Page 8 of A Fate of Ice and Lies
It didn’t help that our manager, Rita, had yet to have someone come in to look at the refrigerator door for our largest fridge. You know, the one we used the most but was prone to getting stuck. One of the workers usually had to pry it open so our customers didn’t break their back trying to get into the stupid thing. Which meant I spent my time bouncing between the register at the front of the store and the refrigerator at the back.
Talk about getting my steps in.
And to top it off, while most days I didn’t mind playing the unofficial, unpaid babysitter for one of the older moms in town, today hadn’t been the day for her to leave unannounced. I also wished Collette spent more time with her daughter than she did doing whatever she did when she dropped off the seven-year-old girl, sometimes for days at a time. At least she’d come back for Victoria this time. Small miracles and all that, right?
Donnie, who in the past eight years had grown up from his wild high school days to become one of the police officers in our town, and Ryenne had come by for a couple of hours to volunteer their time. They were good people like that. Good friends.
By noon, the Colina Verde Community Food Bank had runout of chicken and baked ham although I made sure each family only took one or the other. Not even an hour after that, we were out of canned and fresh potatoes. Eggs and dinner rolls were next. Two hours before closing, all that remained was powdered milk and a few assorted canned goods.
My heart had clenched at the almost bare shelves and the dire need of so many in our surrounding communities. But my small hill country town in central Texas came through for us after my two best friends posted pictures on their Instagram accounts. Food donations came in for hours after closing. So much so that the shelves were fully stocked with extra food in the back. It took hours to inventory and shelf everything by myself, but it was done. I was exhausted with lower back pain that shot up my spine to my neck and the back of my head.
I blamed that exhaustion as the cause of the strange hallucinations I’d had of a man more handsome than anyone I’d ever seen. He was almost too perfect in the most inhuman, storybook way, with eyes of the deepest color violet. He had flawless alabaster skin and a smile that reminded me of sunshine. He looked about my age, maybe twenty-six, at the most thirty. At one point, I tried to touch him to see if his skin was as soft and smooth as I knew it’d be.
Which was silly. And when he disappeared right before my eyes, it proved just how childish my imagination was. Which I guess was no worse than the ongoing dreams I had of some magical woman named Leanora, hell-bent on vengeance. Leanora’s story made for good writing, though, and I hoped it’d become a fully fleshed-out novel one day.
At least I still had a good fictional book boyfriend to curl up with tonight with the current romance novel I was devouring. Or I would if Ryenne didn’t stay too late for our taco/movie night.
We’d purposely picked a cop movie, knowing Donnie wouldn’t join us since he despised any sort of police-related inaccuracy portrayed in a film. As much as we both loved hanging out with Donnie, sometimes a girl just wanted to hang with her girl bestie, especially when said bestie was secretly dating her brother’s best friend.
I mean, seriously, who needed a novel when your best friend was living the brother’s best friend, friends-to-lovers trope?
“You really need to set some boundaries with Rita,” Ryenne chimed in via my Bluetooth earbud. “She manages the store, gets paid the big bucks. . .”
I snorted and continued the final sweep of the store, picking up fallen items and making sure all the refrigerator doors were closed.
“I doubt anyone working here gets paid big bucks.” Not when the store’s survival depended solely on donations that sometimes were so low, I gave from the little I had in my own pantry.
“And don’t get me started on Collette,” she said. “She can’t keep pushing her daughter on you like that.”
“I don’t mind,” I reminded her.
“You don’t mind?” She scoffed. “That’s why people keep using you.”
I didn’t mind that either. Growing up, I didn’t have many friends. I had my mom, our donkey, and the Richter siblings. It was a good, tight circle, which grew smaller when Mom passed three years ago.God, I still missed her.The strange thing was, that familiar circle also grew when the people of Colina Verde, people I’d known since I was a little girl but had rarely spoken to, came by with their casseroles and good wishes. One woman, who’d recently retired from her housekeepingdays, came by and demanded she help me clean and go through Mom’s stuff. If it weren’t for Maria, I would’ve kept every single knickknack and strand of hair I found.
In return, I offered to help anyone and everyone in my small town. If someone needed groceries or medicine, I became the person to call to pick those items up. A new mom didn’t have time to do laundry or wash her hair? I’d pick up her laundry and do the wash myself or sit with the infant while she bathed and shaved both her legs—yeah, I checked after Chrissy came out of her steamy bathroom pink and with a relieved smile on her face but only one leg shaved, which led to a fifteen-minute cry.
As in, she cried, not me, because she was certain her newborn had broken her brain.
I sighed.
“Don’t use that resigned sigh on me like I’m the one being irrational,” Ryenne warned.
I loved my best friend. I really did.
I could picture her stomping her foot the way my donkey did when he was angry.
“Are you at my place yet?” I asked, hoping she’d let me change the subject.
Her sigh came out more resigned and more dramatic than mine. I giggled.
“Yep,” she said. “Already let Hee-haw out to potty, and when his little dorky donkey-ness came back in, he stole my spot on the couch. I swear to you, Teddy, the little shit grinned at me while he did it.”
My smile quickly warped into a yawn that I stifled. I loved Ryenne’s relationship with my pet donkey, and while I’d never admit it to her, I swear he did things just to piss her off.
“Donkeys don’t smile,” I reminded her.
“Hee-haw does, and he’s a menace.”
