Picket Fence Promises. Kathryn Springer

Jerry’s, and never come out. Hiding. I’d turned it into an art form. Esther Crandall, a friend of mine at the Golden Oaks Nursing Home who practically oozes wisdom from every pore, told me that one of God’s favorite words is surprise and I am now a card-carrying believer that it’s true.

      The proof was standing next to a black limo. Alex Scott was in Prichett.

      Surprise!

      He was staring in our direction, his shoulders slightly hunched against the chill in the air. That might have had something to do with the fact that he was dressed for California in late October, not for Wisconsin. We knew better. My winter coat was already on red alert, hanging on a hook beside the door with my wool gloves tucked into the pockets.

      I could feel Elise and Annie looking at me. My toes suddenly curled inside my shoes as if they’d formed their own survivalist agenda. My brain picked up the signal. Make a break for it. Unfortunately, Annie’s fingers were still woven into mine. I couldn’t run without dragging her along with me and she’d just found out a month ago that she was pregnant with twins. It probably wouldn’t be fair to the little newbies to get them involved in my mad dash out of Prichett.

      I could tell the second he recognized me. His hand lifted in a hesitant wave and he started walking toward the park, which up until five minutes ago had been a quiet retreat from a stressful morning in which I had to use scissors and half a jar of peanut butter to get a package of bubble gum—chewed—out of a four-year-old girl’s hair while her mother watched in an almost catatonic state.

      “We’ll talk to you later,” Elise said, peeling my hand away from hers.

      “You can’t leave me alone with him.” Breathe, Bernice. In. Out. In. Out.

      “You’ll be okay,” Annie said, but there was a shadow of a frown between her eyebrows.

      “You called him,” Elise reminded me.

      I had called him. Right before I’d chickened out and told Phoebe, his publicist, not to tell him that I’d called.

      “I called him but I didn’t expect he’d show up here! Where am I going to put him?” I demanded. “There is nowhere in this town that I can hide him. Candy probably has a five-pound sack of birdseed with his name engraved on it already.”

      As I’d said before, Candy Lane was Prichett’s mayor. Somewhere in the fine print that outlined her mayoral duties, it must have said something about hunting down unsuspecting tourists and gifting them with a bag of birdseed—she also owns the feed store—or sending them to Sally’s Café for a piece of pie. On the house. They had to pay fifty cents if they wanted it à la mode.

      My breath stalled again because Alex was a hundred feet away and closing in fast. It isn’t fair that some men are hurt-your-eyes good-looking. And it wasn’t fair that the years had carefully chiseled character into the lines on his face while they’d used a jackhammer on mine. His hair was shorter than I remembered, but still as dark as espresso. His skin was evenly and disgustingly tanned. And his eyes didn’t need tinted contact lenses to make them any bluer. He looked the same…but different.

      There were too many years separating us. And every one of them disappeared the second he smiled. “Hi, Bernice.”

      Alex Scott was one of those things that happen to other people. Beautiful people. People who are ushered to the head of the line and accept that it’s their right. People who own houses scattered all over the world.

      But somehow he became something that happened to me. Our paths crossed when I worked in Los Angeles as a hairstylist for the rich and infamous. Nell, my boss, had been called to a movie set for a hair emergency and as her stylist-in-training—I handed her the curling irons, combs and scissors—she’d made me come along. It turned out the hair emergency belonged to an actress who had tried to trim her own bangs. She’d cut it when it was wet and hadn’t allowed for proper shrinkage, so when her hair dried it had climbed up to the top of her forehead.

      She was crying and carrying on, and I watched for about ten minutes as everyone tried to alternately encourage, sympathize and cheer her up. Even Nell, who was used to this sort of thing, looked as though she was about to cry.

      The whole situation was ridiculous and if no one else was going to point that out, then I figured it was my civic duty. “Oh, please! It’s not your arm or your leg you cut off, it’s just hair!”

      There was complete silence as everyone in the room gawked at me. Then, someone clapped. Loudly. Deliberately.

      It was Alex Scott. I recognized him the minute he’d stood up, unrolling his six-foot-two frame from a chair in the corner. He gave me a mischievous wink. “She’s right. Let’s speed this up a little, okay? I have a dinner date tonight.”

      The actress harpooned me with an evil look and then pouted up at him. “A date? You didn’t mention that before.”

      He’d shrugged and I’d tried not to stare. Alex Scott’s career was just starting to take off and it occurred to me that the set we’d been called to was for his latest movie.

      I shot a nervous glance at Nell. I’d only been working for her for six months and I knew I was dispensable. There were only a few hundred people willing to thank me for my stupidity and jump into my shoes.

      The actress was still fuming but at least it was a silent tantrum now. Nell was smiling.

      I wondered if she smiled right before she fired her assistants.

      “Go ahead and see what you can do,” she told me.

      Instead of firing me, she handed me her scissors.

      The actress began to fuss and fidget, obviously as doubtful about this sudden turn of events as I was.

      “You aren’t queasy at the sight of blood, are you?” I asked her.

      Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

      “Because if you don’t sit still, I might accidentally cut your earlobe off or something. I’m new at this.”

      She sat still.

      Working with Nell, I never ceased to be amazed at what constituted a crisis. An extra two pounds from a weekend of pasta overload. A blemish erupting on a forehead. These were the things that normal women lived with every day and they had to pluck their own eyebrows besides. I started to wonder if I had the patience to deal with this kind of thing on a regular basis the way Nell did.

      “You see, with the shape of your face you could be bald and still look beautiful,” I told her, hearing the frustration creep into my voice. Yup, that tone will win friends and influence people, Bernice. As far as I was concerned, she had no right to complain about her looks, shrunken bangs or not. Not when some people—present company included—had features that were put together like a human Picasso. “You don’t need the bangs anyway. Watch this.”

      A half hour later there was a crowd of people in the trailer and a very happy actress admiring her reflection in the mirror.

      I turned to give Nell her scissors back. She shook her head.

      “You keep them, sweetie. I have a feeling that you’re going to need them.” Laughing, she walked out the door.

      “Yeah, famous people love to get yelled at,” I muttered under my breath.

      “So, how about dinner?”

      I heard the question but continued to pack away my toolbox full of supplies.

      “You do eat, don’t you?”

      I looked up and there was Alex Scott, standing two feet away. And he was looking right at me. “You’re kidding, right?” I said the first words that came into my mind. “Does it look like I pass up that last piece of cheesecake?”

      “Happens to be my favorite, too. So what do you say?”

      What do I say? What do I say to Alex Scott—Alex Scott— asking me out for dinner? I say that I somehow got