Page 76 of Freak
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Monday before Thanksgiving, hefting a box packed tightly with soaps, lotions, and candles, Abigail approached the gleaming new door of ‘Me Day,’ a shop Karlene Conroy was opening in the new Signal Bend Pavilion shopping center.
On Black Friday, the Pavilion would officially open. All the storefronts had been leased, and there was a nice mix, Abigail thought, of businesses: Karlene’s cute little bath and beauty shop. ‘The Nib of Time,’ a watch and pen shop, next door to Me Day. Abigail thought pens and watches made an odd combination, but the punny name delighted her. She also enjoyed ‘Boos & Clues,’ the name of a genre-specific bookshop (horror and crime) on the other side of The Nib of Time.
‘Dahlia’ was a new Mexican restaurant everybody was talking about—Signal Bend had never had a restaurant that offered anything more exotic than a porterhouse. While there were a few benighted naysayers worried about attracting ‘illegals,’ they were thankfully far outnumbered by everybody else, who couldn’t wait for some culinary variety closer than an hour’s drive.
Boos & Clues had had a thornier trip to its business license. Led by Reverend Masterson, the older and more god-fearing locals had steadfastly expressed their concerns about a store that specialized in selling books about monsters and demons of both supernatural and human stripes. The reverend had given several sermons on the matter, and for a moment it had looked like Boos & Clues would have to find its fit in a different town, despite being proposed by Marty Johansson, a Signal Bend native whose family had been among the first residents the town had ever had.
Then a group of young people had done a thing straight out of the old movieFootloose. They’d prepared their own presentation for the town council, read passages of the Bible that they argued made their case, and charmed the council members—and most of the citizens—utterly. Abigail hadn’t been there, but it had been the number-one topic for weeks afterward. So Boos & Clues got to sell its dark stories.
Abigail planned to explore that shop first thing on Friday. She wasn’t interested in true crime, but she loved a good whodunit. She wasn’t a horror reader at all, but she enjoyed the occasional supernatural story, so long as it wasn’t all about death and blood and gore.
What she was most interested in, though, was the shop itself. Its windows were covered with black paper, but a peek between the sheets showed a décor that really leaned toward the gothic. She was so curious she’d actually pressed her face to the glass the last time she’d come by the Pavilion to deliver an order, cupping her hands around her eyes to try to get a good glimpse.
At that time, no one had been present, and the lights had been off. All she’d seen were shadows and impressions. It only made her more curious.
In a larger parcel at the corner nearest the main entrance was ‘On Trend,’ a clothing shop advertising itself as a place ‘for men and women who like to look good.’ It was a franchise location, part of a regional chain that apparently did quite well throughout the Midwest, but Abigail thought maybe the decision-makers should have done some more market research before they’d signed their lease. Even now, despite having grown so much in the past ten or twenty years, Signal Bend was a place of blue jeans and t-shirts, overalls and plaids. When people dressed up around here, it was either their Sunday Morning best or their Saturday Night best. She didn’t imagine either look made the pages ofVogue, and she couldn’t imagine On Trend making a lot of headway in a town like this. But she was no expert in either fashion or merchandising. Maybe On Trend was exactly the clothing shop Signal Bend needed.
Around the corner from Dahlia, which would face the hotel when that was built, there was a shorter spur, with two shops and a small, two-story office building that served as the terminus of the shopping center and would house an accountant and Signal Bend’s first local dentist. Two office spaces were still vacant.
Veronica Lewis’s hair salon, Style, was opening in the space nearest the office building. Style had been in operation in her house for probably twenty years, and Veronica was still keeping her appointments while she prepared to move into the new space.
The other shop on the spur was the only remaining vacant retail space.
The balance of locally-owned businesses and people from away (some of the olds called them ‘carpetbaggers’), was pretty well balanced. Me Day, Boos & Clues, and Style were owned by Signal Bend natives. The accountant was Sherilyn Broward, who’d grown up in town, attended Missouri State in Springfield, and was a brand-new CPA. On Trend and Dahlia, on the other hand, were owned and operated by folks from away.
A few shopkeepers, Abigail thought of as ‘hybrids’—both outsider and local. Martin Atwood, the dentist, lived in Rolla and intended to maintain two locations—the original in Rolla, and this new one. He was interviewing new graduates from UMKC’s DDS program for someone to work full-time here at the Pavilion. It seemed likely that the new dentist would move into Signal Bend. Marisol Torres-Hernandez, Dahlia’s chef and owner, was from St. Louis and currently lived there, but she was looking at houses for sale in town. Moving into Signal Bend, those two would become locals eventually. In a generation or two.
And then there was the man who owned The Nib of Time. Abigail had never met him, maybe even never seen him. He was one of those ‘hands-off’ owners, but he’d specifically hired his whole staff in town. From the manager to the part-time workers, everyone at Nib was local. Abigail saw that excellent decision as a kind of opposite to what On Trend had done: On Trend had hired its part-time sales staff from town, but its management, from the owner to the store manager and even the assistant managers, were from away—and they apparently meant to stay that way, commuting to work rather than moving to Signal Bend. It spoke of a plan to force their ways onto the people here, and Abigail didn’t think it would work. The Nib of Time, on the other hand, had created an environment where townspeople could support their own with every purchase.
She had a pretty solid sense that the owner of Nib was a small-town guy at heart. He got it.
Hipping the heavy box, she grabbed the handle of Me Day’s door, pulling it open to the tinkle of jingle bells, and entered the upbeat clamor of a business preparing for its debut.
Karlene stood up behind the counter and grinned. “Hey there, Abigail! How you doin’ today? How’s Mel?”
“Hi, Karlene. I’m good.” Abigail crossed the shop and set the box on the counter. “Mel’s good, too. Healing up real well. He’s at the hospital today, hopefully for his last check.”
As worried, as frightened, as she’d been when Mel was in the hospital, as horrified as she’d been by all that had transpired at the Harvest Festival, the past month had been wonderful. Among the best, happiest times of her life, in fact. In her taking care of Mel, and in his letting her do so, his willingness to be vulnerable, to have need and seek help, they had cemented a true, deep love. They’d lived together nonstop, slept together every night, in each other’s arms, or at least always touching. She’d nursed him when he was hurting, fed him when was hungry, entertained him when he was bored. She’d listened when he was frustrated with his pain or his weakness, understood when he stewed about club things he couldn’t explain, laughed when he’d been in a storytelling mood. Each time she’d done something for him, each time he’d caught her hand to tell her how he loved her, how glad and thankful he was for her, she’d felt her own spirit swell.
Abigail hadn’t said any such thing aloud, but she’d feltmarriedthese weeks. And she’d loved it.
“That’s great news!” Karlene’s grin broadened before she shook her head. “That thing last month was a real mess. But it coulda been worse. I remember the days when it was worse.”
