Chance of Rain (2 page)
Authors: Amber Lin
Chapter One
Every morning at 4:00 a.m., Natalie Bouchard pulled down fifty vinyl chairs from the lacquered tables. In a matter of hours, they filled with friends. She shared her space, her food, her heart, and in doing so, she never ran empty. Tired and foot-sore, but never alone.
“Hey, Tally.” Joe’s shout over the clamor interrupted her thoughts. The sheriff blearily waved his empty coffee mug at her. “Fill her up for me, would you?”
“Sure thing. Just wait a—”
Joe slid his empty mug toward her. It caught on a crack in the counter, curled on its side and fell to the floor. Ceramic flew under the heavy prep table against the wall and shattered into the holes of the black rubber mat.
“Oops,” he said with a sheepish expression.
It wasn’t an idyllic eatery, she conceded as she grabbed the broom, but the hum of laughter and gentle ting of silverware were the heartbeat of this town, the diner its heart. Besides, the cracks were part of the charm. Dearling, Texas, never lacked for charm.
Joe leaned over to look at the mess, his beige law enforcement uniform creasing stiffly. “We just bought some new dishes online,” he said. “They’re real hardy. Maybe you could get some for the diner. Finally replace the old ones.”
Okay, sometimes Dearling lacked for charm. She gave him her best proprietress glare, the one she’d learned from Gram. “I wouldn’t need hardy dishes if you didn’t throw them around. And my mugs aren’t old, they’re vintage.”
“That means old,” he muttered. “And I thought the customer was always right.”
“Joe Peterson, I ought to make you come back here and clean this yourself.” When he seemed unaffected by her threat, she added, “I’ll tell Lucy you broke my mug.”
Nothing got results like invoking his sister’s name. The woman was scary and awesome. She was scary awesome.
He put his hands up. “No need to get snippy. I’m sorry I broke your mug.”
“Where is that girl, anyway?”
Joe shrugged. “Probably terrorizing some innocent citizen.”
“Hey, Luce, what can I get you?” Natalie asked the air behind his head.
He jerked around and scowled when he didn’t see her. “Oh, very funny. See if I back you up next time she tries to hook you up on a blind date.”
Natalie grinned. For all her tough-girl bluster, Lucy did like to play matchmaker. “No date around here is really blind. I know every male within fifty miles. Every female too.”
Joe perked up. “Now there’s an idea. I wouldn’t mind seeing you with a woman.”
“Ha! I bet you wouldn’t.” She snapped a dish towel at him before crouching to sweep up the mess. Her tired knees proclaimed their defeat with a loud creak and an ache that made her wince. Right in the middle of the breakfast rush. Well, they’d have to buck up, just like she would. Straightening her uniform and her spine, she headed back out with a freshly made order.
She carried the plates out to the Coopers’ table. A name in the conversation snagged her attention. A particular name that never failed to grab her, despite its irregular and infrequent use.
“So, how are you folks?” Breathless, she leaned against the side of the booth, striving for casual and failing. “Nice day out. Glad the rain stopped.”
Clad entirely in denim, Julie Cooper beamed at her. “We were just talking about the Nolan farm.”
There it was again, that little clench in her heart. “Oh?”
Liam Cooper didn’t look up from his food. “I was down at the local branch last week and heard that they’re putting the screws on the farm.”
She felt awful about it, but she never seemed to understand what Liam was saying. Mostly it was because he had a thick drawl and not much formal schooling, so he tended to speak in his own ways. But he’d also had a stroke ten years ago and had a lisp ever since, which made her frustration now completely misplaced. Only, she had an abiding curiosity for anything related to the Nolan farm.
Julie took pity on her. “They took his water rights, dear. And you know what that means.”
Yeah, she knew what that meant. Now the owner of said farm would never come back. Not that she had ever expected him to.
“Do you think one of the surrounding farms will buy it?”
Liam frowned. “Weather’s a gamble enough around here.”
“Oh,” Natalie said faintly, dismayed yet again.
Julie explained, a worried look on her face. “Not many folks will want to buy a farm without water rights, even if they had the capital. Which most don’t. If he sells the land, might go to an outsider.”
