Fiona's Flame Read online

  ‘Just came by to talk to you about the city council meeting. Whatcha think, huh?’ Zeke bobbed up and down in his size fifteen sneakers. Even after all the hits he’d taken as a professional football player, there was nothing wrong with Zeke’s mind. It was his body he couldn’t seem to control at times. ‘Elbert Romo sure was something.’

  Abe shook his head. ‘Something I never wanted to see, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I always meant to climb down to Pirate’s Cove, but I thought if I did I’d see cute, naked girls playing volleyball,’ said Zeke. ‘Maybe girls who needed help with their sunscreen. You know?’

  ‘Instead, now you’re picturing smearing the lotion on Elbert’s back?’

  ‘Dude,’ Zeke said. ‘Okay, so you gonna do that proposal thing the mayor said? For the lighthouse?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  Abe felt the scowl crawl across his face. ‘They should know better anyway. The lighthouse does have historical merit. Old thing like that deserves to be saved. What’s a city council for, if not for that? They shouldn’t need a proposal.’

  ‘Bull. You just hate getting up in front of people.’

  He hated it worse than a local oil spill. Zeke was on the mark, but damned if Abe was going to let on. ‘Waste of time, that’s all those meetings are. Full of the same people, yammering about the same things, all of them trying to change Cypress Hollow.’ They were trying to take it from almost perfect and change it to a Silicon Valley suburb community. The very thought of a certain Seattle coffee-clone pushing its bossy way in next to Tillie’s was enough to make Abe’s blood boil, and at least once a meeting someone suggested trying to lure the coffee giant. But we have no extra-hot triple-vento mochaskinnychoos! Tillie’s just has plain old coffee!

  ‘That’s not why you don’t want to talk to them, though. Why do you hate public speaking so much?’

  It wasn’t the speaking, really. What he hated was being in front of people. He liked to be behind the scenes. Behind the steering wheel. Not lecturing people about something they should already want to do, like saving a landmark that meant something to everyone.

  ‘Is it because Rayna might be there?’

  ‘No.’ He hadn’t even thought about her. Hell, yes, speaking in front of her would make it even worse.

  ‘Is it because you think Fiona has a better idea than you?’

  ‘Who?’ Abe reached around Zeke – no easy feat given the man was as big as a tugboat – and put away the last vest.

  ‘That girl who owns the gas station. You know, the one who always wears that beat-up black cowboy hat. She wasn’t wearing it at the meeting, so you probably didn’t recognize her.’

  Oh, yeah. The woman who owned Fee’s Fill. The one who wanted to tear down the lighthouse. ‘You think her idea is better? I think it’s crap.’

  ‘So you better argue against her. Right?’

  The thought of getting up there in front of the town made Abe feel seasick, something he never felt. Maybe he could blame it on the gathering storm. ‘Shit.’ Abe looked up. The mass of grayness above wasn’t fog – it was a cloud bank lowering ominously. It would rain tonight. He might have to cancel tomorrow’s tours. Not that he minded going out whale-watching in the rain, but tourists generally complained too much to make the money worth it. ‘It’s gonna pour.’

  Zeke ignored him. ‘You have to do something if you want to save the lighthouse.’

  ‘I know that.’ Abe snatched at a tarp that was about to sail over the edge in the cool wind.

  ‘What about talking Fiona out of her idea, then? You think you could? Would it be better to talk to just one person? Get her to listen to you? Huh?’ Zeke bobbed and swayed.

  It was a thought.

  Maybe it was a good thought. ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘How do you not know her? She’s got the only gas station in town. You know she lived at the lighthouse for a couple of years a long time ago, right? You’d think she’d be into saving it.’

  It wasn’t like he didn’t know who she was, he just never talked to her. Abe always used his debit card at the pump. The fewer people he conversed with, the better he liked it. ‘Do you think she’d listen to me?’

  ‘Give her something in return.’ Zeke looked around the dock. ‘Offer her a fishing trip.’

