Best Laid Plans (Garnet Run 2)

But as the sun crested the trees, Charlie couldn’t afford to be nothing anymore. He was responsible for things, so he made himself head for home.

Inside the kitchen door sat Jane, waiting impatiently for her breakfast. Her black and gray fur was ruffled like she’d just writhed herself awake, but the tufts at the tips of her ears stood straight up as always. She meowed at him, a sound like tearing metal, and he bent to offer her his hand. She twined herself around his ankles instead, rumbling a purr of welcome and demand.

“Hi, baby,” he cooed to the huge cat, and scratched between her tufty ears.

A drop of sweat dripped off his nose and landed on her paw. She looked up at him as if he’d defiled her.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” he soothed, and Jane, placated, jumped onto the counter so she was at kissing height.

Charlie had never let anyone else see him do this. He couldn’t be sure, but he’d always imagined that the sight of a very large man exchanging nose bumps and whisker kisses with a very large cat might be cause for amusement. And Charlie and Jane took the ritual seriously.

Even on the counter, Jane had to go up on her back legs and Charlie had to bend down. They locked eyes, Jane’s glittering green to Charlie’s placid hazel, and Jane ever so slowly bumped Charlie’s nose with her own—a tiny, cool press, her luminous eyes so close to his own that Charlie imagined he might follow the rivers of color inside her. He slow-blinked once, and she slow-blinked back to him. Then she brushed her whiskers over his beard and he kissed the top of her furry head, right between her ears.

Ritual completed, Jane yipped—a sound very similar to her metal-tearing meow, but shorter and more demanding—and Charlie poured her food.

“I’m gonna take a shower and then get to the store,” he told her.

She crunched her breakfast.

“I saw a hawk out at the promontory,” he told her.

She crunched her breakfast.

“I’m gonna put you on a leash someday and take you out there with me,” he told her.

She crunched her breakfast.

“Okay, maybe I’ll just take you to the store and you can be a shop cat and get pet by strangers,” he told her.

Her meow of protest rang through the house and Charlie smiled as he stepped into the shower.

* * *

Matheson’s Hardware and Lumber opened at eight, and Charlie arrived by 7:30 to make sure things were in order. There was always something: the register was out of receipt tape; 12d nails had found their way into the 16d nail bin; the key-cutting machine was out of blanks; someone had spilled coffee in aisle three.

Charlie walked the store, plucking this screw out of that bin, straightening coils of wire, and sometimes just running his fingers over the shelves he’d installed and the inventory he’d ordered. He knew every inch of this place, and there was a comfort to its predictability, even if it sometimes smothered him.

Marie arrived as he was turning on the lights, carrying her blue camping thermos of coffee. She high-fived him, tied on her apron, and shooed him out from behind the cash wrap. She never spoke until a customer entered, saving every iota of energy for the day’s interactions.

He’d known Marie for ten years and she was the best manager he’d ever had. Also his best friend. Fine, his only friend. Marie didn’t lie and she didn’t sugarcoat—mainly because she didn’t say much. But when she did, it was considered, concise, and final.

Charlie spent the first few hours of business squeezed into the desk in his tiny office at the back of the shop. It had been a closet when his father ran the store, and Charlie’s broad shoulders barely cleared the walls. His father had done all his bookkeeping at home on the kitchen table—perhaps why, when Charlie took over the business, the books had been a hopeless mess.

He processed orders and filed receipts, answered a few emails and returned some calls. This part of the job wasn’t something he enjoyed, but it had to be done and he was the only one to do it.

When Marie took her lunch break, Charlie went into the store to do what he liked more: helping customers find the right tools for their projects. He listened carefully to what they wanted to achieve, then walked with them, gathering the things they’d need and explaining different ways they might proceed. He loved problem-solving; the more arcane the project, the better he liked it.

He was just walking Bill Duff through replacing his garbage disposal when he heard a clanking and scraping sound from outside.

Through the glass front door, Charlie saw an ominously smoking car grind to a halt in the parking lot. It looked like it had originally been a late-eighties two-door Chevy Beretta but had since been Frankensteined of multiple vehicles’ pieces, many of them different colors and some of them clinging desperately together, helped only by electrical tape and grime.