Please Remember This (6 page)

When had he given up on that dream? Tess stared down at the pencil cup on her desk. Grandpa had asked her to go back to Kansas, but he hadn’t told her about the schoolhouse. He had told Nina. Why?
Did you love her more than you loved me?

Mr. Greenweight was Willow Place’s resident Internet expert. His son had given him a computer, and his grandchildren had taught him how to use it. He overwhelmed the other residents with the information he acquired. The more alert ladies had learned never to mention the name of any medication they
were on. Two hours later Mr. Greenweight would come clumping down the hall, the canvas bag attached to his walker full of postings about the medication’s perilous side effects.

Tess asked him if he could find out anything about the Lanier Building or the Prairie Bell School in Fleur-de-lis, Kansas. Right after lunch he brought her a printed document full of bright graphics. The town had its own Web site, designed to attract tourists and investors.

A local historian would start digging up the riverboat in the fall—Tess remembered the brochure about that—and the town was attempting to attract new businesses. One page of the site was devoted to commercial properties for sale or rent, and although there was nothing about the school, the Lanier Building was listed with a price so low that Tess, accustomed to California real estate, had to smile. It would feel like buying a doll house.

And the building already had her name on it.

A store selling only vintage linens did not seem like a good idea. If by some extraordinary stroke of luck she did have customers who did buy things, it would be too hard for her to keep up the inventory; finding and restoring the linens was too labor-intensive. And she did not want to open a bar, at least not one that stayed open late, serving alcohol. But what about a coffee bar? A Starbucks-type place—wasn’t that today’s equivalent of the Long Branch Saloon? Lots of the coffee bars around her neighborhood also had little things for sale. She could sell her linens and other gift items. She could be Miss Kitty on caffeine.

Gunsmoke
was set in Kansas. She had never
thought about that before. All roads kept leading to Kansas. The Lanier Building was in Kansas. Grandpa had scratched his initials on a schoolhouse in Kansas. Nina Lane had written her books in Kansas.

It was time to go back to Kansas. There was something there.

Chapter 3

 

D
r. Matt Ravenal set his parking brake. He didn’t need to. On the wooded bluffs south of town you sometimes needed a parking brake, but Sierra Celandine lived on the flat river plain to the north. You never needed a parking brake out here. But setting a parking brake took—what?—a good three, four seconds, and that was another three or four seconds of not walking up to Sierra’s front door.

She’d been renting this four-room tenant house since she’d shown up in town twenty-six or -seven years ago. The big farmhouse across the road had burned down about ten years ago when the renters had left candles lighted all night. Fred Hobart, who owned both that house and Sierra’s, hadn’t been too cut up about the fire. He had good insurance, and in truth, it was getting to be a nuisance owning the house that Nina Lane had lived in. Strange people appeared there to pick the lilacs and chant at the moon.

But Sierra’s little house looked good. It was neatly painted, with a new screened-in front porch. She had put up a greenhouse, a good-sized aluminum drying shed, and a fence around the field where she grew her herbs.

Matt got out of the car. There were a couple of high school kids out in the field—Celandine Gardens was one of the steadiest sources of minimum-wage employment in town. Matt’s own kids had worked for Sierra during their high school years. Besides their three daughters, Matt and his wife Carolyn had raised his two nephews, Phil and Ned.

Matt waved at the kids. He knew them all, and they knew him. That was what happened when you were the only doctor in town. “Is Sierra around?” he called out.

“She’s in the hothouse.”

Matt lifted a hand, thanking them, and followed the gravel drive toward the back of the property. The hothouse had a full-view screen door; the glass inset panels were still in place. The light inside was thin and watery, and the rough plywood tables were nearly empty. It was July. The seedlings that would have been crowding the tables in April were flowering in the fields.

Sierra was seated at a long work bench. She looked up at the sound of the door.

When she had first come to town, she had worn aviator-style glasses, and she had parted her long hair down the middle. The two heavy slabs of hair had screened her face into a narrow slit. That was all you noticed about her, the hair and the glasses. But now her hair was short and her glasses were gold-rimmed and small, emphasizing how delicate her features were. And her skin … Matt had told his wife over and over that its beauty came from good genes as much as from any Celandine Gardens moisturizer.

Carolyn had laughed. “You’re probably right. But in case you’re not, I’m using anything she sells.”

Sierra stood up when she saw Matt. “Matthew Ravenal, what a pleasant surprise.” Over her long skirt she was wearing a canvas butcher’s apron. “Can I offer you some tea?”

“That would be nice.” Sierra’s teas were interesting. She blended them herself, and most of the flavors Matt didn’t have much use for, but every so often one would be great.

