Love in a Nutshell - Janet Evanovich [49]
“What about Matt?” Kate asked, and just as she did, he came to stand in front of them.
“Matt’s our backwoods recluse when he’s not at work. He never comes to Spaghetti Tuesday.”
Matt looked at Kate. “Contrary to what my sister says, I’m not a hermit. I’d actually been planning on spaghetti night. How about if I pick you up?”
Kate put her hand on the smooth bar surface and quickly pulled it back. “Sure.”
“Great. I’ll be there at six.”
“See?” Lizzie said to him. “You’re dating!”
A gasp rose along the girls’ all-star admiration line, then all eyes turned to scrutinize Kate. In the space of thirty seconds, she’d gone from being unknown to notorious. But for spaghetti, family, and time with Matt Culhane, she’d deal. And happily, too.
* * *
JUST BEFORE five that evening, Kate walked into the post office. She smiled at the sweeping stairway to nowhere, created when the building’s second floor had been roped off due to declining town population. Despite the passage of time, the interior of the ornate sandstone and yellow brick building was like a trip back to the early 1900s. Or maybe just to high school, considering the way Deena Bowen was giving Kate the stink-eye as she approached.
Deena stepped away from the wall of brass and glass–fronted post office boxes.
“Hey,” she said.
Kate had never heard that one syllable delivered with more crankiness.
“I hear you’re going out with Matt,” Deena said.
Kate wasn’t going to get into the technical aspects of whether a family spaghetti dinner qualified as a date. She worked up what she hoped was a noncommittal shrug and moved on to her mailbox.
“He’ll dump you. Just wait and see,” Deena called after her.
Kate didn’t plan to get to the dating point, let alone the dumping point. She let the comment roll off and turned her attention to the accumulation of mail in The Nutshell’s box.
“Junk, bill … more junk,” she said as she pulled items from the tight space. “And … trouble.”
Her mother’s custom periwinkle linen stationery was unmistakable, as was her perfect cursive script—written with a black ink fountain pen, of course. So long as the letter wasn’t directed to her, Kate found it cool that her mom kept up the dying art of handwritten correspondence. But when Ms. Katherine Appleton appeared on the address line, the envelope was often stuffed with ego-crushers. Not that Kate thought her mom meant to do that, but the end result remained the same.
Kate closed the box and took her load to the counter behind her for sorting. She dropped the catalogues filled with goods she couldn’t afford into the recycling bin, tucked the electric bill into her purse, and opened her mom’s letter. In the past, many of Mom’s messages were like bikini waxes: best finished quickly.
The first few lines were about the weather and her mother’s golf game. Then Mom offered a little chitchat about Kate’s brother and sister and their respective brilliant toddler offspring, which led into the true purpose of the letter.
As I dream of Ivy League educations for my grandchildren, her mother wrote, I can’t help but feel a moment’s sorrow that you didn’t follow a more financially secure path. A business degree would have allowed for far more stability than a degree in the arts. It’s a different world than when I was your age, Kate.
“Doing what? Accounting?” Kate said to herself. She was fine with basic addition and subtracting, especially if she had a calculator. Start placing numbers in labeled columns, though, and she was a lost cause.
Kate had chosen the small liberal arts college her mom had attended, and it had been a good fit. She figured the love of history and art was something in her genes, something that she had inherited from her mother, but her mother might be right about changing times. Kate admitted to herself that she was struggling career-wise.
Ella joined Kate at the counter. “I’ve come