Dry Creek Sweethearts. Janet Tronstad

in Dry Creek.”

      Dry Creek had a hardware store, a café, and a part-time bakery. That and a dozen or so houses were all that was around, except for the church, of course. The church was the heart of the community. But the café was central, too. No one even needed directions to the café. It was right there for everyone to see. Linda had never worried about having any signs up except the Open and Closed one in the big front window.

      “I bet people will pay more to eat in a place with a name,” Lucy said. “Don’t you think?”

      “I’m not going to charge more just because there’s a name over the door. Besides, the food tastes the same whether or not we call ourselves something.”

      “Lance says we need a name. That it will increase business.”

      Linda sighed at that. Besides her, the only other friend Duane had in high school had been Lance Walker, a boy who was part Sioux and had come off the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota with a chip on his shoulder that rivaled Duane’s. The two were competitive with each other about everything, but they had become firm friends.

      Lance had been sent to Dry Creek to live with a distant relative, Mr. Higgins, just as Duane had been sent to live with his great-aunt. Lance didn’t have Duane’s wanderlust, though. He’d stayed in the area after high school, and now he rode rodeo in Miles City. After he’d won a couple of events, he’d begun looking for sponsors for the shirt he wore on his back. Linda had offered to sponsor him even if she didn’t have a name to advertise on the shirt, but he refused, saying he was taking advertising not charity.

      “Everything isn’t always about dollars and cents,” Linda said. “Lance knows that.”

      Lance had his pride, and Linda had begun to wonder if he was serious when he kept asking her to close the café early some Saturday night so she could go to dinner with him in Miles City. At first, she thought he was asking her out because of old times, but she was no longer sure. She wished she could feel half the emotions about Lance as she did about Duane’s old dog, Boots.

      Linda told herself she didn’t want to wind up some disappointed old woman who was still bitter because her first love had left her a million years ago and she’d never moved on. Anyway, it would be good to date again. She could hardly use the excuse of raising Lucy much longer, especially now that her sister was a sophomore in high school.

      Linda used to love to date. When she was Lucy’s age, she had her hair streaked with red and her mascara loaded with glitter. She and Duane used to drive into Miles City every Saturday night just to go line dancing. Sometimes Lance would go along with them and the three of them bumped shoulders with strangers and gave wild coyote yells when the line broke apart. It was more aerobic exercise than dancing really, but they liked the feet-stomping excitement of it. They’d wind down with a soda or malt at a late-night diner. Duane liked strawberry. She chose vanilla.

      Those days seemed like an eternity ago. Linda couldn’t recall when she had first started feeling like such an old woman. She was only twenty-seven years old and some days she’d rather spend the evening with her feet propped up than go anywhere. Maybe she needed some new vitamins.

      Of course, she had plenty of energy during the day; it was just when she thought of dating that she got tired and wanted to stay home in her old bathrobe and watch television.

      “Mama always told us to let our light shine,” Lucy said softly. “I think she’d want you to give the café a nice name.”

      Linda’s eyes softened as she looked over at her sister. Lucy was carefully marking a place on the wall to put a nail so she could hang her framed letter. Lucy didn’t really remember their mother saying that about their light; she remembered Linda telling her that their mother had said something like that.

      Their mother hadn’t said much about love or happiness or anything that a young girl could hold on to so Linda added a few quotes of her own to the stories she told Lucy on the theory that their mother might have said something like that if she’d given her and Lucy more than a passing thought. Her mother had been so caught up in mourning the death of their father years ago that she hadn’t paid much attention to either of her two daughters. The admonition to stay away from Duane Enger was the only advice her mother had ever given her about men.

      Linda knew a young girl needed more than that. She needed to feel loved. She also needed to have some words to guide her. And someone to listen to her and understand what she was saying.

      “Maybe you’re right,” Linda finally said. “A name for the café couldn’t hurt us.”

      Lucy smiled up at her. “You won’t be sorry.”

      “Just think of something without Jazz in it. All we need is a simple name. Something like the Morgan Café or the Sunshine or—”

      “Definitely not the Sunshine Café,” Lucy said. “Not in this mud.”

      The rain was a blessing in this part of Southern Montana. For years, there hadn’t been enough of it and the ranchers had been worried about drought. Now the skies were being overly generous with moisture, which made a lot of people, and their cattle, happy even if it didn’t do much for the floor of Linda’s café.

      Still, Linda knew that happy ranchers made good customers, so she thanked God for the rain.

      “We’ll think of a name on the way home, after I finish mopping.” Linda congratulated herself on moving Lucy’s attention away from the letter. Hopefully, once it was hanging on the wall, Lucy would forget about it.

      Linda pulled her mop out of the bucket. The lemon smell of her cleaning solution cut through the old coffee smell. Linda prided herself on her black-and-white floor. That, along with the gray Formica-topped tables, gave the whole place a fifties look. And it was neat and orderly, just the way she liked. She had an old malt machine on the counter and two-dozen malt glasses hanging from a rack above it. She was also saving up for a genuine ruby-red jukebox to put next to the door of the kitchen. When that happened, everything would be perfect.

      And, if the decor wasn’t enough to inspire a name, the café itself should be. She made an honest cup of coffee and charged fair prices. She ran a working person’s café that offered good value. There should be a name in all of that somewhere.

      “The name shouldn’t be too froufrou, though,” Linda told her sister. “Remember who most of our customers are. Ranching families. We could just call ourselves the Dry Creek Café and everyone would be happy.”

      Lucy wasn’t listening. “I should write and tell the Jazz Man about his guitar hanging on our wall.” Lucy adjusted the framed letter she’d just hung. “I think he’d want to know, especially if we have a name.”

      Linda sighed. Maybe she’d made a mistake in letting Lucy think life was filled with more love floating around than it really was. “He gets lots of letters, honey. Tons of them probably.”

      “But not letters from Dry Creek,” Lucy said confidently. “This is his home. He wants to hear from us.”

      Linda didn’t answer. What could she say? So she just pushed her mop across the floor. The rain was coming down steady still. She’d just seen a flash of lightning and she wanted to get the floor mopped quickly so they could get back to the farm before the roads got any worse. She didn’t want to get stuck in the mud.

      “I think he might want to know about all the rain we’ve had this spring,” Lucy continued. “He knows how dry it usually is so he’ll be happy. His great-aunt’s lilac bushes are going to be in full bloom pretty soon if the rain ever stops.”

      A person had to drive past the Enger driveway in order to take the road out to the Morgan farm. It always made Linda sad to see the old Enger house standing there without anyone living in it, so she tried not to look in that direction as she passed.

      It was time to stop avoiding things, she decided. She needed to put the past to rest.

      She might just stop someday soon at the wide place where the Enger driveway met the