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“Yay!” Maeve said as she grabbed the door handle and pushed the door open.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Miss Ellen O’Reily.” Ellen cringed at the familiar voice. Chalmer Leggins was a familiar sight around town. He’d graduated with Ellen and had been considered a good athlete. He’d been the high school quarterback, although not good enough to play at the college level, and he hadn’t gone to school after his high school career. Instead, he married the head cheerleader, Shanna, and they had two kids together. They’d been divorced for several years, and Chalmer had gotten a job as a truck driver for the Powers family trucking.
Irritatingly, he showed up at a lot of Ellen’s dog competition events, and any time she saw him in town, it felt like he chased her down.
She’d been very clear that she wasn’t interested, but Chalmer had a hard time taking no for an answer. She had been hoping that he wouldn’t be here this evening. Of all the people in town who could buy her basket, Chalmer would be her last choice. Not because she hated him, just because anytime she was even a little bit nice to him, he took it as encouragement and asked her out, not understanding her no and going so far as to show up at her house to pick her up, even after she told him she wasn’t interested in going anywhere with him.
“Hi, Chalmer. I’m sorry I can’t talk. I need to rush in.” They weren’t late or anything, she just didn’t want to get stuck talking to him.
“No problem. I can walk in with you. I’ll carry your bucket.”
“No. Actually, it’s kind of special, and I don’t want it to get upset.”
“What? You think I’m not going to be careful enough with your little bucket?” he said, grabbing both buckets out of the back seat and holding them up with one in each hand, held by the handles with his pointer fingers.
Ellen watched with her heart in her throat. Not necessarily for her bucket, but if he did anything to Maeve’s bucket, Maeve would be devastated.
“Hey! That’s mine. I want to carry it,” her little voice chirped up.
“Which one?” he said with a teasing grin that didn’t seem friendly. “This one?” He held up the one with the pink flower.
“Yeah. That one’s mine.”
“If you want it, you need to say the magic word,” he said as he slowly began to twist her bucket around on his finger, making slow circles. Ellen resisted the urge to grab for it. That would only make things worse, because it would make Chalmer laugh, and he would continue to tease them. The best thing she could do was to play it cool and not give him the attention and reaction he wanted.
“Please. Please give me my bucket,” Maeve said, and she still sounded cheerful, although there was a little wrinkling in her brow that bespoke her concern for her bucket.
Ellen couldn’t blame her, she was worried herself. He had started to swing it faster, around his finger, almost as though he were trying to see how fast he could get it to go. Or how long he could do it before they threw a fit and started crying for him to stop.
For Ellen’s own bucket, she wouldn’t have said a word, but for her sister’s bucket, she would give him what he wanted. “That’s enough, Chalmer. You’re going to spill it.”
“Oh, I’m going to spill it,” he said in an affected female voice. “Don’t you have any faith in me?” He gave her an arrogant look as he began to spin her bucket on his other finger, until he had both buckets going round and round each finger, holding them up and away from his head and body.
“Of course we have faith in you. I’m sure you can spin buckets with the best of them. But we would like to have our meal so that we can go in and put them where they go. We have things to do.”
“You’re going to drop it,” Maeve said, and she no longer sounded happy.
“You’re going to drop it,” Chalmer mimicked in his affected voice again.
“Chalmer—” Ellen began, but it was too late. He had moved just a little bit, and Maeve’s bucket went flying off his finger, smacked into Ellen’s car, tipped over, and all the contents ended up on the ground with the bucket on top.
“No!” Maeve let out a keening cry as she dropped to her knees, trying to pick the things up quickly, but the country-fried steak had fallen out of the container and lay on the ground right in the dirt. The mashed potatoes had come to the same fate. She could probably salvage the cookies, although they were cracked, and the pie had broken.
About the only thing that could be salvaged would be the sweet corn cake that had been wrapped in aluminum foil.
Ellen tried to tamp down her anger. Anger never helped anything. Although, it would certainly make her feel better if she could haul off and smack Chalmer right in the nose.
“Oops,” Chalmer said, not sounding sorry at all. Then his brown eyes landed on Ellen. “Maybe the next time I ask you to go out with me, you’ll say yes.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, her lips pulled back, but she had them buttoned tightly closed, so she didn’t give him a piece of her mind, one that she couldn’t afford to lose. She’d never been happy anytime she allowed her mouth to run when it shouldn’t, and this would be no different.
“Here. I’ll set this one down very, very carefully so that nothing happens to your precious bucket. And I’ll make sure I know which one to bid on,” he said with a laugh before he slammed her bucket down on the ground and sauntered off.
He was so irritating.
“I’m so sorry about your bucket,” Ellen said to Maeve who had touched the country-fried steak that lay on the ground before she realized that there was no way she was going to salvage any of it. “Our buckets were exactly the same other than my blue flowers. Can you salvage your pink flower and put it on my bucket? You can have it.”
“Really?” Maeve said, hope entering into her eyes.
