Page 38 of Kiss the Girl
I smiled. “She’s for really real.”
“So why are you sleeping on that? If you don’t date her, I will, and I’m straight!”
“We’re just friends, Paige. Don’t make it weird.”
“The only thing that’s weird is that you’re just friends,” she said, but she dropped it when Evie dropped her wood, and Paige bent to help her gather it all back up.
A few minutes later, Grace popped her head through the door. “Noah, you want to help me with this?”
“Sure.” I stepped into the back room, which was bigger than I would expect from the outside, but even more crowded than she’d hinted, an explosion of tinsel and ornaments everywhere. “Wow. I think I found Christmas Town.”
“I know,” she said. “We’ll get this stuff on the floor soon, and it won’t be so bad back here.” She handed me a sturdy canvas tote full of tools and hefted a small, kid-height portable workbench. “We’ll set these up in the back corner near the fishing tackle. That won’t get much traffic today.”
I would have offered to carry the workbench, but I had a feeling it would offend her, so we all trooped dutifully behind her to the fishing corner, where she set up the workbench and brought out a couple of chairs for Paige and Evie.
“Would you guys mind if I borrow Noah after I teach you how to build the box?” she asked.
“Not at all,” Paige said.
“If you give him back,” Evie said and looked confused when we all laughed.
Grace demonstrated how to nail the four sides of the box together, showing Evie how to hammer, and more importantly, showing Paige how to hold the nail for Evie with a pair of pliers so she didn’t have to worry about her fingers if Evie missed.
“Smart,” I said, as they got to work.
“Told you, it’s not my first time turning kids loose with a hammer. Should we head up front?”
I followed her away from Evie’s enthusiastic pounding. “I’m going to work on this Halloween display while you tell me how the booth plans are going,” she said.
“Can I help?”
“Sure. We’re making a mini graveyard to show off the new tombstones.”
“That’s a weird sentence.” But I grabbed one of the decorative tombstones she indicated that read “RIP I.M. Wormfood.” “This is awesome,” I said, hefting it. Like most of the things in Handy’s, it was better quality than the cheap stuff we used to buy online for our frat house decorations. Those had been made of Styrofoam that chipped away and showed white chunks through the cheap spray paint if you even looked at them wrong. This had a real stone veneer on the front, and a sturdy plastic stake to keep it anchored in the ground.
“Youwouldthink that,” she said, wryly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you like dumb dad jokes as much as my actual dad does.”
I couldn’t deny it.
I followed her orders for a few minutes, but customer after customer set off the front bell, and before long, there was a grumpy call from the direction of the register. “Getting backed up here, Gracie.”
She straightened. “I really gotta hire some holiday help. Come on, you’re about to get some register training.”
I followed her to the cash register. “You’ll do any cash purchases,” she said. “Just scan the tags, press total, punch in the amount they give you, and it’ll tell you how much change to give back. Can you handle it?”
“It sounds like a monkey could handle it.”
“You’re not wrong,” she said. “That’s why you get the job.”
“Ha ha.”
“Now watch me a couple of times, then you take over while I go answer questions on the floor.”
It was as easy as promised, and I rang up customers for the next twenty minutes until the line was down to one again.
