Yeah, not exactly. Sheriff Kline wasn’t really the welcoming type and he and I had developed a love hate relationship. We absolutely loved to hate each other. He put me in his jail cell the first time when I was only fifteen. A boy and I had climbed up to the water tower and spray painted “Principal Gubbels Eats Boogers” for all the town to see. Sheriff Kline put me in his cell the second time one week later when I climbed up to the water tower by myself and spray painted “Sheriff Kline Eats Principal Gubbel’s Boogers.” Our relationship didn’t improve much after that.

  A few stores down from the sheriff’s was Stank’s Hardware, and next to Stank’s was Cup’s Cakes. When I was in high school, Stank and Cup had a torrid affair. Stank’s wife left him. It was the most exciting thing that had happened in Hopeless in my lifetime. On the other side of the street was the Post Office and Grub’s Diner. And two buildings down from Grub’s was the city’s Methodist Church.

  And seeing as I’d made the trek all the way from Portland for a funeral, you’d think that’s where everyone was headed.

  But this was Hopeless, Idaho, international headquarters for weirdoes.

  And so it was that all the people walking in their dark suits and black dresses, were making their way past the church and two more stores until they reached the actual location of today’s service.

  The Library.

  I parked my car in one of the angled spots that hugged Main Street, then checked the time on my phone. Only two minutes to go. I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. I looked like someone who tried very hard to look pretty after dipping her head in orange fairy dust. Like John Boehner with long hair.

  I put on the darkest lipstick I could find.

  I was hoping it would be distracting. But I was wrong. Now I just looked like John Boehner if he decided to be a hooker.

  I glanced at my phone again. Shoot.

  I jumped out of the car and half jogged down the sidewalk.

  The last dark suit anywhere on Main Street was just shutting the door.

  Which meant I was last.

  I made it to the front doors of the Library. The heavy wooden doors I’d walked through a thousand times in my life.

  But never like this.

  I took the deepest breath of my life. And for the moment, I was no longer concerned about my evaporating journalism career or the swanky Portland apartment I could no longer afford. I was suddenly nothing more than a kid. I was Hope Walker. I was in Hopeless, Idaho.

  And I was at my Granny’s funeral.

  I pulled on the heavy doors, walked in, and the entire room froze. Well over a hundred people, all dressed in black, packed into every nook and cranny of this place I knew so well. I swept the room with my eyes, taking in the faces of the people who’d been part of the first nineteen years of my life. And all they did was stare back. Not even a whisper.

  Easily the quietest I’d ever heard that place.

  There’s one more thing I should tell you about The Library. It’s not really a library. The Library is a bar. Oh sure, there’s a shelf with twenty or so books that people can check out. But that’s just so Granny could call it a library. She once applied for and received a federal grant for the library but, instead of buying books, she bought a fifty-year-old bottle of single malt scotch. The Library is a bar, a restaurant and a very bad coffee pot all rolled into one. Granny had owned it for years and she always said that one day she’d have her funeral here.

  I shifted my gaze from the crowd to the bar and the woman behind it. Bess, still there after all these years. Her auburn hair had mostly turned gray and she’d put on a good twenty pounds since I’d seen her last. She had a bar towel slung over one shoulder just like always. When our eyes met, she gave me a faint smile. Then she nodded to the far side of the room.

  To the coffin.

  In true Granny fashion, the coffin was nothing but a pale pine box. She’d never seen the sense in a fancy coffin. As she’d once remarked to me on the topic of her eventual demise, why the hell would she pay for air conditioning in the hereafter when she never saw the need for it in the now. The pine box was only one of the things Granny had insisted on. She was very particular about planning the funeral and what Granny demanded, Granny usually got.

  Usually.

  When I’d left home for Portland, Granny wanted me to stay. Demanded I stay. She didn’t get her wish that time.

  It took her funeral to get me back.

  Zeke Roberson, one of my late Grandfather’s oldest friends, walked from the coffin straight for me. He’d looked like he was “older than dirt” old when I was a little girl and to Zeke’s credit, he hadn’t changed one bit.

