Growing Season Read online

  “From what? Extinction?” Cassie gave a smirk and all but shoved the bread plate in Melinda’s face. Amadori’s garlic bread was one of her few vices and Cassie knew it. “You certainly won’t starve here. Eat up.”

  Melinda knew she was being melodramatic. The coming weeks and months would be only as difficult as she let them be. Her attitude, her outlook, would determine how well she weathered this challenge. “OK, OK, but I’ll probably feel like a dinosaur when I start looking for another job.” Then she became quiet. “Eviction, though. Eviction could happen.”

  “Then you’ll just find another apartment,” Susan patted her hand. “You won’t be homeless or go hungry, we’ll see to that.”

  “You girls are the best friends I could ask for,” she managed a smile for Susan and Cassie. “You’re right, I need to give it time. Maybe I’ll just hang out for a few days, try to clear my head. But then, I need to figure out what I’m going to do.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Do you know what you are going to do?”

  Melinda glanced up from the foam cup of coffee she was absentmindedly stirring with one of those tiny plastic straws. It was hospital brew, cheap and hot and bitter. She’d added four little pots of creamer, trying to make it drinkable, but it was a work in progress. She reached in her tote for the packets of sugar swiped from the cafeteria.

  Aunt Miriam plopped down in the beige plastic chair next to Melinda, a wad of tissues in her hand, her brown eyes tired. “It’s been, what, a month now? Any prospects?”

  She had been camped out on her couch, surfing talk shows and house-flipping programs, when her mom called to tell her about Uncle Frank’s heart attack. That was yesterday. Today they were at the hospital in Mason City, waiting for Frank to come out of surgery. He was going to survive, the doctor said last night, but needed a triple bypass and, after that, lots of rest.

  “Well, I’m looking around,” Melinda began her standard answer to the question that had been asked more times than she could count in the past month. That included challenging herself with it at least once a day.

  “The market’s not good. Most of the larger advertising firms in the city aren’t hiring. I might get lucky at a smaller company, but most of them have been snapped up by the larger firms. I’ve got a few more severance checks coming, and then I can apply for unemployment, I guess.”

  She sounded defeated and bitter, and she hated herself for it. She was healthy, she wasn’t starving, the rent was paid. But some days it had been hard to get up in the morning. Where had the time gone? Melinda wasn’t sure, but knew she’d passed too much of it sprawled on her couch, remote in hand.

  There were more important things to talk about now. “How is Uncle Frank, what have you heard?”

  “The physician’s assistant came out about an hour ago to say the bypass is going well.” Miriam folded her hands in a quick praying motion and glanced up at the cream tiles on the waiting room’s ceiling. “I’m thankful for that. He’ll pull through, thank God. But I don’t think he’ll be back at the store anytime soon.”

  Miriam rubbed her close-cropped brown curls and adjusted her glasses. Melinda knew her aunt was about to vent her frustration, and she was ready to listen.

  “I’ve been telling him he needs to slow down,” Miriam clenched the tissue still in her hand. “The hardware store doesn’t need to be his whole life, we can hire more help. But he loves it so much. I do, too, but I don’t know how we can keep it going, if he can’t work for even a while. Truth be told, I don’t want to retire, either. We’ve only run the store for more than thirty-five years.”

  Frank and Miriam, who was Diane’s younger sister, had owned the hardware store in Prosper, a little community northeast of Swanton, since just after they married. The store had been in Melinda’s family ever since her Shrader great-great-grandparents opened it in 1894. The small town had less than two hundred residents, but Prosper Hardware was its heart. The community’s lone gas station had closed more than twenty years ago, and it had been decades since a grocery store operated in the little town. Prosper Hardware remained the only retail business for ten to fifteen miles, depending on which direction you traveled.

  Miriam and Frank had no children, and Melinda always suspected she was their favorite niece. She hadn’t hesitated to pack a bag yesterday and hurry home to offer whatever support she could. Aunt Miriam was normally quick with a joke and a smile; nothing fazed her and no one intimidated her, especially after years of waiting on every resident within miles of Prosper. But now, she was quiet and drained. It hurt Melinda to see her aunt like this.

