First Step Forward Page 2

  “Excuse me. Are you OK?”

  It’s a woman’s voice, soft but clear, laced with apprehension. Of course. It would have to be a woman seeing me like this. All I can manage in response is a grunt.

  Her voice lowers and I can sense her moving down the aisle toward me.

  “Do you need some help?”

  “Yes. Shit, yes, I need some help.”

  When she gets within a foot of me, I can smell her; she’s covered in the scent of something coconutty. It quickly becomes the best damn thing I’ve experienced tonight and in reaction, I suck in a heavy inhale through my nose. She probably thinks I’m completely insane, but I just need this tropical breeze–scented woman to hand me a bag of salts, and we can both be on our way. She can head back to the beach, or heaven, or wherever she came from. I point down at the low shelf.

  “I need a bag of Epsom salts. If I bend down to get them, I might never get back up. I just need the salts, please. I’ll give you anything if you just hand me a motherfucking bag of them. Anything.”

  Then she laughs, a gentle laugh, absent of judgment or cruelty, and she clearly isn’t laughing at me because the sound of it is more pitiful. I slowly draw my eyes open just as she starts to duck under my arm, dragging her scent along the way. All I can see is the top of her head, a pile of wildly messy, light auburn waves in a sloppy bun, a red bandana wrapped around to secure the longer pieces back from her face. She’s twisted her way between me and the shelving, on her knees and leaning toward the bottom shelf.

  Then she looks up to face me—from between my goddam legs—while pointing at the shelves.

  “Big bag or small?”

  Christ. It’s possible I’ve developed a brain tumor in the last few hours, because she’s fucking gorgeous. Pretty tan skin, hazel eyes, and full pink lips. In the right side of her nose is a tiny gold hoop piercing. She’s wearing men’s pajamas—not the kind that girls normally wear, pink and covered in kittens or some crap. No, these are throwback-style, oversized, old-man’s pj’s in navy blue.

  When she tilts her head back and lifts her arm to point more directly, just shoot me now, because I get a clear view of some very nice, very naked cleavage. The kind of cleavage I might normally endeavor to spend a great deal of time exploring. I shut my eyes and groan, hoping that not being able to see any more of her skin will somehow make this more manageable.

  “Big bag. The biggest one down there.”

  I hear her shift forward and another waft of the coconut whatever-she’swearing rises. When I open my eyes again, she’s dragging a bag off the shelf and then slips out from her perch on the floor in a graceful squat-hop over my planted foot.

  Good job, asshole. Just stand here while this woman saves you from yourself, and don’t even bother trying to do the decent thing and move out of the way while she drags a bag off the floor for you.

  The raised-right, polite version of me—who takes full appreciation of fine-smelling, pretty-cleavage-possessing, helpful women—has been replaced with the supreme dickwad version of myself. I normally reserve that guy for the media and people who test my patience. But right now, no matter how gorgeous this woman is, I’m just a guy who can’t muster much beyond a grunt because his job sometimes involves being a human punching bag.

  Once I orient my limbs properly, I turn and shove away from the security of the shelves. Miss Hawaiian Tropic thrusts the bag toward me and tilts her head incrementally, taking inventory, likely trying to determine exactly what kind of a jerk I am.

  “This won’t help with a hangover—you know that, right? It’s probably dangerous to soak when you’re drunk anyway.”

  Blinking, I crease my forehead tightly. “I’m not drunk; I’m in pain. Rough day at work.”

  She nods slowly and narrows her eyes.

  “You should add some lemongrass oil to the water. It’s good for detoxifying impurities and soothing inflammation.”

  Raising her index finger toward the ceiling to stop me from going anywhere, as if that were even a possibility, she shuffles off down the aisle and peers around. Craning her head down a few random rows, she disappears for a second and then pops up again, her soft-looking waves moving slightly with every step.

  Returning, she hands me a small bottle. “Shake a few drops in after you get the tub full.”

  My eyes drop to the unreasonably tiny print on the bottle. Before I can make out any of the words, I notice her feet. Shoeless, but clad in a pair of thick, ugly, oatmeal-gray ragg wool socks.