  ‘If she was a fisher, I’d know it.’

  ‘A whale tour, then.’

  ‘Whale tours are for tourists.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Zeke. ‘So’s nudity, apparently.’

  Maybe it could work. Abe could try sweet-talking her. Not that he’d ever been any good at that. But he could try.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sometimes we think we want to knit a sweater when all our hands want is a simple scarf. It’s okay to cast on for socks while you decide. – E. C.

  It rained the next day. Fiona spent the first part of the morning fixing three broken tiles on the roof. She could have sent Stephen up to do it – he’d offered – but they weren’t busy, and she wanted to get her hands dirty. Stephen was more than capable enough to handle doing both the Honda’s paint job (just a side door ding) and running the register at the same time.

  And even though the steady, cold rain kept dripping down her neck every time she tilted her head, Fiona enjoyed being on the outside of her business, looking in. On a dreary day like today, when the clouds were weighted and the light was dull, the view into the well-lit windows of the filling station was cheerfully warm. People had laughed at her when she’d done up the inside with hanging plants and welcoming couches. Like some kind of day-spa, they’d said. Not like old Roy had it, nope.

  Not like Roy. And unlike when he’d run the place – when it had only smelled of grease and gasoline – people actually enjoyed coming in to Fee’s Fill. The interior of the store still held the usual gas station things: water, soda, snacks, oil and antifreeze. But they were semi-hidden, tucked away in the dark wooden bookcases that the old library had been throwing out when they moved. The coffee Fiona sold was locally roasted and freshly ground, unlike the stuff Roy had peddled straight out of the bulk generic bucket. She swore she’d once seen him get paint transfer off with the oily brew.

  Peeking in from the ladder, Fiona saw the geraniums and begonias that lined the walls, hanging from hooks in the rafters, next to the wind chimes that Hazel Montrose made from driftwood. The African violets that lined the tops of the bookshelves were Fiona’s favorites – thanks to the skylights she’d put in a few years earlier, she could coax them to bloom all year round.

  Even the garage itself, a space only she and Stephen worked in, was clean and well-lit. They couldn’t work on more than two cars at a time, but doing body-work in a town as small as Cypress Hollow wasn’t where the money was. The real cash came from tourists stopping and filling up with gas, picking up a locally made kite and some salt-water taffy at the register. The bestsellers in the shop were the pieces of jewellery Fiona crafted from scraps of auto-parts. The price of a steel bracelet tripled if she could mark it as part of a vintage Mercedes.

  Fiona finished climbing down and put away the ladder. She shed her jacket and dried her jeans the best she could with a shop towel. Then she waved at Stephen, who smiled back at her over his paint respirator mask. ‘I’ve got the register now,’ she called and he nodded.

  Fiona took a long, deep breath as she hung her jacket on its hook. The smell of good coffee and Cora Sylvan’s cinnamon candles, mixed with the occasional acrid scent of diesel drifting in from the garage bay, was as comforting to Fiona as the smell of chicken soup. This was home. The last big decision – whether or not to repair the old neon sign that read Fill Here – had been hers to make, hers alone. She reached behind the shelf of maps to flick on the outside lights in the dim afternoon, and heard the buzz she loved. It had turned out the old sign had been too expensive to repair. The new one was still big and curved and old-fashioned, but now the words Fee’s Fill arched over the top of the building. Th
ough she couldn’t see it from inside the station, she could see its red glow blinking reassuringly against the steel-fronted gas pumps.

  Home was just steps away, in the backyard on the other side of the herb garden, in the rundown cottage she’d spent the last three years redoing by hand. Home was here. This station, her garage, her house. It was enough.

  Usually this time of afternoon would bring people who wanted car washes. With them came the impromptu knitting circle that would form in the small seating area Fiona had created with two sofas and three wingback chairs. While Fiona and Stephen washed and detailed cars by hand, women chatted and knitted, making liberal use of the free stitch markers Fiona kept in a bowl on the low coffee-table. Just because she didn’t knit didn’t mean Fiona was clueless as to what industry drove the town. Cypress Hollow lived, breathed and ate knitting, and any place a knitter could sit and chat with another was a place that could turn a profit.