  “I know you love the city,” Miriam said now, leaning in as if she was sharing a secret, “and you probably can’t imagine living out here again. But if you wanted to help me out for a while, I would really appreciate it.”

  Melinda didn’t know what to say. She took a slow sip of her now-lukewarm coffee to buy some time. Miriam assumed the silence was a sign her niece was considering her offer, and doubled down. “I’d pay you, of course, as decent a salary as I could manage, and it would be full time.”

  It was obvious Aunt Miriam had given this idea some serious thought. Before Melinda could begin to let her down easy, she started ticking off the details of her plan.

  “You can’t drive back and forth from Minneapolis, but what about staying with your parents? It would give you more time to spend with them. It’s just for a while, until Frank gets his strength back and we can decide what to do. We have a full-time employee already, it’s not like you’d have to take on that much. I need to focus on the books, ordering supplies and payroll and such. What do you say?”

  What Melinda wanted to say was, as much as she loved her parents, she couldn’t imagine living with them again. How would she live out of a suitcase, even for a few weeks, when she’d been living on her own for so many years? And what about her life in Minneapolis?

  “I know it’s a lot to ask,” Miriam patted Melinda’s arm. There was now a pleading tone to her voice. “I’ll take all the time you can give me. A few weeks, a few months. Whatever you can spare. It would give me more time to care for Frank. And it’ll help him recover, too, to know that the store is in good hands.”

  Melinda started to laugh. “Well, I don’t know anything about running a hardware store, so I’m not sure I qualify for the ‘good hands’ part. But I’ll think about it, Aunt Miriam. It would be a big change.”

  What she didn’t say, what she couldn’t put into words, was how this idea had suddenly raised her spirits. She didn’t want to admit it to her aunt, but the last month had been filled with empty days, tears and frustration. Helping at the store would give her a chance to drop out of her regular life, which wasn’t so great right now. It was the easy way out, a temporary escape, but maybe she was willing to consider it.

  “Honey, I think you’re due for a big change.” Miriam’s mood brightened. “Sounds like you’ve had plenty of change recently, but not the good kind. Maybe a little break would be just the thing, give you something else to focus on. I hear that you can apply for jobs online, everyone does that nowadays. You could continue to look while you’re here. It’d be like a summer job, like when you were in college.”

  Miriam’s eyes sparkled now. She’d saved her best talking point for last. “I could set you up with health insurance. Does that help? I bet it does.”

  “Wow,” Melinda tipped her head, considering. “You’re making a sweet offer now.” The premiums on her former employer’s insurance plan were going to skyrocket in just a few weeks. And she had already decided that, no matter what else happened, she would never go without health insurance. That was just tempting fate.

  “Well, I could pay up my rent a month or two in advance, I guess,” she shrugged, “if I decided to do it.”

  “I won’t work you seven days a week. The store isn’t even open on Sundays. You’d have days off, I’m guessing Sundays and Mondays. You could go back and forth whenever you wanted.”

  Melind
a was relieved to see her mom coming down the hall with a stack of cafeteria sandwiches in her arms. They couldn’t be worse than the coffee, and she was starving.

  Even in the harsh glare of the florescent lights reflecting off her glasses, Diane Foster still didn’t look all of her sixty-seven years. She styled her steel-gray hair in a layered pixie cut, and decades on her feet as an elementary-school teacher had kept her fit. Melinda couldn’t believe it when her mom took up running after retirement, but it was doing her good. She had the energy of a person half her age.

  The one thing that dated her mom, that made Melinda cringe even now, was that retired-teacher habit of wearing tops embellished with designs reflecting the seasons. Pumpkins in the fall, kittens with mittens in the winter, that sort of thing. Today’s pink top was embroidered with hummingbirds on the right shoulder.

