I squeezed my hands into fists, channeling the tension I could feel running through my body. It had been ages since I’d been this worked up about a man, and I needed to keep it in check.
I spent another near-sleepless night tossing and turning at Roxie’s. I appreciated the guest room; I appreciated the comfortable bed even with the squeaks and creaks. But honestly, how the hell did anyone sleep in this town with all that racket outside? I was finding some earplugs while I was in town today.
Friday morning in Bailey Falls dawned clear and crisp, and before I could say howdy-do I was bouncing along the rutted country roads next to Roxie, eating one of her cinnamon biscuits and marveling at how blue the sky was when you could actually see the sky. Not that there was anything wrong with the sky behind the Chrysler Building, but it just wasn’t the same.
“Did you tell Trudy thanks for letting us host the meeting at the diner?” I asked, sipping from a travel mug of my special-roast coffee. After the disaster at the coffee shop last weekend, I came prepared this weekend, getting off the train last night with a smile and two pounds of Colombian gold coffee.
“You can tell her yourself, my mom can’t wait to see you. She’s officially pissed that you didn’t stop by last weekend to see her. She said, and I quote, ‘Tell that city snot to get her ass in to my diner or I’ll send Bert after her.’”
“Who the hell is Bert?”
As we turned onto Main Street, Roxie pointed to an ancient cop car sitting in front of city hall. “Bert. Chief of police, coach of the women’s bowling team, champion Scrabble player eleven years running, and unofficial number-one flunky willing to do anything my mother asks, on account of the giant crush he’s had on her since they were paired together for square dancing in seventh-grade physical education.”
“Wow, that’s specific,” I said, peering out the window at the grizzled-looking old man in the cop car peering back at me. “Did he just wave at me?”
“Looks like my mom has already alerted him about the new girl in town. Nice of her, wasn’t it?”
“Fucking Mayberry,” I muttered, while Roxie laughed. We pulled into a spot right in front of Callahan’s, the diner that had been in Roxie’s family for three generations. When Roxie was running the diner last summer she’d made a few updates to the menu, most of which Trudy kept when she returned home from her world tour and realized that even the oldest recipes can be tweaked and brought into the new century.
I hopped down from the Jeep, pausing a moment to straighten out my black pencil skirt and make sure that my button-down had the correct number of buttons unbuttoned. I didn’t know if Oscar would be making an appearance at the town meeting this morning, but my cleavage and I wanted to be prepared.
“Natalie Grayson, get your sweet buns in here and give me a hug,” I heard booming from the behind the counter before I’d even made it inside the front door. All eyes swiveled to me as Trudy Callahan—grown-up hippie and Salisbury steak dynamo—came barreling across the linoleum to hug me tightly.
“Hiya, Trudy, how are you?” I asked, wondering how someone so small could be so powerful.
“We are just so excited you’re here! A big-shot city ad lady coming to talk to us about our little town? Couldn’t be more tickled! Now you sit over here. I cleared the corner booth for you; what can I bring you? Cuppa joe? Eggs? Slice of ham? Slice of pie?” Trudy would have given me the entire menu, but by now Roxie had caught up with us and was leading her back behind the counter.
The two of them were knee-deep in an argument about why the sign Featuring Zombie Cakes had been moved from the front window when Chad Bowman appeared, radiant in North Face fleece and perfectly pressed jeans. “Hi, how’s it going?”
“Good, really good, just wanted to get here a few minutes early and get some things set up. Are you expecting people to be on time this morning?” I started stacking some notepads and pens on the table, getting a few of my graphs together that I’d pulled from the local census about who and what comprised the town.
“Are you kidding? They’re all here already,” he replied, helping me pop up my easel. “Nice charts, by the way.”
“I don’t see anyone,” I said, looking over my shoulder and just seeing a crowd full of diner customers.
“Trudy closed down the diner this morning to everyone but chamber of commerce members. Everyone here is a business owner, here to see what the woman from New York is going to tell us about how to generate business for our little town.”
“Wait, what?” I asked, now seeing the diner customers for what they really were. In between coffee sips and breakfast eats, they were already assessing, calculating, wondering what I might have up my sleeve.
I could handle this. I’d faced down boardrooms filled with the toughest sharks the advertising world had to offer. Titans of industry. Masters of the universe.
Turns out they were nothing compared to Myra, the owner of the Klip ’n’ Kurl.
I spent the better part of the morning asking and answering questions from a group of townspeople as excited and fired up as I’d ever seen. They all had very specific ideas about what needed to happen in order to make Bailey Falls a destination town. They were open to new ideas, but they wanted to make sure they retained the small-town atmosphere that had been created over the years, that no new weekenders were going to ruin a good thing. But of course money talks, and the possible new streams of revenue that could be brought into the town by some new blood was attractive to all.
I’d printed some of the photos I’d taken the weekend before and displayed them around the diner, giving them a taste of what a Natalie Grayson campaign would look and feel like. I went through possible layouts in regional and national magazines, showed them examples of featured columns I’d orchestrated for other clients in newspapers like the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Washington Post.
I’d brought my iPad and was able to screen a few of the commercials I’d put together to give them an idea of what I was capable of. And when the people of Bailey Falls began to realize that some of them could be featured in a commercial just like the ones I showed them, they began to get excited.
So excited, in fact, that Norma from the florist and Arnold from the pizza place suggested that Bailey Falls host a screening party the night of the premiere.