After a few soothing pleasantries, Natalie escaped behind the counter. Outsiders were a scary prospect in Dearling, but it might actually be a good thing. People moved out but rarely moved in. They trickled away, and sometimes she wondered if one day she’d be left tending an empty diner.
* * *
Sawyer couldn’t wait to see this town in his rearview mirror.
Dearling was his least favorite place on earth—not a sentiment he formed lightly. As a Navy SEAL, he had worked and fought in some of the darkest, dankest places on the planet. Fallujah. Kabul. In fucking Okinawa, which was scary more from an ideological point of view than a tactical one.
But he wasn’t fighting right now, not maneuvering or planning or even training. Right now he was just a guy returning to his hometown. He’d left as a scrawny eighteen-year-old kid, with a bus ticket paid for by the U.S. Navy. Now he was stronger, smarter and just as eager to leave.
Driving through the main street, he recognized many of the faded wooden signs, though blackened windows meant some of the stores had shut down. Others had been remodeled, with modern neon signs and spray-painted specials on the windows.
The biggest change was how small everything looked. Sure, he’d bulked up in BUD/S and in the years since, but Dearling had once loomed large in his memories. Now it looked...quaint.
He headed toward the hardware store where the real estate agent had left the keys as well as a list of repairs needed to sell the house. Not surprising, considering it had been empty in the five years since his father’s passing. He was lucky the thing was still standing.
As his truck idled to a stop, he glanced at the duffel bag beside him. Inside was a letter from the agricultural board or something-or-other telling him he’d lost his water rights, followed by official mumbo jumbo about how he could protest the decision. But that would require the land to produce, and he was a fighter, not a farmer.
Ergo, the farm would lose its ability to function...forever.
So he would sell the house, maybe to someone with a neighboring farm that could swallow up the land and use it as overflow. Or maybe to a suburban family that thought the rural setting was the answer to their fast-paced lifestyle. He didn’t care. He had come to handle the sale and disposal of the farm personally. It was far less than his heritage demanded of him but all he had to give.
The sign read Hal’s Hardware, though there’d never been a Hal as far as Sawyer knew.
He pulled into the parking lot just as a tall woman stepped off the sidewalk, directly in his path. With quick reflexes, he stopped the truck, but the spin of the tires sprayed her with water from a puddle. He winced. With the chill in the air, that water had to be pretty cold.
Which was confirmed when the woman marched up to him, frozen droplets spraying from her short hair. She was a little intimidating, though he wouldn’t admit that on pain of death.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Sorry about that,” Sawyer said. “I didn’t see you there.”
She arched her brow. “Look, mister, you may be new around here, but on Dearling’s main road there are more people than cars. Next time it could be Mrs. Fenworth and her potbelly, you understand?”
“Her...potbelly?” He was all for straight talking, but that just seemed rude.
“Her
pet
potbelly. You know, the pig.”
“Ah.” Yeah, this town was still nuts. “Like I said, ma’am. I’m real sorry.”
She squinted at him. “You look familiar. And you definitely have the drawl. You from around here?”
“Just passing through.”
A partial truth. The last thing he needed was to stir up old trouble. The curiosity was there, and something that felt oddly like nostalgia, but it was best he didn’t get involved. He wouldn’t bother the town. The town wouldn’t bother him. Once he sold the farm, he wouldn’t have any ties to this place at all—exactly what he had always wanted.
Inside the hardware store, the owner, some guy not named Hal that only looked vaguely familiar, peered at him from beneath thick bushy brows. “You Wilson’s boy?” he asked, referring to Sawyer’s father.
Sawyer cleared his throat. “Yes, sir. That’s me.”
He harrumphed. “I never did like Wilson.”
That made two of them. “Sorry about that.”
Not here ten minutes and already Sawyer had apologized twice for things he had and hadn’t done. His old patterns of failure and disappointment were as strong as ever. Once again, it was obvious he didn’t belong.
There really was no place like home.
* * *
As quickly as the breakfast rush had filled the place, they filed out. Natalie cleaned up in preparation for the lunch crowd, though technically this was also her break time.
Mr. Winterman sat down at the end of the counter.
She sidled up beside him. “What can I get you?”
“Texas toast,” he said with preemptive insistence. “I don’t want any cheap substitutes like last time. Two eggs, sunny side up, and four pieces of bacon.”
