Last-Minute Marriage

Rachel Steele—they’d introduced themselves the moment Tessa walked up to ask them if she could be of help—was dressed in a pink sweat suit, with colored bands of rose and mauve on the sleeves. Ruth wore a raspberry sweatshirt and matching sweatpants. Both were wearing identical pairs of pristine white tennis shoes. They were small and plump and looked like two pieces of candy that had somehow found their way out of their gilded box and into the wallpaper-and-paint department of Sterling Hardware and Building Supply.

“Rachel. Ruth.” Caleb looked over the waist-high wall that blocked off the view of the office on the upper floor. “Good morning, ladies.”

“Good morning, Caleb.” Rachel glanced up from the sample book, the frown that had marred her face disappearing in a smile that deepened myriad tiny wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. “The search goes on. I’m almost in despair of ever finding the right wallpaper pattern for my bathroom.”

“The paper on the walls now is just fine,” her sibling insisted. “We’ve got better things to do this morning.”

“You always say that. I’m determined this time to find just the right paper.”

“Perhaps a floral stripe?” Tessa suggested, pulling sample books from the shelves. She’d told Mitch the day he hired her that she didn’t intend to spend her time in paint-and-wallpaper, but that’s where she’d ended up.

Working for Mitch, she was finding, wasn’t the same as working at Home-Mart, because Mitch’s hardware store was different, and so were his customers. Some of them had been coming to Sterling’s since long before he was born, she suspected. Many of them were friends and contemporaries of Caleb’s, like the ladies she was helping at the moment, and probably of Mitch’s late parents’. The men smiled politely, tipped their feed-company hats and headed for Mitch or Caleb for their electrical and plumbing needs, or sought out Bill Webber in the lumberyard.

The women did the same if they were buying hardware. But if they were looking for paint or wallpaper, they brought their questions to her. Riverbend was a traditional place, she was coming to learn. And one of the traditional things about it was the unwritten rule that men didn’t like to look at wallpaper books or paint-chip cards. Even men whose business it was to know about such things.

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