Sierra took off the apron and slipped her bare feet into a pair of clogs. She was wearing a scoop-necked T-shirt. There’d been times, especially in that first year or so after Nina Lane had died, when Matt had worried about how thin she was, but she looked healthy now.

And he was not here about her physical condition. Her health was none of his business. She had never consulted him professionally. If she had routine checkups—and Matt suspected that she didn’t—she went out of town.

She told Matt to go wait for her at the Adirondack chairs over by the pear tree. “You could move one into the shade, but on a day like this, you can feel the sunlight right here.” She touched the lower curves of her cheekbones. “Tilt your head back and you can feel the vitamin D flowing through your body.”

The vitamin D flowing through his body? This was going to be worse than he had thought.

It was a clear day, bright and hot; a strong wind had swept away yesterday’s mugginess. Matt sat in one of the Adirondack chairs, and chairs like that almost
forced you to tilt your head back. The strong sunlight did feel good.

Annoying people would be a whole lot easier to take if they were wrong all the time. Sierra was right precisely the wrong amount. She was often full of such goofy earnestness that no sane person could stand to listen to her. But she was right just often enough that you needed to. This time she was right. He could have sat here all afternoon.

“This tea is new,” she said as she crossed the grass a few minutes later. She was carrying a tray with a pitcher and glasses. “I think it may be too sweet.”

It was. He had to struggle to keep his face straight.

“Now, Matthew”—she waved a finger at him—”you don’t need to pretend with me. We’ve been through too much together for that. This tea tastes like artificial fruit-scented lip gloss, I know that. There’s an interesting undertaste, but it takes you a while to notice it. Now, tell me what sends you out this way.”

Matt put down his tea. “Phil sent me. I’m here to talk business.”

“Oh, no.” She pretended to shudder. “Not business. That’s so dull.”

He didn’t believe her, not for a moment. She didn’t find business dull. But the price of dealing with Sierra was at least pretending to believe these self-myths of hers.

“I know that, but things are happening in town,” he said. “Changes I want to talk to you about.”

“Business may be dull, but change is thrilling, isn’t it?” She hunched up her shoulders as if she were giving
herself a little hug, and Matt could feel the performance coming on. “I love change. There’s such an energy that emanates from change. What is that law of thermodynamics, about there being a constant amount of energy in the universe? I don’t believe that. Change creates its own energy, don’t you think?”

Well, no, he didn’t, at least not on a molecular level. However, thermodynamics was at least something he had heard of; most of the time when you started talking to Sierra, she was going on about the Eternal River of Healing, which was not something he had learned about in medical school.

She hadn’t always been this way. She hadn’t always been silly. When she first moved here, she cared about things that mattered. She had been completely wrong, but you could talk to her. You could engage with her, you could argue with her. She would listen. Everything was different now. She was up into the clouds, floating around, saying things that had no relevance to anything.

And why was she talking as if she liked change? She had been renting the same house for more than twenty-five years. And every time there was any kind of change in town, she hated it. The Kmart had been open for nearly a year, and as far as Matt knew, she had yet to set foot in it.

“You’ve been downtown, haven’t you?” he asked.

Her face tightened. “What else could you have expected?”

A year ago a discount superstore, a Kmart, had opened on the highway south of town. It had a pharmacy, a grocery, and a small lunch counter with
white plastic bistro chairs. It had housewares, automotive supplies, clothing, and a gardening center. The store was bright and clean, with wide aisles, low prices, well-stocked shelves, and convenient parking. People used to cross the river and do their discount shopping in St. Joe or Kansas City, both of which were in Missouri. Now people could keep their money in Kansas. While it was hardly a Kansas-owned business, at least the jobs were in Kansas and the state was collecting sales tax.

But just as its opponents had predicted, the Kmart had killed the downtown.

Dennis Gatkin, the drugstore owner, hadn’t even tried. He closed his place and went to work as the Kmart pharmacist. “So what if I’m not my own boss anymore? I’ll make sure people get as good service, and you’ll see, the prices will be lower.”

The prices were lower on everything at Kmart. Two other stores had closed before Christmas, and four more since. Now you went downtown only for the bank, the dry cleaners, and the municipal building. Red-bordered
FOR SALE OR LEASE
signs studded empty store after empty store, and through the dusty windows you could see the card racks and display counters that the business owners had left behind, the empty cartons that they had been too tired to throw away.

The Town Council had gotten Kmart to pledge to hire people full-time, giving them benefits. So Dr. Matt was seeing new faces in the office, people who had never had health insurance before. That was great, but Barb Eislinger, whose husband had the electronics store, hadn’t brought her kids in for camp
physicals this spring. She couldn’t afford camp or the checkup.

This was what Matt’s older nephew, Phil, had taken upon himself to fix.