  Not, however, on a grey, drippy day like this. No one needed a car wash, no one sat in the comfy circle of chairs. So Fiona fell backward into her favorite green seat and fished out her cell phone, which had somehow stayed miraculously dry in her front pocket.

  She dialed. Waited. She wondered how he’d take the idea of the lighthouse being razed.

  ‘Hey!’ Tinker’s voice boomed. ‘What’s new with my favorite daughter?’

  As if he had more than one daughter, as if anything ever changed in Cypress Hollow.

  ‘Not much. How about you, Pops?’

  Fiona’s father, on the other hand, could always be relied upon to have a new story to tell, even if it had been less than a day since they’d talked.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You’ll never guess how many we sold today.’

  ‘Where are you again?’

  ‘New York City! I told you that!’

  ‘It’s hard to keep track of you sometimes. Is it cold?’

  ‘The worst. Snow like you wouldn’t believe. At night we have to run that little propane heater.’

  ‘Inside the truck?’

  ‘It’s safe! Trust me!’

  Fiona rolled her eyes. Even if it wasn’t safe, there was nothing she could do about it. She heard a rustling in the background and then a grinding noise. ‘Gloria’s still working?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how many people want our pencils.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Fiona pulled out the small drawer of the coffee-table and lined up the tape measures, which were marked Fee’s Fill.

  ‘Nabbed a huge sale today,’ said her father.

  Fiona cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder, trying to keep it from slipping. Her head tilted, she said, ‘Oh, yeah?’ She could just imagine him – he’d be standing outside in the cold in that old, black parka he’d worn since she was a child, the one with the holes at the wrist. He’d be perched on the back bumper of the pencil truck, his black cowboy hat, which matched her own, pulled down so that his ears, never his best feature, stuck out at an almost ninety-degree angle. His heavy, white eyebrows would move with each word and his white teeth would flash with each grin. God, she missed him sometimes, so much it was like an ache in her bones.

  Tinker continued, ‘I said to myself, “Self, who needs to erase things?” And there it was! The answer! Musicians!’

  That wasn’t what Fiona would have come up with. She shut the drawer softly and ran her fingers through the beaded stitch markers in the bowl.

  ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘What do they do?’

  ‘Play music?’

  ‘Write music. And the people who write those little notes down on staff paper – they need to be able to erase, right? So me and Gloria found the music school, you know, that big one they made that movie about. We set up the truck right in front.’

  Tinker and Fiona’s stepmother, Gloria, lived in the equivalent of a taco truck, only instead of carne asada, they sold sharpened pencils. Artisan pencils, Tinker said. Each one sharpened by hand with love. And it was true, Tinker loved everything about sharpening pencils. He actually had an honest-to-God mail-order website, and people ordered pre-sharpened pencils from him in bulk. He made money. It boggled Fiona’s mind on a regular basis.

  ‘So we set up, and they came pouring out between classes, and I’m telling you, daughter, the smell of freshly shaved wood blew right up their noses. I couldn’t take the dollar bills fast enough. New York, right? I gotta hustle. It’s cold, so they’re moving on if my line doesn’t roll. A guy selling roasted chestnuts wanted to beat me up – I was taking his customers. Gloria had to go right out there and give him a four-pack and show him how nice they write.’

  ‘A line for pencils,’ Fiona clarified.

  ‘Artisan pencils.’

  ‘Of course. Good for you.’

  ‘And you? What are you doing today?’

  Fiona leaned back and looked out the window at the gas pumps standing idle under the canopy. Rain dripped from the roof to the sidewalk. ‘I went to the city council meeting last night.’

  ‘The wild chickens still living in the rosebushes there?’

  She’d seen them last night, three or four bedded down for the evening. ‘You know, you could come check on that yourself sometime. It’s not like your house doesn’t have wheels.’