“You know you can’t have that, Mr. Winterman.”
“I don’t care what the damn doctor said. I’m going to live my life the way I want. Now serve me my food, woman.”
She cocked her head. “Do you find this approach successful with the ladies?”
“When I’m paying them, I do,” he growled, then seemed to rethink his words. A ruddy blush spread over his deeply tanned skin, and he muttered to himself about mouthy waitresses.
She laughed as she carried the dustpan into the back. One of these days she was going to get that man to smile.
Barry, her cook, glanced up as she dumped out the ruined mug. “Another one?” he asked sympathetically. He understood the value of the original dishware. Either that or he was really good at placating the crazy boss-lady.
She ran this place, but it wasn’t really hers. Natalie had been granted power of attorney over the estate when Gram had become mentally incapacitated. The reminder of her grandmother always strengthened Natalie’s resolve to keep things the way they were, the way they had always been. Even when the inevitable happened and she was left truly alone, the diner would still be Gram’s.
“Afraid so,” she said. “Mr. Winterman’s here. He wants the usual.”
“Scrambled egg whites, grilled turkey bacon and whole grain toast,” Barry said. “Coming right up.”
On her way out of the kitchen, she heard the muted tones of the cowbell that hung on the door. Her friend Lucy stalked into the diner, her slim white T-shirt and jeans splattered with mud and a black cloud over her face.
“What happened to you?” Natalie asked, handing her some napkins.
“Ugh. Some guy wasn’t watching where he was going. Sprayed me with twenty gallons of water.”
“Who was it? The Durston boys?”
Lucy waved her hand as she swiped at her clothes with the other. “No, some outsider. And anyway it was an honest mistake. I had stepped off the curb. I’m just lucky he didn’t hit me.”
“Hit you? Well, that’s just dangerous, and I don’t care if you were off the curb. I know Mrs. Fenworth is always wandering around with Piggles.”
Lucy snapped her fingers. “Ah, that’s it. I can never remember the name. One time I called it Piggy and you’d think I insulted its mother the way Mrs. Fenworth looked at me. Honestly, I’m not sure I can say Piggles with a straight face.”
Which turned out to be true, because as the name left her lips she cracked a smile.
Natalie laughed with her. “Do you want to change? I probably have something upstairs that could fit you. You’re a whole head taller, but a skirt ought to work just as well.”
“A skirt.” Lucy shuddered in her damp Levi’s and flannel work shirt. “No, thank you.”
At the counter, Natalie poured her a steaming cup of coffee, hoping it would take the chill off.
Joe frowned. “What happened to you?”
Lucy ignored her brother and took a long sip of her coffee—black, of course.
Mr. Winterman looked up from his low-cholesterol breakfast and blinked at Lucy’s damp appearance. “Don’t tell me the storm hit already.”
“Nope,” Lucy said. “This is from the puddles left from last night’s drizzle.”
Rain was common this time of year, which helped keep the temperature down and was vital to the newly planted crops. Unfortunately, it occasionally escalated into tropical storms and hurricanes. As a result of all the moisture and activity in the skies, storms were always brewing somewhere off the coast.
Even when they did culminate in a land-based storm, battering poor Galveston for the umpteenth time, they were little more than a thunderstorm by the time they reached central Texas. Despite this, the exact coordinates of the current storm system in the Gulf, its wind speeds, its trajectory, were an endless source of conversation.
“When do you think it’ll touch down?” Joe mused.
“Can’t say.” Mr. Winterman shook his head. “Any day, though. Could happen.”
“Yeah, but it probably won’t reach us,” Joe said, being a fairly reasonable and levelheaded individual despite his youthful antics and current sheriff’s uniform. Or maybe because of them.
Mr. Winterman grunted. “Right when you least expect it, that’s when it’ll happen.”
Just then, the cowbell over the door clanged. Natalie looked up, dragging her gaze over well-hung jeans, a faded T-shirt...and a face that damn near stopped her heart. Scruffy and solemn and—
damn
,
damn
,
damn
—familiar.
“Sawyer,” she breathed.
There was too much noise in the diner for him to have heard her, too much distance between her behind the counter and him just inside the door, but his gaze honed in on her. Recognition flared in his eyes. And something else. Something dark and hot and clenching tight in her belly.