Sugar Plums for Dry Creek. Janet Tronstad

a letter to someone who’s right across the street. No, we need to be neighborly and tell her to her face. It isn’t fair that we let her think she’ll make a go of it here with that school of hers.”

      “Well, I can’t talk to her,” Charley said. “I’m the one who promised her everything would be fine.”

      “Too bad she wasn’t the one who was deaf,” one of the other men muttered.

      “I’m not deaf. I had a bad connection is all,” Charley said. “It could happen to anyone.”

      “Maybe he could go talk to her,” the other man said, looking up at Judd. “He seems to hear all right.”

      Judd felt his stomach knot up at the idea. “I got to count me out some nails. I’m building a fence.”

      He walked back to the shelves that held the boxes of nails. Amanda and Bobby trailed along after him. Judd looked down at Bobby. “Why don’t you take your sister and go across to the café and put your order in for some of that cocoa? Tell Linda I’ll be along in a minute.”

      The Linda who ran the café was also his landlady. She was renting him the Jenkins place, with an option to buy come next spring. Judd had saved the few thousand dollars the state had given him when it settled his uncle’s estate and added most of the other money he’d gotten to it for the past six years.

      He’d started out working as a ranch hand, but the wages added up too slowly for him, and so he’d spent the next couple of years on the rodeo circuit. He’d earned enough in prize money to set himself up nicely. Right now, he had enough money in the bank to buy the Jenkins place, and he’d already stocked it with some purebred breeding cattle. He could have bought the place outright, but he wanted to take his time and be sure he liked it well enough before he made the final deal. So far, the ground had been fertile and the place quiet enough to suit him.

      Judd watched Amanda and Bobby leave the hardware store before he reached into the nail bin and pulled out another nail. Fortunately, the older men had given up on the idea that he should talk to the new woman. They probably realized he’d botch the job.

      Outside of talking with Linda at the café and smiling politely when Mrs. Hargrove had delivered the books the school had sent him when he’d decided to homeschool the kids, Judd hadn’t had a conversation with a woman since his cousin had left the kids with him. Well, unless you counted the court clerk he’d talked to on the phone.

      Judd never had been much good at talking to women, at least not women who weren’t rodeo followers. He had no problem with women at rodeos, probably because they did most of the talking and he always knew what they wanted; they wanted a rodeo winner to escort them around town for the evening. That didn’t exactly require conversation, not with the yelling that spilled out of most rodeo hangouts in the evening.

      As long as his boots were polished and his hat on straight, the rodeo women didn’t care if he was quiet. He was mostly for show anyway—if he was winning. If he wasn’t winning, they weren’t that interested in talking to him, or even interested in being with him.

      The few temporary affairs he’d had with rodeo followers didn’t leave him feeling good about himself, so eventually he just declined invitations to party. By then he was counting up his prize money after every rodeo anyway, with an eye to when he could leave the circuit and set himself up on his own ranch.

      In those years, Judd hadn’t known any women outside of rodeo circles, and he thought that was best. Judd never seemed to know what those women were thinking, and he didn’t even try to sort it all out. He liked things straightforward and to the point. The other kind of women—the kind that made wives—always seemed to say things in circles and then expect a man to know what they meant. For all Judd knew, they could be speaking Greek.

      Judd had a feeling the new woman in Dry Creek was one of that kind of women.

      No, he wasn’t the one to talk to her about what she was doing here, even though he had to admit he was curious. She sure knew how to hang a sign in that window.

      Chapter Three

      Lizette shifted the sign with her left hand and took a deep breath. It had taken her the better part of three days to get the practice bar in place along the left side of the room and the floor waxed to a smooth shine. She still had the costumes hanging on a rack near the door waiting to be sorted by size, but she’d decided this morning it was time to put the sign she’d made in her window and start advertising for students.

      She could still smell the floor wax, so she’d opened the door to air out the room even though it was cold outside. At least it wasn’t snowing today.

      Lizette had bought a large piece of metal at the hardware store yesterday and some paint so she could make her sign. The old men sitting around the stove in the store had obviously heard she was setting up a business, because they were full of suggestions on how she should make her sign.

      Of course, most of the words centered on the Baker part of the school’s name, but she couldn’t fault them for that. She was heartened to see they had so much enthusiasm for a ballet school. If this was any indication of the interest of the rest of the people in the community, she just might get enough students to pull off a modified Nutcracker ballet for Christmas after all. She’d even assured the men in the hardware store that no one was too old to learn some ballet steps. In fact, she’d told them that lots of athletes used ballet as a way to exercise.

      The old men had looked a little dismayed at her comments, and she wasn’t surprised. At their age, they probably didn’t want to take up any exercise program, especially not one as rigorous as ballet. “You’d want to check with your doctor first, of course,” Lizette added. “You should do that before you take up any new exercise program.”

      The men nodded as she left the hardware store. All in all, they’d been friendly, and she wasn’t so sure she wouldn’t get a student or two out of the bunch. And if she didn’t get any students, at least she’d gotten some good neighbors. One of them had already been over to check on the smoke coming out of the small kitchen off the main room when she’d been baking some cookies earlier and had forgotten they were in the oven. He’d even offered to bring her over some more flour if she was inclined to continue baking. He’d expressed some hope of a cherry pie.

      The chair Lizette stood on gave her enough height so she could lift the sign and hook it into the chain she’d put up to hang it with. The sign had a white background with navy script lettering.

      Lizette planned to take a picture of the sign later and send it to Madame Aprele. She wasn’t sure she’d tell her old teacher that she didn’t have any students yet, but she could tell her that the school was almost ready for classes now that the practice bar was in place. Lizette had planned to use a makeshift practice bar at first, because she couldn’t afford a real one. Madame Aprele had surprised her by sending her one of her own mahogany bars. Her old teacher had shipped it before Lizette left Seattle, and Linda, next door in the café, had kept it for Lizette until she arrived.

      Lizette had called Madame Aprele, thanking her and insisting that she accept payment for the equipment. It would help enough, Lizette explained, if she could just pay for the bar over time. She didn’t add that she had no need of charity. Madame Aprele agreed to let Lizette make payments if Lizette promised to call her with weekly updates on her school.

      At first Lizette was uncomfortable promising to call Madame Aprele, because she knew her mother would disapprove. But then Lizette decided that whatever problem there had been between her mother and Madame Aprele, there was no need for her to continue the coldness.

      Twenty years ago when Madame Aprele had bought the school from Lizette’s mother, the two women had been friends. But, over the years, Jacqueline spoke less and less to Madame Aprele until, finally, her mother wouldn’t even greet the other women when she picked Lizette up after ballet class.

      At the time, Lizette didn’t understand why. Now she wondered if her mother didn’t look at Madame Aprele and wish her own life had turned out like the other woman’s.