  ‘Someday, daughter. Someday.’

  That’s what he always said. Fiona tried to believe him today. For once.

  ‘Hey, Dad. I’m going to work on getting the lighthouse taken down.’

  A silence met her words.

  ‘And a public park put in its place.’ She waited to see if he’d say anything. When he didn’t, she continued. ‘With paths. Maybe a little playground.’

  ‘Torn down, huh?’ A pause. ‘Guess it’s probably time.’

  Fiona gave a laugh that sounded empty. Should she mention … Oh hell, why not? ‘Mom would have liked that, huh?’

  Another pause. Fiona heard him cover the receiver and mumble something to Gloria. Then he said, ‘You know, your mother never understood what it meant to me to be the lighthouse keeper those few years.’

  ‘I know, you’ve told me –’

  ‘You were young. You don’t –’

  ‘I was a teenager. Of course I remember.’ That, and so much more.

  ‘Why are you so stuck on that part anyway?’

  Fiona couldn’t remember anything else.

  Tinker went on, ‘So many other wonderful memories there.’

  She had the urge to hang up. To just hit the red button on her phone. Before he tried recalling the good times and not being able to come up with any.

  An old blue pickup with a white stripe pulled under the awning. A 1942 International Harvester, to be exact, a real beauty. Abe Atwell’s truck.

  ‘Like when we found the baby seal and brought it home. You remember that, Fee? How cute it was in its box?’

  ‘It died the next morning.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Abe got out of his truck, stretching long and tall, like he always did. He stuck his card in the machine, put the nozzle in the tank, and leaned on the open door, eyes facing across the road to the water. He was one of the few customers who used the time to look at the waves, not his cell phone. It was one of his oh-so-many attractive features. It was almost as sexy as the way his dark hair curled at the nape of his neck. His hair was more out of place than normal – maybe from the rain. If so, Fiona loved rain.

  ‘Well, don’t forget the view of the fireworks on the fourth. From the top?’

  Mom had been drunk three of the four years they watched the show from the top of the lighthouse, and Fiona had been so worried about her falling to her death on the rocks far below that she’d barely looked up at the overhead explosions.

  ‘And the way the foghorn sounded, so close.’

  Well. That had been nice. She could still hear it at night, of course, but not as clearly as they had from that spiteful little piece of land.

  Abe replaced the nozzle and punched the button for his receipt. Like always, he’d get
back in the truck and drive away without even glancing at the shop. Not once had he ever come inside, not for a drink, not for one single Slim-Jim.

  Except that this time he didn’t get back in the truck.

  Abe headed for the front door. He’d been caught in the rain at some point, and his jacket was dark across his wide, heavily muscled shoulders.

  Holy hell.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘And the smell of seaweed? Such a great smell. Almost as good as pencils, am I right?’

  ‘Dad, I have to go.’

  ‘Fee, honey, I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to bring up bad –’

  ‘No,’ she interrupted. ‘Customer! I have to go. Love you, Pops.’ She’d never hung up on him for a customer before. Usually she either left the phone on the countertop for a moment or, more often, she just handed the phone over and Tinker said hello to the customer and caught up with whoever was in the store.

  Fiona caught a glance of herself in the convex security mirror over the door. Her hair was parted sloppily, which made sense since she’d barely run a comb through it this morning after her hasty – as always – shower. Where was her damn hat? Had she even put it on today? She couldn’t remember. Glancing down, she counted three separate oil stains on her jeans. Her steel-toed boots looked as if they’d been run over, which made sense given the number of tires she’d scuffed them against. Her mother’s voice rang clearly in her head. ‘If a woman’s wearing lipstick, she can get away with anything.’

  Fiona hadn’t even put lip gloss on this morning.

  God, if she stood here like this, staring like a guppy, he’d figure out about her crush for sure. She bent over to straighten the gum shelf, but her hand knocked a box of spearmint breath mints all over the floor.