  “Are you not wearing any shoes?”

  She looks down and lets out another gentle laugh.

  “Yeah. That. Nope, no shoes. No worries, though—I don’t think I stepped on any big-city syringes or anything. I just crossed the street from the hotel; that’s all.”

  She points across the street to a downtown hotel, and I trace my gaze over her face again as she looks away, that tiny gold hoop dangling from her perfect little nose. Combined with the bandana wrapped around her messy hair, it’s decidedly a hippie-tastic look, but fuck me if it doesn’t look completely hot on this girl.

  When she drops her arm and faces me, the pain threatening to shred my skull in two hits a crescendo, because her pretty lips drop open a few inches as she stares for a moment, then starts to babble. As she speaks, her eyes don’t leave mine and no particular expression covers her face; she simply blathers on and proceeds to devour me with her eyes.

  “They wanted seven dollars for the bottled water in my room. Seven dollars, can you believe that? It’s appalling. Seven dollars for twelve ounces of water they poured from a municipal tap and bottled in non-biodegradable plastic loaded with BPAs and f-toxins. But the tap water in that hotel tastes like radiation and fluoride conspiracies. I figured I could at least pay slightly less for the privilege of poisoning the earth and everyone on it. Lesser of certain evils or whatever.”

  Nodding, I wait for her to break this staring game, because I’m planning to enjoy it as long as I can. Until she gives in or a blood vessel breaks loose in my brain, I’m just going to stand right here and enjoy the view.

  Eventually, she mumbles something about landfills and going to hell, then slips past me and makes her way to a refrigerated case at the back of the store. Once she arrives at the counter to pay, I sidle up and drop my bag of salts next to her bottle.

  “Let me buy this evil, guilt-ridden bottle of water for you. As a thank-you for your help.”

  Her eyes drop and don’t meet mine again. Not even when she mumbles a protest, then a thank-you. I watch her toddle across a four-lane street, jaywalking in those wool socks, then slip through the revolving door of the hotel.

  Just a few buildings down the street, I stumble through the entrance of my warehouse loft building and jab at the elevator call button until the creaky beast finally appears. Charming authenticity, my ass. Tonight I’m convinced the developers of this warehouse conversion kept the prewar-era elevator in place because they’re cheap bastards.

  Once inside my loft, I fill the tub and shake five drops of that oil into the water. Stripping my clothes off and letting them land in a pile, I slip into the heated water and sit there as long as possible, until my limbs feel manageably heavy and my mind promises sleep without pain.

   2

  (Whitney Reed)

  I’m definitely not imagining things.

  The loan officer is actually checking out my chest and my legs, and probably has plans to inspect my rear view when he finally ushers me from his office. While I sit here and try my hardest to sound professional, yet enthusiastically passionate about my orchard, he’s staring at my cleavage. The whole thing is beyond pathetic, but the fact that I’ve considered how to best use his gross inventory of my assets—and not the kind on my business proposal’s balance sheet—to my advantage is even worse.

  I sat there and tracked his gaze for a good ten minutes after I arrived, drifting from my legs and up over my chest repeatedly as he asked me questions that had very little to do with my b
usiness. Where was I from? (Washington State. A little town built by a sawmill baron and now kept afloat by people who would hate to admit to its un-green beginnings.) How did I spend my time when I wasn’t working? (I scoffed internally, but claimed an interest in cooking and reading, the sort of half-hearted answers that seemed appropriate for half-hearted questions.) Was I living out there all alone? (This one was tricky. Saying yes meant the smarmy bank officer with my address might put his car’s GPS to use. “Alone but never lonely” was my glib answer).

  I showed up here, dressed in a loose purple batik skirt that hit just above the knee and a scoop-neck white eyelet blouse, determined to look effortlessly bohemian while wowing him with my business acumen and playing to what I hoped was his compassionate nature. Yet all it seems I’ve managed to do is wow him with my minimally exposed cleavage and my gams. Both of which are just fine as gams and cleavage go, but what I really need is for him to admire the reports and data I’ve compiled in the three-ring binder I just handed him. Without that, I won’t secure the re-fi I need to save my struggling orchard and home. Short of that or a Mother Earth miracle, I’ll be homeless by the New Year.

