Romeo Fails Read Free Page B

Dorsey’s arm at her touch.
    “Yeah, me too,” she finally managed to say, finding herself momentarily tongue-tied in the face of Sarah’s double entendre and Maggie’s cheerful round visage innocently beaming at them both. They waved as they went out the front door.
    Oh, no, Dorsey thought as they left. This was not good. For one thing, she was a terrible liar, so she always told the truth. The truth was just so much easier to keep track of. On the other hand, it had gotten her into a lot of trouble over the years. People are much more comfortable with their facts liberally sugar-coated, she’d found. She’d decided at an early age that she’d rather speak the truth or be silent. Which didn’t leave her with much to say in Romeo Falls. But even if she did want to fib, she could never lie to Maggie—when you’ve sold Girl Scout cookies door-to-door together, presided over the marriage of your GI Joe and Barbie dolls countless times and mutually suffered through puberty, high school and small-town melodrama for twenty years, there’s just no room for deception. And she didn’t want to deceive Maggie. But this wasn’t her secret to tell…
    All of a sudden, her summer was looking a lot more complicated.
    * * *
     
    Shaw wandered in around four thirty to help her close. Dorsey set him to sweeping the floor. The old hardwood floors were pretty clean, but it gave him something to do and would make him look busy if Goodman showed up unexpectedly, which he was wont to do. Good was easily exasperated by Shaw, the youngest and dreamiest of the Larue siblings. Shaw wasn’t lazy, but he had a tendency to lose focus if a task didn’t engage him. Dorsey had encouraged him to go to the community college in Grover City after high school, but Shaw couldn’t quite seem to settle to anything. As his big sister, Dorsey worried about him a little from time to time, but, in truth, Shaw seemed happy with his life. He had a job and a roof over his head and that was more than a lot of twenty-three year olds could say. She’d had no interest in going to college either, so she could hardly pester him about that.
    She found herself worrying more and more about her older brother as well. Goodman seemed to get a little angrier, a little more stressed out with each passing year. He had inherited the hardware store when their father, Hollis, died several years back. Dorsey didn’t mind about the store as it wasn’t the future she wanted and she knew it was what Good wanted. She’d gotten everything she needed from her father when he was alive—not only had he given her his unconditional love, he’d also taught her everything she knew about carpentry and woodworking. The workshop Hollis had built behind their house was now her refuge. There, amongst the power tools and the smell of sawdust, she could indulge her hobby of “re-imagining” the antique (or just plain old) furniture she found at garage sales and curbside. In a perfect world, she would be making a living off her hobby. But Romeo Falls was far from a perfect world, in more ways than one.
    She knew she had a job at the hardware store as long as she wanted one, since Good was fair-minded and generous to a fault. Despite the always uncertain incomes of farmers and the unpredictable economic times in general, Larue’s Swingtime Hardware usually made a small profit. The three of them were scraping by, but only because the Larue family had owned both the store building and their house for three generations. But the new home center in Grover was a looming threat on the horizon, like a funnel cloud seen from afar on the prairie.
    Sometimes, lying awake in the middle of the night, Dorsey thought about packing a bag, getting in her little pickup and just taking off for some place like Chicago or Denver. California even. Anywhere far from Romeo Falls. But she knew that was just a fantasy. She couldn’t leave Good in the lurch like that. And everything else aside, taking off would