Phil was a lawyer, aged thirty, with a real leader-among-men personality. As a kid, he had liked organized activities: Boy Scouts, team sports, and clubs. Since Matt’s wife Carolyn was the daughter and sister of Kansas governors, he had gotten interested in politics early. After law school he had gone to Washington, D.C., to work on the staff of the local congressman, but when he saw what Kmart had done to the downtown area, he had come home. He had opened a law office, but as far as Matt could tell, he was too busy to practice law. He had gotten himself appointed to the town’s Economic Development Council; he spent all his time working on Fleur-de-lis’s problems.

There was no solution within the local economy. That was clear. There was also little chance of attracting a new industry, and no chance of getting a new prison built. Phil’s idea was to revitalize Fleur-de-lis’s downtown by encouraging weekend tourism.

His brother Ned, Matt’s younger nephew, was a historian. He was going to be digging up the riverboat this fall. It was a major undertaking and had already attracted more publicity than Ned had the patience for. People were going to want to come look at the project, and Phil wanted to give them something to spend their money on once they arrived in town. The primary draw would be Ned’s excavation and the exhibition of any artifacts that he uncovered,
but those visitors needed to come downtown and spend money.

With the congressman’s help, Phil had already gotten a federal beautification grant, and Main Street’s cracked concrete sidewalks were being dug up and relaid with pretty brick. The utilitarian streetlights had been replaced by scrolling black wrought-iron ones that arched elegantly over the streets. State money was providing low-interest loans to business owners to paint their storefronts and buy new awnings. Financial packages had been put together to tempt new business people.

Phil went looking for these new businesses, approaching individuals no one else would have thought to talk to. A very nice, almost elderly lady, Mrs. Ballard, Dennis Gatkin’s older sister, had been the first to open one. She had been collecting teacups for years, and her kids didn’t want them. Since Dennis still owned the pharmacy building, she could arrange her collection on his shelves rent-free. Charles Dussel, who was a bit of a bird nut, was going to sell bird seed and his handmade wooden birdhouses in a shop he was calling Happy Little Bluebirds. Barb and Pete Eislinger were opening an old-fashioned sweets shop in their electronics store to sell fudge, ice cream, lemonade, and popcorn. Phil had persuaded Mr. Twitchell, the shoe-repair man, to carry a line of leather gift items. He was having less success at getting Mrs. Cavender to install a cappuccino machine in her bakery. “It’s so much work for just one cup,” she fussed.

But even if there had been a cappuccino machine,
none of these new businesses would bring people into town. The one business that might draw people, independent of the riverboat excavation, was Celandine Gardens, Sierra’s mail-order line of herbal soaps and lotions. It was clearly a successful enterprise. A number of well-heeled patrons came to the Nina Lane Birthday Celebration only for the sake of the Celandine Gardens table. A full retail outlet might bring people to Fleur-de-lis year-round. But thus far, even the very persuasive Phil hadn’t been able to get Sierra to consider it. So he asked Matt to talk to her.

Phil’s motives were not pure. He never concealed that. The congressman was retiring at the end of this term, and Phil wanted his job. “But people are going to say that I’ve had it too easy, that I’ve never done anything for the town. I need to come home and prove myself.”

His efforts weren’t universally popular. Some people hated change so much that they couldn’t be realistic. They hated the Kmart, they hated the stores closing, they hated them reopening as tourist shops. They seemed to think that if the town did nothing, things would eventually go back to the way they used to be.

That wasn’t going to happen. Fleur-de-lis would never again have a downtown that serviced its local residents. It was going to attract either tourists or no one at all. That was the choice.

So Matt was here talking to Sierra.

“You could really do a lot to bring about change,” he said. “I know Phil’s talked to you about this. It will be a lot easier to get other people to open shops
if we can promise them that you’ll be there. You’ll bring in the traffic.”

“What are you saying?” she asked. “You want
me
to open a store? Me? A store … that’s so capitalist.”

How could anyone who had been running a successful business for twenty years complain about capitalism? “You’d meet a lot of interesting people, Sierra.”

“But a store is such a commitment, Matthew, such a restriction of one’s freedom. Opening times, closing times. You know me, I’m a free spirit. I can’t be tied down.”

Matt was suddenly angry. She was a free spirit? Maybe the dead were free to be spirits, but the living had obligations and responsibilities, things that did tie you down. “Ten years ago the School Board asked if you’d come in three times a week and teach an hour of French or German—nobody cared which—and you said you didn’t want to be tied down to a full-year contract. Since then, for a whole decade, every single kid at that high school has had to take Spanish because you didn’t want to be tied down, and I can’t see that you’ve gone anywhere.”