“But is she nice?” Patrick asks. “Do you think Mia would like her?”
Mia is a gem, but also very shy. I know Patrick worries about her making friends.
“I think so. She’s…”—I search for the right word and land on—“bubbly.”
“Bubbly?” Lou echoes. “Like champagne?”
I roll my eyes. “Not what I meant.”
“You’re going to have to spell it out, boss. Not all of us are poets.”
I ignore the poet comment. “Bubbly like she’s in good spirits…happy most of the time.”
“So pretty much she’s your opposite,” Lou jokes.
“Pretty much.”
Patrick and Lou laugh.
Patrick slings his arm over my shoulder. “For a grouch, you sure are lovable.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I shake him off.
“What about her sister? Is she single?” Lou asks.
“No clue. Haven’t met her.”
“But they’re living next door to you, right?”
I nod.
“You can find out for me, then.” Lou holds up his hand. “I call dibs.”
Patrick rolls his eyes. “You can’t claim a woman like that, Lou.”
“I’m expressing my interest,” Lou argues, turning to me and pointing his finger at my chest. “I don’t want Mack to swoop in with his broodiness and sweep the other sister off her feet before I get the chance, ya know?”
“I’m not interested in Holland’s girlfriend’s sister.” Talk about complicated.
“All the better.” Lou nods, but then he rubs his hands together. “We do need to think about giving them both a nice, Cashmere Cove welcome, yeah?”
I start shaking my head.
“Come on, man. It’s tradition.”
“You are not pranking the Kasper sisters.”
“Not by myself,” Lou says, looking affronted. “We’ll do it together.”
“No way.”
“Why not?” Lou puts his hands on his hips. He’s a good six inches shorter than me, but he looks like he’s ready to rumble. “It’s how we welcome everyone into the fold—or at least how we vet people.”
The Cashmere Cove faithful have a custom of pranking people who move to town. I don’t know who started the tradition, but it’s been going on for longer than I’ve been alive to witness it.
It’s not malicious. Mostly, it’s a couple of harmless miscues that the locals enact on new arrivals to establish that the newbies can take a joke—that, and to add to the town lore.
That’s the thing about Cashmere Cove…we don’t take ourselves too seriously, and we love a good reminiscence. If someone moves to this part of Cashmere County, folks here want to break them in, make sure they can hang with the fun crowd. This is a small, close-knit community. Last I checked, our population hovered right around two-thousand people.