  “Ham and cheese is all they’ve got right now.” Diane handed a waxed-paper bundle to Miriam, then one to Melinda. “Is it working, Miriam?”

  “What?” Melinda was about to take a bite, then stopped. “Mom, are you behind this plan?”

  “Well, not really. It was her idea. But your father and I would love for you to come stay with us for a while. And working at the store will give you something to do, so you won’t be underfoot all the time. We like doing what we please, when we please. We’re getting used to this retirement idea.”

  “I’m not,” Miriam snapped. Diane took the chair on the other side of her sister and wrapped an understanding arm around Miriam’s shoulder.

  Melinda just shook her head. Diane and Miriam had always been close. It’s no wonder they’d cooked up this plan together.

  “I know it’s a lot to ask,” Diane said to her daughter. “And I know you’ll head back to the city eventually. But will you at least consider it? Maybe you’d even have some ideas about marketing for the store, like using that social media stuff.”

  Miriam started to laugh. “I don’t know how much a marketing plan would help the store,” she said, then took a hearty bite out of her sandwich. “People know what’s in it, things haven’t changed much over the years. And the same customers have been coming in for decades. But Melinda, I know how talented you are. I’m open to any and all suggestions.”

  It was clear her mom and aunt weren’t going to drop their idea. “Well, since you two have it all planned out, I’ll give it some thought, at least.”

  “In the meantime,” Aunt Miriam began to fish around in the black leather purse at her feet, “can you stop by the store on your way home, I mean, to your parents’ house? I need to get this extra set of keys to Bill, our full-timer. He’s going to lock up tonight. I was so frazzled when I ran by there this morning that I forgot to hand them over.”

  “You went to the store today, Miriam?” Diane gave her sister a concerned look. “Let Bill worry about the store. You have to take care of yourself, too, along with Frank.”

  Neither of them said, “that’s why we need you, Melinda,” but she saw how tired her aunt looked. The relief that Uncle Frank was going to make it through this health crisis didn’t change the fact that Miriam had some long weeks and months ahead of her as she helped her husband recover.

  “I’ll stay as long as I can this afternoon and come back tonight if you want me to,” Diane told Miriam. “Melinda, we’ll eat about seven. That should give you plenty of time to stop by the store.”

  “The doctors say Frank will be out of surgery soon,” Miriam hugged Melinda as she got up to leave. “I’ll let you know how he is. If all goes well, they said I could go home tonight.”

  Melinda threaded her way through the antiseptic corridors of the hospital and stepped out into the blindingly bright afternoon sunshine. Working in downtown Minneapolis for so many years, she had forgotten how strong the sun could be without all those towering buildings to filter the light. The bubble of silence inside her gray hatchback was comforting after the sudden stress of the past two days. She cranked on the air conditioning, leaned back and closed her eyes.

  It had been weeks since she’d been in the middle of this much activity, and she was surprised by how strange it felt. Her days had dissolved into a slow routine of watching television, reading, walking and cleaning, punctuated with occasional dinners out with friends and a weekly scroll through the online job boards.

  The woman who had been so busy, who had so much work to do and so many commitments to fill her days and nights, where had she gone?

  The chaos of the last twenty-four hours had shown her just how lonely she was, how much she missed the hustle of her former life. All the special projects she’d planned to take on during her sabbatical, like a scrapbook for her sister’s kids, a deep clean of her closet, some creative writing, had yet to be started.

  She was bored. Bored, and lonely. The longer she was out of a job, the less connected she felt to her old life, her old self. With nothing new on the horizon to replace them, she drifted through the days and weeks, waiting for something to happen.

  And now, it had. She opened her eyes and realized she was still clutching the keys to Prosper Hardware. She dug down into her tote, reaching for a safe place to stash the nothing-special ring and its two keys.

  Oreo’s brass tag winked at her from the bottom of the inside pocket. Seeing it made her heart ache for a moment. Then she realized that, for the first time in a long time, she was free to do whatever she wanted. Wherever she wanted.

