Bluegrass Hero

But scent did not answer prayers or build character or make Ethan Travers instantly attractive.

So why did someone like Gil Sorrent get all hyped up about it? He forbade her to sell the soap to his employees. She found that highly irritating, even if she did somewhat understand his motives. His guys were young, granted, but they were adults capable of making their own decisions. Even if Gil felt them to be poor ones. These men were eager to be her customers, and unconventional as they were, she didn’t think she could afford to refuse their business.

Lord, I need a way to know if I can give that speech. I’ve also got to find a way sell the soaps but not tick off Gil Sorrent. She sat cross-legged in pajamas on her living-room rug and pondered. She made lists, charts, pro and con tables and generally paced around until at least one of the solutions came to her.

Sell, don’t scalp. Of course.

That was the solution: Sell Lord Edmund’s Pirate Soap, but don’t scalp it. Sell for the same price as all the other Edmundson soaps. If men were rushing into her shop to buy soap, then they would get a fair deal, and the clear explanation that they would get nothing from the transaction except clean. It was, after all, the easiest antidote to the uproar: Soap that did nothing would kill the rumors about its wonder-working properties. Men liked hard evidence, Ash had always said. Well, she had thirteen bars of hard evidence, and they were going to do their job. Even Barbie Jean Blabbermouth couldn’t override good, hard evidence.

Then maybe, she mused, I can get a few of them to go home with a second bar of some other soap. Herbal hand cleaner, I’ll call it. Emily grabbed her notebook, drew up a plan and packed everything up before going to bed. The soap matter, at least, felt sufficiently resolved.

As for the speech, well, that would have to wait until another day.

Tuesday morning, Emily remembered her pledge to have a second cup of coffee, ensuring she was wide awake before she began her morning tradition of praying over her to-do list. She and God walked through her schedule and her task list, and she asked for help with the challenges of the day. It was an especially nice day for January, clear and crisp with invigorating morning sunshine. Emily opened up a bar of Edmundson’s Joy Soap for her own personal use. It had a pleasant, lemony scent cut with verbena and another floral essence she couldn’t identify. True to its name, it was a happy soap. A high-quality soap, too. The Edmundsons had achieved a lush, silky soap at a price that suited her shop and her clientele.

“With more sales like that I can save enough to take out an ad next month,” she told Othello as she scratched him behind the ears at breakfast. “I bet I can even draw up an annual marketing plan. Love soaps for Valentine’s Day. Faithfulness for anniversaries. Kindness soap as a thank you gift. Peace for Christmas. I could put a card in the gift wrap with the verse from Galatians.” Othello blinked. “Then, if it works out, I could give a special price for the eight-bar set—it’d make a great confirmation or baptism gift, wouldn’t it?” The possibilities spread themselves out before her.

Othello wound his way around her legs and stared up at her with his round yellow eyes. Sounds brilliant to me, he seemed to say.

“I’ll let you know how my plan works out at dinner, Othello. Maybe we’ll have to celebrate a successful day.”

This plan really seems brilliant, she thought as she walked to work, enjoying the beautiful day.

And then she turned the corner onto Ballad Road and saw the line. A dozen or so men stood waiting outside West of Paris. Emily’s beady-eyed top customer defending his spot at the very front of the bunch.

The Homestretch Farm workers: her newest, unlikeliest patrons. Those young men looked every bit the hard cases she’d heard they were. Some people said every one of them had had a criminal record before his sixteenth birthday. Every spring when the new hands came onto the farm, the town quietly held its breath because they looked like such a crop of miscreants. They seemed to look tougher and meaner every year. Emily was afraid of half of them, quite honestly, even though she felt bad for feeling that way.

She’d been against the farm when it had first opened three years ago. It seemed like far too big a risk for so small a town. However, Sorrent’s farm hadn’t given Middleburg much trouble. He’d kept it under tight control and even joined the town council. There had been very few complaints.

But that was before this morning. Emily wasn’t sure she was ready to get so friendly with Homestretch’s questionable residents. Still, she told herself as she walked up the street to her shop, they look no meaner than a banker would look foreclosing on your loan. Smile, and remember how long it’s been since you made a dozen sales before eleven.

She clutched the plan in her basket of work papers and reminded herself she’d come up with a brilliant solution. If she could just stick to it and hold her ground with these men, her problem would be solved before noon and the whole absurd episode of Lord Edmund’s Pirate Soap would be over by day’s end with nothing but clean men to show for it.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” she said as the bodies split into a human hedge leading up to her door.

The Latin-looking one—the one with the silky voice who had winked at her the other day—winked again. “Morning, Miss Montague,” he said.

“No work today?” She turned the key in the lock and heard their feet behind her. She wanted to ask, “Does Mr. Sorrent know you’re here?” but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Of course Sorrent knew they were here. He knew where they were every second of every day.

“We got to be back in half an hour,” one of them said. “So we gotta work fast.”

“I want two bars!” a lanky boy who barely looked old enough to drive said from the back of the throng.

“Me, too!” cried another. “I’ll pay ten a piece.”

“Fifteen!” came another shout.

Emily stilled the key and turned to face the crowd. She was glad to count only ten faces—that made things easier. The plan. Work the plan.

“Let me make one thing perfectly clear: you’ll pay the regular price of four dollars, and I’ll sell each of you one bar of soap—no more.” A chorus of moans rose up from the band of soap-seekers. “And I want you to understand clearly, in no uncertain terms, that these soaps will do nothing but get you clean. They’re soap, and nothing else, and I’ll have a bone to pick with any of you that claims otherwise.”