  Just when I thought I had found a home, a place where the dirt beneath my feet was mine, I’m on the path to losing it all. And to make it even worse, my fate rests in the hands of a kid with ink on a business degree that hasn’t even had a chance to dry yet.

  “Your revenue forecasting is very aggressive, Miss Reed.”

  He flips pages as he speaks, so quickly I can only assume he is skimming without reading a word. Perhaps the graphs were all he needed to see, the straight-line trajectory I used to forecast the next five years and that would turn my tiny apple farm from sinking ship to smooth sailing. It’s all there, the black and the white of my story. Every thin dime it would take to save my future is noted and footnoted, despite the way Mr. Campbell continues to flick each sheet like a toddler with a picture book.

  “Aggressive? Maybe. But I think you can see that between the marketplace’s desire for organic, locally harvested fruits and the moderate yield expansion design I’m using, it isn’t overly optimistic.”

  Yes. That’s the way I rehearsed this role. Go me, with all the confident answers. At that moment, I was a seasoned pro instead of merely a grief-stunted woman who left her hometown three years ago and drove until she found a place that seemed idyllic enough to get lost in.

  Mr. Campbell slaps the binder shut and tosses it on his expensive desk. It lands with a flat thud, and I fix on that spot for a moment, curtailing the instinct to launch myself toward it and swipe the precious evidence of my failing business into my arms. Campbell leans back in his high-backed leather chair and runs a hand over his jaw. Another perusal of my chest follows.

  If only this year hadn’t been so chock-full of meteorological misfortunes. First, there was the frost. One lone night in April when just a few hours of below-freezing temps killed off nearly ninety percent of the tender blooms on my trees. Then came the damp, wet weeks that followed, which only served to stymie pollination and eventually kept some fruit from setting the way it should.

  Then it hailed. A last gasp of late summer storm that within fifteen minutes put more fruit on the ground than was left on the trees. Once the hailstorm ended, I walked the tree rows and did the only thing I could. I started to gather the heavily bruised and gouged fruit off the ground, dragged it all into the house, and spent the next four days making apple butter. Waste not, want not, I thought … at least it was something I could sell.

  Unfortunately, what people really want is whole fruit, bags and boxes of apples they can load into the back of their Subarus and use to create their own masterpieces at home. Apple butter is a novelty at best, one that takes time, sugar, lemons, jars, lids, bands, and labels to make—not exactly a profit powerhouse.

  Mother Nature and her grumpy attitude was all it took. My business is too young and tenuous to withstand even one bad season, plus I had already blown through the savings I’d accumulated over the winter from the temp jobs I took on, just trying to keep myself—and my trees—properly fed and nurtured.

  Now it’s mid-October, when I should be smack dab in the middle of harvest, running ragged from hitting every market I can; instead I’m three months behind on my loan and formally in foreclosure. While a sale date hasn’t been set yet, I know I have four months at best to see if I can find someone, somewhere, to take a chance on me.

  Moving his hands to the top of his head, Campbell begins to rock back and forth in his chair.

  “Here’s the thing, Whitney … Can I call you Whitney?”

  I nod my head and give him a small smile. One side of his mouth turns up in a knowing smirk, nearly convinced in his own mind that I might crawl across his desk any minute now and drop my insatiable self in his lap.

  “Excellent. So, as I was saying, Whitney … three years ago, you bought a ten-acre farm with a dilapidated house, no water rights, and three hundred apple trees, half of which were so diseased and neglected they had to be removed. You paid cash outright for this behemoth of an orchard, and then proceeded to take out a business loan to keep the operation afloat, using the property as collateral. Now, here you are, with your existing loan in foreclosure, looking for a way out.” He pauses and flips open my intricately prepared binder. “And this year, you’ve shown just two thousand dollars in sales. Can you see my hesitance here, Whitney?”

