Head Over Heels. Beth Harbison

For a moment, Grace Bowes—standing in the blazing-hot sun looking for a mailbox that should have been on the corner of Main and Sycamore but wasn’t—didn’t think the question was directed at her. But when it was repeated with more vehemence, she looked toward the speaker and saw a bent old man perched on a bench in front of the Blue Moon Bay Pharmacy, staring at her so expectantly she couldn’t help but laugh.

“No, I haven’t.” She’d never been one to believe in omens, but when the seventeen-year locusts returned to her hometown the same month she—after a fifteen-year absence—did, she had to rethink her position. On several things. “But I haven’t ruled it out.”

The man laughed heartily, revealing a mouth full of holes plus one or two brown stubs of teeth. “Smart girl.” He thumped a gnarled finger against his temple.

“Have you?” She noticed he had a battered hat at his feet with a handwritten sign that said Thank You in an uncertain hand, and an old dented and rusted Partridge Family lunch box by his side. She immediately regretted asking. Maybe that lunch box was full of locusts right now.

“Had to, during the war. Would’ve starved otherwise.” He looked her over with a sharp blue eye. “What war are you fighting?”

Divorce. Betrayal. Single motherhood. The modern job market as it related to a woman whose only real job had consisted of working as a secretary for her father, the local judge, ten hours a week one summer. A lot of wars. “I’m just looking for a mailbox. I thought there was one on this corner.” She had to mail a car payment on a car that was the main asset she’d won in the divorce after her husband, Michael, had left her a note on the bathroom counter, saying he was sorry but their life together hadn’t worked out and he’d found someone else.

“Used to be one right there.” The old man gestured, then shook his head as if something very sad had happened. “Not there anymore.”

“No, it’s not.” Grace glanced at her watch. In ten minutes she had an appointment at the Bayside Jobs employment agency. First she had to mail this payment, hoping to avoid at least one early-morning call mispronouncing her name and threatening unspeakable actions if she didn’t get the car payment in on time. Along with winning the car, she’d won the car payment, thanks to Michael’s savvy at hiding his financial assets.

Michael Bowes. He’d been the golden boy of Blue Moon Bay, Maryland, the captain of the football team and homecoming king to Grace’s homecoming queen. He’d gone to college in the north and she’d followed a year later. Four years after that, they were married and Michael, then a commercial real-estate developer, had ridden a ride of prosperity right into a lovely upper-middle-class lifestyle. When the bottom had dropped out of that market, he didn’t bother to mention to Grace that they were living on credit cards and line of credit advances and a host of bad gambles.

By the time he left—no doubt because thugs with stub noses and barrel chests were threatening to break his kneecaps—he’d accrued hundreds of thousands of dollars in liability. He and Grace had had to sell the house and her jewelry and even her clothes. Her yard sales were legendary. And exhausting. When it was all over, she had nothing except bad memories of a man who had once seemed like the Catch of Blue Moon Bay.

She wasn’t sorry the marriage was over. Often she’d felt as if in their life together they’d lacked understanding of each other, and even real interest in each other. Perhaps if Michael hadn’t made the first move, she would have suggested it herself after Jimmy was grown. She’d never know, because Michael had beaten her to the punch.

So she’d packed up their ten-year-old son, Jimmy, and moved back to her hometown to live with her widowed mother in the house she’d grown up in. It was only for a year, she told herself. She’d save enough money to move back north, so Jimmy could be near his friends again, in the town that was his home. And she could be far away from this claustrophobic hamlet.

In the meantime, she’d just

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