  “Hope,” he said as gave me a polite hug. His body was frail. “It’s so nice to see you.”

  I glanced at my phone. “Sorry I’m late.”

  He shrugged. “Unfortunately, we’ve already closed the coffin.”

  I practically groaned inside under the weight of what I was about to say. And it seemed like Zeke was waiting for it. Like everybody was waiting for it.

  “But under the circumstances,” I gave in. “Would you mind if I took one last look inside?”

  Zeke nodded solemnly. “I don’t think she’d mind that at all.”

  Zeke stepped out of my way and held out his hand; the Library parted like the Red Sea… and I took the slow and painful walk across the floor I’d crossed a million times, but this time under the watchful eyes of practically every single person I’d ever known. Instead of lifting my head and meeting anyone in the crowd’s relentless gaze, I handled this in the time-tested manner of anyone who’s ever done a walk of shame. I kept my eyes at the tips of my high heels until suddenly I was there. Right in front of the old pine box.

  Normally, the appropriate thing to do at a funeral would be to kneel and say a prayer in the person’s memory. But I knew for a fact Granny didn’t want me to do that. Instead, I steadied my hand, gripped the side of the casket and slowly opened it up.

  Even though I knew what to expect, the reality of it caught me off guard. Granny was laying there, wearing that old blue Boise State Football sweatshirt she loved so much. Her hands were folded peacefully and she was holding onto a packet of Virginia Slims. When she caught me smoking my freshman year of high school, I asked her why she was allowed to smoke if I wasn’t. As furious as she was at me, ultimately, Granny agreed. She quit right then and there. To my knowledge, she’d never smoked another cigarette the rest of her life. But boy oh boy, did she want to. So she always kept a pack of cigarettes with her. And now she was in her coffin, clutching them still, like an Egyptian Queen being sent to the afterlife with her most prized possession.

  After a few dutifully somber moments, I said what I’d come over four hundred miles to say. “Hello, Granny. It’s me Hope. I made it. I finally made it home.”

  The inside of the Library seemed even quieter than the Sawtooth forest on a still winter’s day. Then Granny’s lips trembled, her eyes opened, and she smiled.

  Granny was alive.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  That’s right. Granny made me drive four hundred miles to attend her funeral. A funeral she had painstakingly planned, from me being the last one to show all the way down to the exact words Zeke Roberson and I were to exchange once I arrived.

  “Well it’s about time,” she cackled. “I told you to be last, not late. Another five minutes and I was gonna be dead for real!” Granny sat up in her coffin and the entire Library cheered.

  Granny threw her arms around my neck and squeezed me close. A familiar mix of old person, bourbon, and Secret Powder Fresh deodorant hit my nose. It was Granny’s scent and right then, I was glad to be there in her arms.

  “Welcome home, darling,” she said. “Welcome home. Now help me out of this coffin before I throw a blood clot.”

  Before I could tell my not so petite Granny that there was no way in Sam Hill I could lift her out of that thing, she flung her eighty-year-old legs over the side of that pine box and jumped down like she was dismounting a pommel horse.

  And, having stuck the landing, another riotous roar surged through the Library followed by chants of speech, speech, speech.

  Granny put her hands up in the air to get control of the crowd and when everyone had settled down she began.

  “I do believe it’s called a eulogy at a funeral, not a speech. In all sincerity, I thank you for coming. Even the ten percent of you I hate and the twenty percent of you that are only here for the free drinks. Okay the forty percent of you here for the free drinks. A long time ago, I realized it wasn’t any good to have a funeral when you’re dead. Funerals are the time when people get together and make up a bunch of stuff about what a saint you were. And if I’m dead, I won’t get to hear any of that nonsense. I figured I might as well get on with it now. And we’ll get to the speeches, err, eulogies in a little bit but first, I better make sure you are all properly lubricated and remind you that drinks are free and the food is terrible. But you all know that. The other announcement I have is much more important.”