  I lean back into my chair and do my best to stay strong. I promised myself all the way up here that I wouldn’t lose hope, that I’d do whatever it took to persevere.

  Straightening my spine, I grip the chair’s armrests tightly.

  “I understand, Mr. Campbell, I do. But my business plan is sound and there’s tremendous market demand out there. I’m not just looking for a way out. What I need is a bank that can look beyond my situation, see all the untapped potential that’s there, and help me find a way to restructure the debt so it’s more manageable.”

  “My loan committee isn’t interested in untapped potential. If I take this to them, all they will see is an orchard with no revenue to speak of, owned by a woman who’s already ninety days behind on her current loan.” Sighing, he leans forward and shoves the binder my way. “I wish I had a different answer for you, Whit. I wish there was a way we could start a relationship here—trust me, I do.”

  OK. That’s it.

  Final. Straw.

  In the span of three minutes, he went from “Miss Reed” to “Whitney” to “Whit.” If I stay another five minutes, he will have the word honey on the tip of his forked tongue. Then he alluded to starting a relationship with me, complete with a licking of his lips that signified his definition of a relationship would likely include me purring in his ear about how we might come to a creative compromise.

  This is now, officially, a wasted trip. I drove three hundred miles, over Kenosha Pass in fifteen-degree weather, in a truck with an intermittently operating heater and no defroster. Then I dropped a few hundred dollars on a hotel room so small that the bathroom door wouldn’t even open fully before whacking the side of the bathtub. I spent thirty-seven dollars on a room-service club sandwich for dinner and fifteen dollars on blueberry pancakes for breakfast. And they didn’t even have the decency to give me more than one pat of butter for the pancakes. Who uses only one pat of butter on pancakes? No one.

  Standing up, I tuck my sacred binder into the crook of one arm and reach across the desk to shake Campbell’s hand, drawing the folder up to cover my chest as I do. His hand is clammy. And he gives a cold fish of a handshake. I strengthen my grip to prompt him, but he gives nothing back. He’s just a kid with a bad handshake.

  And I’m just a woman out of options.

  When I lurch out the doors of the bank, my dress-up kitten heels clicking across the concrete, I walk determinedly until I round a corner out of sight. Once the bank and Campbell are sufficiently behind me, I find the side of a building and lean back with my head tipped up to see the sli
ver of sky visible between skyscrapers.

  With the overwhelming size of those buildings looming around me, things feel impossibly bleak. Instead of if, it’s only when. When I lose my little farm, when they come to collect everything that no longer belongs to me, I’ll have nothing to hold on to except the realization that I squandered every dollar that my father’s untimely death left me with. I’ll be adrift. Again.

  Back inside the shoe box–sized hotel room, I strip off the batik skirt and ball it up, shoving it into one corner of my suitcase, leaving on the black leggings I wore underneath. The kitten heels are tossed in favor of a pair of wool socks and chore boots. The white eyelet blouse comes off to reveal a white cami. I slip on a zip-up hoodie, and when I put my whiskey quartz necklace back on, the negativity of Campbell and failure dissipates. I press my palm to the crystal, hard enough that the rough edges of it nip at the skin of my chest, and take a deep breath. If my father could see me right now, he would shake his head, call me a hippie, and proclaim he loved me anyway.

  Once my body feels like my own again, I zip my suitcase shut, taking a last look around the room to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. Satisfied that all my meager belongings will return with me, I drop two dollars on the bureau for housekeeping, wishing it could be more, and go to throw open the heavy hotel room door, tossing my suitcase out into the hallway with a swift thud. It bounces awkwardly and before it tips on its side, a hotel uniform–clad man is reaching out to grab it. Behind me, the door shuts with a loud click and I leap forward, trying to save my own bag. We stumble against each other and when he steps back, he looks entirely flustered for a moment, before regaining his composure and straightening his tie.

  “Ms. Reed?”

  I manage to right my suitcase and find my balance so neither of us will topple over.

  “Yes?”

  “Ma’am, your credit card was declined this morning. We tried to call you earlier, but we need you to settle your bill before checking out.”