Her jury, the ones who had ruled her unworthy.
She pasted on a smile. “Can I get anyone anything else?”
“I’ll take more water,” Nora said, tapping her glass.
“Can I get some Coke?” This from the youngster. Oh, she should probably start calling him by his name. “No problem, Josh.” She headed out of the room to the long soda fountain counter.
The Summit Café hummed with conversation on this Friday afternoon, a day off for Mercy Falls schools for some sort of teacher training day. The smell of burgers on the grill, crunchy onion rings, fresh-spun malts, and house-ground coffee made the café one of her favorite places, ever, to work.
She’d made the rounds, from the convenience store, working at their twenty-four-hour kitchen, deep-frying wings and assembling pizzas, to summers working in the park as a trail guide, to pulling espresso shots at the Last Chance Coffee Shop. Even that one stint as a waitress at the Gray Pony Bar and Grill. After all, a girl without a formal education couldn’t turn down a job.
She should probably see if she could get back on staff at the Pony for the winter. After all, given the conversation in the next room, she’d no longer have to keep her weekends free for youth activities.
Apparently, they didn’t need her anymore.
Willow filled a glass with Coke, grabbed the water pitcher, and headed back to the room. The group stopped talking when she entered—small mercies—and she set the glass down in front of Josh, then filled Nora’s glass.
Pastor Hayes touched her arm as she passed by. “Bella comes home today,” he said quietly. “She was hoping you’d call her.”
Willow smiled, nodded, crazy tears burning her eyes as she fled the room.
Silly. It wasn’t like she wouldn’t see these kids again. But Carrie’s words had rung in her head all week. “She’ll never be on staff at the church, because frankly, she can’t be trusted to make wise decisions.”
She tried not to let the words dig a hole in her chest but . . .
It might be true. After all, she’d stranded them on a mountaintop only a few months ago during the flood of the century.
She wandered by the rest of her tables—a family on vacation, a group of teenage boys fresh in from some grass-stained practice. Maybe rugby players. She thought she might have recognized one from a youth event, but he said nothing. Another table of ladies—they held books and were in rapt discussion—ignored Willow as she filled their glasses.
She put the pitcher down on the table at the booth where Jess and Sierra sat. Sierra was finishing the last of her banana chocolate shake, and Jess was picking at her tater tots. As usual, Jess hadn’t quite gotten all the paint off her hands—Willow spotted a smudge of pink.
“Paint break?” she asked.
Jess looked up at her, her mind clearly somewhere else because she blinked a moment, then smiled. “Yeah. I think Pete is coming over later to start tackling the upstairs. We need to gut the bathroom.”
“I can’t believe he’s doing all this for free,” Sierra said.
Willow glanced at her tables and slid in beside her sister, just for a moment. “Oh, I know why he’s doing it—he’s getting paid in hang-out time with Jess.”
Jess’s mouth opened, then closed, and she frowned. “No—I mean, sure, we’re friends, and we have a good time together, but we’re teammates. I promise you, he doesn’t think about me in any other way.”
“Right,” Sierra said, and Willow glanced at her.
“Seriously,” Sierra continued. “I see the way Pete looks at you at the ranch. And yeah, you two have fun, but under all that teasing, I think he’s looking for a way to ask you out.”
“Oh trust me, that’s not what’s happening here.” Jess added a shake of her head, a wry smile, and picked up a tot.
Silence filled the wake of her denial, and she looked up. “What?”
“No, you tell us, what,” Sierra said, and Willow nodded.
Jess lifted a shoulder. “Nothing, just . . .” She sighed. “After the bear attack, he brought me home and . . .”
More silence.
“Jess, do I need to take those tots away?” Willow said.
Jess looked up, wrinkled her nose. “Fine. I thought he was going to kiss me, and . . .”
For a second, just a flash, Willow was back in Sam’s arms, tasting his mouth on hers.
“He kissed you?” Sierra said.
“No. I thought he was going to kiss me. We were goofing around, as usual, and then things just got real serious, real fast, and he took a step toward me—close enough so that we probably could have kissed . . .”