  She smiled at me. Oh no.

  “The Prodigal granddaughter is back. That’s right, Hopeless, Idaho’s very own Hope Walker is here in the flesh. I had a daughter of my own a very long time ago. She pretty well hated my guts and moved out of here as soon as she could pay for the bus ticket. My daughter gave me a lot of grief…but before she left, she gave me one thing that was good.”

  And here it was, the line I—and every other resident of Hopeless—had heard a thousand times before.

  “She left me a granddaughter. She gave me Hope.”

  The Library erupted and I felt like I was in that ugly Christmas sweater again.

  “Belly up to the bar everyone, the drinks are on me… and in thirty minutes, you all better have lots of nice things to say or Bess will be serving nothing but Natty Light the rest of the day!”

  Half the room immediately followed Granny’s advice and dropped any pretense of sorrow for whiskey and beer. The other half made a crude reception line. And over the next two hours, a sort of this is your life from hell played out as one by one and two by two, the residents of Hopeless, Idaho came up to give me their “condolences” for Granny’s passing. The stunt, it appeared, was never going to get old. Then they would tell some story or make some joke about Granny, or worse, me, and then move back to the bar.

  As Granny said many times that day, it was one heckuva party.

  It was also one heckuva way to get reacquainted with Hopeless. I guess what they say is true, the more things change, the more people who once annoyed the crap out of you stay the same. But there were some bright spots. It was good to see Bill and Dotti Lloyd. They were still divorced and still running a business together. Years ago, they realized they made terrible marital partners but terrific business partners. So they moved out of each other’s beds and into each other’s professional lives by starting the town’s newest and now longest running ice cream parlor, Banana Splitsville.

  It was also nice to see Robert Lomax. I recognized his familiar tweed jacket before I even saw his face. And when the crowd cleared, and I saw his face, it held a smile for me. Professor Lomax had taught English for years. I’d won a writing contest sponsored by the college when I was a student and after that, Professor Lomax was one of my biggest cheerleaders. He assumed I’d be studying English under him and was beyond disappointed when I decided to leave town.

  “Hope,” he said with a warm smile. “It’s been far too long.”

  He gave me a brief hug.

  “You’ve made us all very proud with your dynamite reporting through the years,” he said.

  The topic of my career made me more than a little uncomfortable and I needed to change the topic, fast.

  “Anything I learned, I learned from you,” I said. “Speaking of, how are things in the English department?”

  He stood up a little straighter and adjusted his tie. “It appears you haven’t heard.”

  “Haven’t heard what?”

  “I am no longer Professor Lomax… for the last two years, I’ve been Dean Lomax.”

  “You’re in charge of the school?”

  “Technically, President Bentley is. But between you and me, his job is to raise money and shake hands. That leaves the rest of the college to me.”

  “That’s amazing. Congrats, Professor—I mean, Dean Lomax.”

  He winked. “Good to have you in town again, Hope. Come visit us any time. Granny, do you have any good wine behind the bar?”

  Granny looked up from her conversation with somebody else. “Wine? Bess bought eight bottles of Two Buck Chuck from the Trader Joe’s in Boise if that’s what you mean.”

  Dean Lomax closed his eyes and shook his head. “No, Granny, that is not what I mean. That is definitely not what I mean.”

  It was also nice to see Pastor Leif from the Methodist Church. It appeared he was still faithfully guiding his parish and his Main Street business. Holy Cow Pastor Leif’s Pastured Beef was now in its twentieth year, he was proud to tell me. Then he handed me a coupon. On one side was a thirty percent off a family pack of steaks coupon. On the other was an advertisement for Sunday’s sermon. And below it an ostentatious advertisement offering “FREE GRACE!”

  Yep, Hopeless, Idaho had enough weird and quirky to fill a circus tent. And to the extent that you were into quirky, Hopeless was pretty good. But whenever there’s good, there’s bad.

  And as soon as Pastor Leif gave Granny and me a blessing for a grace and beef filled life, the bad was staring right at me.

