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“The house is my treat,” I said, and her dark gray eyes flared with surprise. “I certainly don’t expect you to pay for it, not when it was my idea in the first place. And while Hazel has a booking later in the month, you still have several weeks when you can stay here as you try to get things figured out.”
“But I want to do something to help,” Chloe protested. “I didn’t come here just so I could freeload off you. Yes, I wanted your advice on all this witchy stuff, but once I saw you had a store, I thought maybe I could work for you…if you needed an extra pair of hands.”
An extra pair of hands? Definitely — and much more than that, if she was up to the task. She’d said she’d worked at Chipotle, so she obviously had experience working with the public, but that wasn’t quite the same thing as having to manage a New Age store all by herself.
I knew I was getting way ahead of myself, especially considering how reticent I’d been to hire anyone else after the whole Melanie Knowles debacle. Still, sometimes we needed to stop and pay attention to the messages the universe was beaming to us, and in this case, it sure felt as though some higher power had decided to take pity on me and send the one person who might keep me from having to close Once in a Blue Moon after all.
“Maybe,” I allowed, and then smiled. “Why don’t you tell me about your experience?”
As it turned out, Chloe had been an assistant manager at Chipotle during her last year of college, so she knew more about dealing with inventory and placing orders for stock than I’d originally thought. It wouldn’t be too hard for her to learn the nuances of managing the shop, and I had to imagine the pace would be much, much slower.
First things first, though. After she explained some of what her work had been like, I realized it was time for us to head out of town if I was going to have even a prayer of getting those cornbread muffins together in time. Chloe climbed into the passenger seat of my Renegade and glanced around somewhat wistfully.
“My friend Andrea bought one of these last year,” she said. “She really likes it. But the only way she could afford the car was to have her parents give her the down payment, and there was no way I’d ask mine to give me that kind of money.”
“They’re strict about that sort of stuff?” I asked, curious despite myself. It was one thing for me to be all noble and pretend I didn’t care what Jordan Fairfield had done with his life, but I knew deep down that I had a burning curiosity to know what the man was really like, how he interacted with his family.
“Strict?” Chloe repeated, then shook her head. “I don’t know if ‘strict’ is the right word. They’re just careful with money. My brother Justin and I always had jobs once we were old enough to work. Actually, after he graduated from college a couple of years ago, he went to work full-time for the computer company he’d been with since he was a senior in high school. I guess it makes sense — teachers don’t exactly earn the same as doctors and lawyers, even though they probably should.”
While I agreed with her on that point, I couldn’t help saying, “Your mother doesn’t work?”
“She does now,” Chloe responded. “But when Justin and I were little, she stayed home. It wasn’t until after I was in first grade that she got certified as an EKG tech, and that’s what she does for a living.”
Somehow I guessed that EKG technicians didn’t make piles of money, either, although I knew it wasn’t my place to ask. The picture I was getting from Chloe was that of a solidly middle-class family, one that had been able to afford a home in a decent area and have a modest lifestyle, but definitely not with the kind of extra money lying around that would have enabled them to go on lavish vacations or buy fancy cars for their children.
I couldn’t help contrasting this scenario with what I’d learned about Tom’s kids’ upbringing — private schools, brand-new cars when they turned sixteen, their every need pretty much catered to. The result had been a couple of people I couldn’t help thinking of as anything except spoiled brats, even though they were now in their thirties…and even though I, as someone who liked to believe she’d done some serious work on herself, shouldn’t have been thinking of them in such judgmental terms.
But man, did they rub me the wrong way.
“Well, I really loved my Bug,” I said. “But in a minute, you’ll see why I needed to switch over to four-wheel drive.”
In fact, the turn-off for the narrow lane that led to the house was coming up right then, so I slowed down and made the turn. The second we were off the highway, we began jouncing our way along, the Jeep’s automatic four-wheel drive handling the washboard road with aplomb, even if it wasn’t the smoothest ride in the world.
“I see what you mean,” Chloe remarked with a grin. She reached up to grab the “Jesus handle” overhead, although her smile remained in place.
“We’ll probably get the drive resurfaced before the monsoon rains come this summer,” I said, slowing down a bit so my stomach wouldn’t continue to smack into the steering wheel. “But we’ve had some cold nights, so we wanted to make sure we were past any freezes before we started the work.”
“You have to pay for the maintenance? I didn’t see any signs saying it was a private road.”
Clearly, my half-sister paid attention to what was going on around her. “Technically, it isn’t,” I replied. “But ours is the only house on this lane, and it’s actually on tribal lands. It’s just easier to take care of it ourselves instead of having to submit a request to the elders.”
I didn’t bother to point out that even such a big project wouldn’t be too much of a hit to our budget, mostly because I didn’t see the need to go in depth about my finances to someone I’d just met, long-lost sister or no. Most people in town knew I’d inherited some kind of money, but the exact amount was something I never talked about.
Chloe gave a thoughtful nod, and we continued the rest of the way in silence…which wasn’t for very long, since the house was only a hundred yards or so down the drive. I pushed the remote for the garage door and we pulled inside, then got out so we could walk over to the house.
I could tell she was keenly interested in everything, from the overall architecture of the pueblo-style adobe house to the band of cottonwoods that followed the line of the creek at the edge of the property. It was too early in the year for them to have leafed out, but the branches had a thin film of green indicating that they intended to come to life soon.
As soon as I opened the front door, my little long-haired chihuahua, Sadie, came bounding into the entryway, her flag of a tail swishing this way and that. And she went right up to Chloe, who bent down so she could scratch behind my pup’s wispy ears.
“What an adorable dog! What’s her name?”
“Sadie,” I replied, inwardly relieved that the dog seemed to have taken to Chloe right away. Like most dogs, Sadie was a pretty good judge of character, and if she liked my half-sister, then it seemed likely the girl wasn’t hiding any deep, dark secrets.
“Hi, Sadie,” Chloe said, and gave the dog a final caress of her ears before she straightened again. “I’m very happy to meet you.”
Sadie’s tail kept going, and she followed the two of us into the living room, where Chloe set her purse down on the hearth.
“I think you’ve made a new friend,” I said, and my half-sister’s mouth turned up in a lopsided smile.
