“Nails?” Her brain instantly took her to manicures.
“Hardware store.”
“Oh.” She deflated a little. Was it too much to ask for Monroe to have a spa? She gave herself a mental smack. Priorities, she reminded herself firmly. Life over facials. She realized that Hugh was still eyeing her with that annoying mixture of amusement and suspicion, and all her frustration at the unexpected and unwanted turn her life had taken coalesced into a hardened ball in her stomach. “Why are you here?”
“I went to the post office.” He lifted a handful of letters. “I heard they had free mail there.”
The practical answer made her building indignation collapse, and she wanted to laugh at herself. What had she expected him to say—that he was stalking her? She scrambled for a response that was witty or even halfway coherent, but she had nothing. The way he was holding back a smile, making his cheek crease in that too-adorable way, wasn’t helping matters.
“Okay.” Jules poked her head outside, interrupting Grace’s scattered thoughts. “Enough flirting with the new girl, Hugh. Go to the station and bug Theo and Otto for a while. I’m sure they’re missing you.”
Hugh turned his gaze away from Grace, and she was suddenly able to breathe again. “I’ve been banned from the station.”
“Then go to the viner.” Jules grabbed Grace’s hand and started towing her toward the store entrance.
“The what?” Hugh sounded like he was about to laugh again.
“Viner.” Jules was still moving away from Hugh, pulling Grace with her. “We got sick of saying ‘the diner at the VFW,’ so we started calling it the viner.” She hauled the door open and almost shoved Grace through, calling “Bye, Hugh,” right as the doors closed, leaving him outside.
“Thank you,” Grace said. All of Jules’s siblings were already scattered around in different sections of the store. Now that she was out of reach of his strange magnetism, Grace’s original fears about Hugh came flooding back. She lowered her voice to just below a whisper. “Do you think he knows something?”
“About you? Based on the month I’ve known Hugh,” Jules whispered back, “I’d say he’s fishing. If he knew something, he’d act on it.”
A flush of relief burned through Grace, and she put a hand on a nearby counter to steady her. “Good.”
“Now are you ready to shop?”
Grace looked around the store, and her heart sank. “No?”
With a laugh, Jules grabbed her hand again, this time pulling her to a rack of heavy coats. “Too bad. Winter is coming, as they say. What do you think of these insulated coveralls?”
“No.” Grace could deal with a return to thrift-store shopping, but she drew the line at insulated coveralls.
Still grinning, Jules exchanged the adult onesie for a down coat. “How about this, then?”
“You just showed me the coveralls to make the coat look better,” Grace accused, but she was fighting a smile as she accepted the jacket to try.
“It worked, didn’t it?”
Jules flipped through the rack, and Grace was vividly reminded of just a few days ago. When she and Penny had been looking through clothes, it was as if they’d been in a whole different world. The expensive, brightly colored fabric of the dresses, glowing like jewels in the sun, made the drab thrift store with its buzzing fluorescent lighting seem even shabbier and so very demoralizing. Grace had been so hopeful and happy and secure in her perfect future, and now… She glanced around the store, the familiar musty odor bringing her childhood back to life in full smell-o-vision, and bit back a sigh. Now she could only hope that she’d have a future.
Her face must’ve shown her thoughts, because Jules said softly, “Hey.” Grace met her steady, serious gaze. “It gets easier.”
Forcing a smile, Grace looked down at the coats to hide that her eyes had filled with tears. Setting her jaw, she forced them back. It would have to get easier. After all, how could it get much harder?
Except for a tiny, elderly woman sitting behind the checkout counter, they were the only ones in the store. It was eerie, this lack of people.
“What stays open?” Grace asked as Jules dumped an armful of clothes in her arms.
“What?” Jules added another pair of jeans to the stack. It looked like the pants were lined in flannel. That couldn’t be flattering. “Go try these on.”
Grace obediently started toward the dressing room, although she’d already decided the flannel-and-jeans was a no. Honestly, how cold could it get? “You said that a lot of the stores close in the winter. Which ones stay open?”