  Sheriff Ed Kline.

  He, of course, was the only one not dressed all in black. He wore khaki sheriff pants, cowboy boots, a chocolate brown sheriff shirt and tie, a dark cowboy hat, and a gold star on his chest. He tilted the brim of his cowboy hat at Granny, then directed his surly gaze at me.

  “Been a long time, Hope.”

  I hated the way that man made me feel. Small, insignificant, and always like I’d done something wrong. I mean, most of my life, I did do stuff wrong, but I sure didn’t need him to remind me of that.

  “Yes, Sheriff, it has.”

  A woman came up alongside Sheriff Kline. His wife Margaret. She was about my height, had beautiful silver hair that had once been a lustrous dark brown, and large brown eyes. She was a sophisticated looking woman. And by all accounts, Margaret Kline was also a nice woman. I remembered her being quiet and liking to keep to herself. But the few times she had spoken to me she seemed kind. What a kind woman like Margaret ever did to deserve a grumpy old coot like the Sheriff Kline, I couldn’t guess. She smiled at me warmly and then began chatting with Granny.

  That left me all alone with my old friend.

  “Got something for you,” he said. He pulled some skinny sheets of paper from a small red folder and handed them to me. I didn’t touch them. Didn’t even look at them. I looked at him instead.

  “Backstage passes for Beyoncé I presume?”

  He ignored me.

  “JT then?” I asked.

  He ignored that too. Almost certainly because he had no idea who or what Beyoncé and JT were.

  “Three unpaid speeding tickets.” Then he pointed his big finger at me. “Your unpaid speeding tickets. And since this is your first time back in Hopeless in a long, long time, I thought you could finally take care of them.”

  I ripped the tickets out of his hand and looked at them in disbelief.

  “These are from twelve years ago!”

  He looked like the cat that ate the canary.

  “As I said, seeing as this is your first time back, I thought you could finally take care of them.”

  “You’re out of your mind. These are twelve years old! There’s got to be a statute of limitations on something like this.”

  He closed up the folder and cleared his throat. “Wasn’t aware that you had become an expert on the laws and statutes that govern the independent municipality of Hopeless, Idaho. Fact is, there is no such statute of limitations because when Mayor Jenkins proposed it a few years ago, I rejected it and the city board agreed with me. Which means, you can either pay at my office or settle things up right here. I take all major credit cards…” then he narrowed his eyes and sized me up like a used car. “But I prefer cash.”

  “You’re insane!” I said, my voice much louder than I expected. Margaret looked our way and frowned at her husband. She grabbed his arm. “Time for us to go, Ed.”

  Sheriff Kline tipped his hat at Granny again before coming back to me.

  “Just get the tickets paid. And, Hope, one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Welcome home.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I practically ran to the bar, where I crumpled up those tickets and stuck them in the closest thing I could find. Unfortunately, that was a tall glass of beer. Even more unfortunately, that tall glass of beer was attached to someone’s hand. And as you can probably guess, that hand belonged to a face. A man’s face.

  This man’s face was smiling at me.

  And it was more than a little handsome. This man had a chiseled jaw. His hair was short and sandy blond. A bit of scruff on his face. A sharp nose between two blue eyes. Not just handsome, I decided on second glance. Hot. There was a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I would have gone for a hot guy like this. At the moment, he looked bemused. No doubt over my using his craft beer as a trash receptacle.

  “Is this a new version of a Jagerbomb?” he asked.

  I laughed at the joke. “Yes, the paper bomb is all the rage these days. Sorry about that.” I hollered at Bess. “Another beer down here for this gentleman.” I smiled at him. “Least I could do is buy you another.”

  “I thought the drinks were on the house.”

  “Which makes it a lot easier to buy you another.”

  He smiled. His teeth were white and mostly straight, one of his middle teeth was slightly crooked. And I decided, as I looked at the entire handsome package once more, crooked in a good way.

  “Then seeing as it’s so easy to buy drinks, I suppose I should buy you one. What’s your poison?”

 

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