Page 64 of The Tattered Gloves
“Willow?” Sam said from his new spot behind the counter.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for today. The help, I mean,” he said, slightly stumbling over his words.
I smiled, feeling heat rush to my cheeks. “Anytime,” I answered.
Rushing into the stacks, I found my phone in the pocket of my hoodie and quickly sent a text to Allison.
I did what you asked. I tried.
I got an immediate response back — a heart-eyed emoji which meant she was happy, or proud. I don’t really know.
Rather than go into details, I didn’t bother sending her a long-winded explanation.
I didn’t even send her a single word.
Just a happy face emoji back to match my own.
“ARE YOU KIDDING me?” I said, staring up at the giant tree that now took up half of our living room.
“What?” Addy said casually. “It was on sale.”
“It touches the ceiling!”
“Barely.”
I’d just arrived home from another shift at the store.
School had ended for the month among howls of joy as every student, staff member, and teacher ran from the building, celebrating the holiday season.
And the blissful two-and-a-half-week vacation.
After school, when I’d gone to work as usual, I’d brainstormed more ideas to keep the shop going. The obvious problem to our great plan? Neither of us knew the first thing about a coffee house. How much did the equipment cost? Should we start small? Were we even licensed to sell food and beverages? Was that a thing?
It was overwhelming, and I’d left feeling slightly less useful than I had when I first arrived in the tiny shop.
Greeting me at the door the second I’d stepped inside was an overly enthusiastic guardian with tinsel wrapped around nearly every part of her body, begging me to help her decorate.
“I thought we weren’t doing this,” I said, sitting among the boxes of ornaments, as I continued to gaze up at the tree she’d snuck into the house while I was away.
“Why would you think that?” she asked, fiddling with the radio.
The old speaker crackled and faded in and out as she tried and failed to find the local station that was dedicated to playing holiday music twenty-four hours a day.
I hated that station.
Sam had insisted on playing it around the clock basically since the minute Halloween had ended. He thought it would remind customers about their holiday lists and convince them to purchase more.
All it had done was slowly drive me insane.
“Well,” I said, referring to her question, “it’s so close to Christmas. I figured we were just skipping the decorations. I mean, half of my friends had their trees up the day after Thanksgiving, some even before. I thought maybe you weren’t into it.”
She stopped messing with the radio. The static sound of the radio went silent as she found her way to the floor, sitting next to me near the tree.
“When we were little — your mom and I, I mean,” she clarified, “our daddy would always show up days before Christmas with the biggest tree I’d ever seen. It would take up the entire parlor of the grand house downtown, and we’d need a ladder to get to the top. When I asked him why he’d waited so long, he would shrug and say that was the way his parents had done it, and he wanted to continue the tradition. I guess I do, too.”
I thought back to all the stories she’d told me about her growing up. Most hadn’t made it into the pages of Sam’s report. It had been a lot to swallow.