  “It is a sign?” She raised an eyebrow at Oreo’s collar. “We’ll have to see about that.”

  She made her way out of Mason City and merged onto the interstate, heading east. She’d changed her car radio’s presets yesterday, a task she completed each time she crossed the Iowa-Minnesota state line on her trips to and from Swanton. She cranked up her favorite country station as the fields and pastures began to fly by. Pop and alternative rock were her favorites, but the tunes of Willie, Merle and Dolly always seemed a better fit for rolling through the open spaces of northern Iowa.

  It was about a forty-minute drive to Prosper, punctuated by a handful of towns once she turned south onto a two-lane state highway. It was always interesting to check for any changes in the communities along the route, but it was the fields and family farms that she loved the most. No matter what was happening in the Twin Cities, no matter how crazy her life was, she could always breathe easy out here.

  It was early June, and the young corn and bean plants were just starting to poke up out of the fertile soil, each stalk just one miniscule stitch in a rolling green blanket that stretched to the horizon, the fields interrupted only by the small streams meandering through this part of the state and its grid of gravel roads. Melinda was always amazed at how many shades of green were visible out here, from the pale tones in the tender leaves on the trees to the deep hues of the grasses in the freshly mown yards. Red-winged blackbirds sang atop road signs as they kept an eye on their nearby nests, which were tucked into the wild-growing bushes along the ditches.

  Melinda played a little game as she passed each farm, seeking out anything new, such as a garage being built or a re-shingled house roof. Fall was her favorite time of the year to make this drive, but early summer was a close second. New calves appeared in some of the barn lots, and baby goats and lambs frolicked near their mothers in the front pastures.

  Once Melinda passed the place with the white barn and the red house, whose color scheme was the opposite of most of the farms along the state highway, she started watching for the turnoff to Prosper. She smiled when the green sign with the white letters appeared on the side of the road. It told her the little community was still incorporated, a point of pride for places this small. That meant a mayor and city council, a library, and a little tax money to keep up the streets. There’d been rumbles a few years ago that Prosper might officially disband, but its few business owners rallied with residents to keep the town on the map.

  She turned east at an intersection with a county blacktop, the tower of Prosper’s co-op punctuating the ho
rizon about a mile away. Platted in the 1890s along the railroad line, the community’s founders had big dreams that didn’t quite pan out. The irony of the town’s name wasn’t lost on any of its residents, however. Melinda laughed as she passed the wooden welcome sign, which offered a quaint, colorful painting of Main Street and the town’s motto: “Welcome to Prosper, the great little town that didn’t.”

  There was the inevitable bump-thump as the county highway crossed the railroad tracks just before Prosper Feed Co., where the co-op’s name was still prominently displayed in bold, black letters on the cream stucco of its tallest tower. Prosper’s first commercial structure, a wood-frame train depot that once doubled as a feed store and creamery, was still huddled next to the tracks, its white paint peeling and its windows dark. The current co-op office sat closer to the county highway, square and smug in its cloak of tan metal siding. Several trucks were parked out front, and one man was coming out the front door with a bag of animal feed slung over his shoulder.

  The blacktop next crossed First Street, made a little diagonal jag to the southeast, and began its three-block run as Prosper’s Main Street. The opposite end of the business district was marked by the sea-green water tower just past Fourth Street. Beyond that, the county highway bended again, this time turning straight south, and crossed the Shell Rock River.

  The first block of Main was filled with houses built at the turn of the last century, a few grand Victorians surrounded by bungalows and the occasional four-square house that would have been at home on any area farm. The Methodist Church, a stately brown-brick structure, stood the corner of Main and Second.

  “This is where all the action is,” Melinda grinned and shook her head as she rolled into the second block of Main. Prosper Hardware crowned the middle of the block on her right, a two-story, red brick building with limestone-block details above its windows and on its corners. Display windows flanked both sides of its dark-green front door. A matching awning sheltered the first floor from the ever-changing Iowa weather.