuff, but...well, I hadn’t been willing to leave the couch for Tanya, but I also didn’t have a place for it in Mom’s house. Some of it, like the boxes of clothes, would come inside and go in my childhood closet pretty quick, but a decent amount of it, I had no immediate purpose for.

I supposed I could change the finished but empty attic into an apartment of sorts, but also...who would live in it? Not me. I had less than no interest in climbing two flights of stairs to go to bed every night. Plus, did I really want someone living in my attic? A stranger with a key to the front door traipsing through my home all the time?

Maybe I was still in my LA mindset, but that seemed like a good way to get robbed to me.

I had a neat stack of boxes sitting in the garage, and I’d just uncovered the end of the couch when two things happened. The first, the expected thing, was a delivery person pulling up with my food. I thanked him profusely, and he waved me off, thanking me in turn for the tip I’d left him in the app as he left.

Then, when I turned around, there was a guy standing there.

I almost did that movie thing, where the person shrieks and throws everything in their hands up in the air, but well, he looked so darned nervous, my brain engaged before it could get too scared. Plus I refused to lose the fresh coffee I’d just procured.

He was a teenage boy, for sure, long hair dipping down over one eye as he ducked his head. “Hey. Miss, um, Abernathy?”

“Jones,” I corrected. Mom’s last name had been Abernathy, but when she’d adopted me as a baby, she’d left my last name Jones. My identity should be what I chose, she’d always told me. It was nobody else’s business to tell me who to be. If I ever wanted to change my name, that was up to me. “But it’s just Jaycie. And you are?”

“Ryan,” he answered instantly. He waved to the nearest house, my only real neighbor, since every other house nearby was either obscured by trees or hills, or far enough away that we couldn’t see each other. “Ryan Miller.”

I remembered the Millers. They’d been a little younger than Mom, and had never really gotten along with her. Oh, there’d never been a real feud, no police involved or anything. Just a fair amount of glaring when they passed each other in the street.

“Can I help?” he asked, holding his hands out. “Gran sawyou unpacking, and said I should come down and help out. Neighborly thing to do and all that.”

I cocked my head at the notion. That was not the Millers I remembered from my childhood. It had also just been a couple with a little kid, which, I supposed, had been Ryan at the time. No “Gran” living with them back then.

Still, I’d just been worrying about the darn couch, the one thing I definitely couldn’t move on my own. So I smiled brightly at him. “I could definitely use some help, Ryan. You want a bagel? Or...I think there are some cranberry orange muffins in here somewhere. Do you drink coffee?”

“Does anyone not?” was his incredulous retort.

I laughed. “Come on in. We’ll get you some food, then we can tackle the couch. I appreciate the help.”

4

Ryan helpedme most of the morning, and he was a great kid. Drank even more coffee than me and inhaled two bagels, but there was no way I’d complain when he’d also carried more than half the boxes in.

We talked about how things had been going in town since I’d been gone, and honestly...it didn’t seem like much had changed. Small towns were always hotbeds of gossip and drama.

Apparently Jennifer Beasley had also moved to LA and gone into movies of the adult variety, and her mother was either unaware or in denial, claiming Jennifer was in “art movies, not like that usual Hollywood trash.” I personally was all in favor of both adult movies and “Hollywood trash,” and didn’t care much for art films, but I supposed I wasn’t the right audience for Lucy’s angry ranting.

The high school gym was falling apart, just like it had been when I went to the high school, but apparently nowadays the roof was leaking, so things were starting to get dire.

“Sheriff Parker doesn’t really do much other than sit in his office, that’s what Gran says,” he told me, looking mildlyconfused. “I’m not sure why it matters, since the worst crime we’ve had in town was that time someone stole an antique carriage wheel that was nailed to a fence as some kind of, like, decoration? Old man Collins freaked out and said it was worth thousands of dollars, even though it was just a wheel, and really old and gross anyway.”

I lifted a brow at him. “Know who did it, did you?”

He flushed. “No! I mean...if I did, then...then maybe it was just, like, a prank. They left it in his yard a week later.”

I scoffed. “Sounds like when Hillary Grant stole one of the Potters’ cows and...relocated him into the high school gym just after graduation.”

His eyes bugged out. “Grant? Like the dentist?”

“His daughter,” I agreed. “She was three years ahead of me in school, and I thought it was the coolest thing anyone had ever done at the time. But honestly, I could not care less about someone taking and then returning an antique carriage wheel. I could try, but I’m pretty sure I’d fail.”

He laughed at that, his wide shoulders shaking as he nodded. “Plus it was a little funny watching the old guy melt down at the town meeting. He called an emergency meeting over it, because, I dunno, something about a crime wave.”

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