There was a moment of thoughtful silence, and Emily heaved a sigh of relief as she opened up the shop and let them inside. Was it possible that she’d gotten through to them?

“Sure, Ms. Montague,” said the oldest of them, “whatever you say.”

He must have thought he’d been hiding the smirk on his face, but it became instantly obvious to Emily that they hadn’t absorbed a word. They’d still have plunked down twice as much with glee. Well, that couldn’t be her problem. She’d come up with her best possible solution—whether those men learned from it was going to have to be Gil’s—or God’s—problem.

Emily did, in fact, make her midweek income goal by noon. Suddenly the Homestretch Farm men weren’t looking so scary. She was pretty sure, however, that Gil Sorrent would show up sooner or later, and sure enough she was sorting through the noon mail when he skulked through the door. It struck her, as he made his way to the counter, that she’d never seen him happy. Or laughing. She’d seen a smile or two—mostly when he won his point soundly at a town hall meeting—but that didn’t really qualify as happy. She couldn’t remember having a purely social or remotely chatty conversation with him—all of their encounters could only be described as adversarial. In fact, outside of town council business, she’d hardly ever even seen him at all.

“Had a good morning?” It was barely a question, and it became an accusation when he added, “Taking my guys’ money?”

She’d known it was coming, and she had a defense planned. “Now look here, Mr. Sorrent. I don’t claim to know how to run your farm, so I’ll thank you not to tell me how to run my shop. If those grown men come in here asking for soap, then I’ll sell them soap.”

He stared at her, a little surprised.

“I’ve given this a lot of thought,” she continued, emboldened by the fact that he hadn’t yet jumped down her throat. “I think the best thing for all concerned is for that soap to be in their hands. Disappointing them. I turned down their offers to pay all kinds of wild prices. And I made it mighty clear that the soaps would do nothing but remove grime.”

Sorrent swung his weight onto one hip. “And you really think that sunk in?” It wasn’t exactly an agreement, but it was better than the tirade she’d expected.

“Well, not yet.” His eyes narrowed to near slits but she continued anyway. “But if I’d held those soaps back, it’d be as bad as endorsing the rumor that they do something special. You and I both know they do nothing special, so the best thing for everyone is to get those soaps out, used and gone.”

He crossed his arms. “No good can come of this.”

“Nonsense. I think just the opposite. By tonight, you’ll have the cleanest, most pleasant-smelling farmhands you’ve ever had. And any and all rumors of Lord Edmund’s Pirate Soap and its unique abilities will be dead and gone.”

He gave her a look that let her know just what he thought of that prediction. She smiled at him and held her ground. And then he surprised her. “My niece, by the way, went gaga over whatever it was that you picked out for her. Thanks.” He didn’t quite smile, but his expression edged toward a reluctant pleasantness, if you could call it that.

“You’re welcome.”

“Which makes me think you’re a smart businesswoman, so would you mind telling me what you’ve got against ATM machines?”

Ah, so he had read her letter to the town council. “I have nothing against automatic teller machines, when they’re where they belong.”

“And where’s that?”

“In banks. Grocery stores. Theme parks. But not on four different Middleburg street corners. Honestly, it’s a four-block walk to the one at the bank. Now we’ve got to have them mounted on the streets like parking meters?”

“People today don’t carry cash around. We’re in the age of the debit card, Ms. Montague, and we’d best figure that out sooner rather than later.”

“Tell me, do you think people come out here to escape the city, or to see an ATM at every turn? It’s the parking meters and ATMs and bustle that they’re running away from when they come here. They don’t want a drive-through with burgers and fries, they want apple pie and coffee. I’m not against technology, Mr. Sorrent. I just don’t want to be accosted by it on every street corner.”

He turned and looked out the window. “Four is not one on every street corner.”

“We’re not a big town. Ballad Road’s downtown is just a few blocks long. The bank’s smack dab in the middle of it. We can’t expect the average American consumer to walk four blocks? I don’t know about you, but I like to think of my customers as a mite more capable than that.”

“It’s a convenience thing.”

“It’s just as much about town atmosphere as it is convenience. And tell me, have you given any thought to who it is that pockets all the service fees for those ugly little machines? And have you seen them? They’d look like giant metallic mushrooms sprung up on our street.”

She had him there. “I grant you, they’re not very artistic,” he agreed, “but they’re cash machines, not sculpture.”

“Our streetlights are streetlights, but they still look nice and fit the character of our town.” Emily crossed her arms over her chest.

Sorrent shifted his weight to the other hip and scratched his chin. “What if there were only two—one at each end of the town farthest from the bank? And what if I talked Howard into putting you in charge of selecting the design and the mounting?”

She was about to let him know that two ATMs was two too many when he held up a finger and added, “And what if twenty-five percent of all the profits went to the town beautification fund?”

Emily fiddled with her register buttons for a moment as Sorrent watched her. She’d lost a sale last week when the couple buying dish towels didn’t have enough cash and didn’t want to use their credit card. She’d told them where the ATM was, and they said they’d walk down there and come back for the towels, but they never did.

And she’d get to choose the design. Not Howard Epson, who couldn’t be counted on to choose red paint for a barn, much less a piece of public structure. And Howard would be forced to donate one quarter of his profits to the beautification fund—the fund that paid the extra money for those particularly lovely streetlights.

Choose your battles, Emily’s mother always said. Know what hill you’re willing to die on and why. Sometimes your goals planned your solution, and sometimes your solution planned your goals.

“Mr. Sorrent, you’ve got yourself a deal.”

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