April 22
Ron’s June 22
The bell above the door had rung eleven times before noon. Kim had counted without meaning to. Four customers. Seven volunteers. She wasn’t sure anymore where one ended and the other began. Good Yarn had never been this loud.
Kim watched her bookstore turn into a place she didn’t recognize. Mrs. Durfee had commandeered the reading nook with a binder full of sheet music and was explaining to anyone who would listen that she could have a marching band ready in thirteen days if, and she said this three times, if people would stop volunteering their children and start volunteering their children’s instruments.
“I have fourteen kids,” Mrs. Durfee said. “Fourteen. I need twenty. And I need them to own their own instruments, because we’re almost out of school instruments and Principal Liddell asks too many questions.”
“My nephew plays trombone,” said Catherine Hayes, who was unpacking a casserole dish onto the counter beside the register. Kim moved the cash drawer. Catherine didn’t notice.
“Can he march?”
“He can walk.”
“Close enough.”
David Fleming and Jan Williams were bent over a hand-drawn map of Main Street sketched on the back of a hardware store receipt, bickering about where the parade should turn.
“You can’t turn at Elm,” Jan said. “The farmer’s market tables are still stacked there from last fall. Nobody moved them.”
“Why didn’t anyone move them?”
“Because you and I weren’t speaking, David, and those are your tables.”
David looked at her. Jan looked at him. A moment passed between them that Kim couldn’t name. Forgiveness? No, not yet. But the acknowledgement that they were standing in the same room working on the same thing and that was more than either of them had managed in two years.
“I’ll move them tomorrow,” David said.
“I’ll help,” Jan said. Then, quickly added, “With the tables. Not with anything else.”
Frank was in the stockroom, which he now referred to as “the newsroom,” printing the next batch of papers. Kim could hear the printer grinding through page after page. Frank had gotten faster since he started using what he called “the gadgets” to generate filler content.
The sports pages still worried him. Ron would know if the box scores were wrong. But Frank was doing his best, which was all any of them were doing.
Pastor Josh arrived with a clipboard and the news that the church parking lot was available for staging the floats. “Everyone is on board,” he said.
The phone rang. “Thank you for calling Good Yarn,” Kim said.
“Kim, it’s Megan Bell.”
Megan had called three times in the past week. She was on the town beautification committee and had opinions about everything and had somehow heard about the decorations on Main Street and wanted to know why she hadn’t been consulted.
“Hi, Megan.”
“I’ve been driving down Main and I have to say the bunting is lovely but whoever chose the shade of blue on the lamppost banners made an error. That’s not colonial blue. That’s navy. Colonial blue is lighter. I have samples.”
“Megan, I appreciate—”
“—I’m bringing the samples. I’ll be there in twenty.”
She hung up. Kim looked at the phone. Looked at the room full of people arguing about parade routes and trombone players and casserole placement.
“Megan Bell is coming,” Kim announced.
The room groaned in unison. It was the most unified sound Kim had heard in two years.
By dinner time, they had a parade route, a staging area, a band of fourteen and a half musicians—Catherine’s nephew was a maybe—a food committee chaired by Jan who had accepted David’s tables with the air of someone accepting a treaty, and a growing pile of casserole dishes on Kim’s counter that she was going to have to deal with eventually.
Mayor Balcerzak stopped by at 5:45, shaking hands before anyone offered one. She’d gotten the permits. All of them. “I briefed city hall and they’re with us. All the way.”
“Everyone in this conspiracy is technically telling the truth,” Frank said from the stockroom doorway, holding a stack of fresh newspapers.
“That’s how you know it’s going to work.”
People left in ones and twos as the light faded. Jan and David walked out at the same time, which Kim noted and said nothing about. Mrs. Durfee was the last to go, still talking about trombones as she backed through the door.
Kim stood alone in Good Yarn.
The shop was a mess. Crumbs on the counter. Catherine’s casserole dishes stacked by the register. Some of Mrs. Durfee’s sheet music spread across the reading nook. David’s hand-drawn parade map tacked to the bulletin board beside the photos of Ron at Good Yarn. Frank’s printer still warm in the stockroom.
The two flags on the wall hung the way they always hung. Still there. Still up.
Kim looked around her store. It was cluttered and chaotic and it smelled like Catherine’s green bean casserole and Frank’s printer ink and the coffee that nobody had bothered to finish.
The shop hadn’t been this alive in years.
She thought about Ron in Room 8. Sitting by his painted window. Doing his crossword in front of a river that didn’t exist. Waiting for a July that was already being built in a bookstore he’d walked into three weeks ago because a girl told him the flags were still up.
Kim picked up the parade map from the bulletin board. David’s
handwriting was terrible. The route was crooked. The scale was wrong. It was the most beautiful thing in the shop.
She pinned it back up and turned off the lights.
Thirteen days.
Charlie, we’re getting there.
New chapters posted every Monday and Thursday until April 23.