Me and the Helpful Hurricane

Excerpt:

Chapter 1

Leah

I am in trouble.

So. Much. Trouble.

With my boss.

I guess for those of you who read the books about my sisters, Claire and Tammy, you might be thinking that you’re about to read a romance.

I’m sorry, but that’s not what you’re getting in this book.

My name is Leah Harding. Harding is my maiden name, although I was married for two years. I never changed it.

I guess that’s how committed I was to the marriage.

Kids. We were stupid, right?

Anyway, it’s been fifteen years, and I have no desire to get married again.

So this book is not going to be a romance.

I’m sorry, but it’s probably going to be mostly about me complaining about my insufferable, arrogant, jerk, and—since I’m an honest person, I also need to say—very handsome, very smart, very compassionate boss.

His name is Doug Ripley.

And he is going to kill me when he sees what the ladies at the Cherry Tree Senior Living Center and I have done now.

It’s Saturday, and he shouldn’t be in, but he thrives on doing the unexpected.

Or maybe I should say he thrives on catching me doing the unexpected and then slapping me with a reprimand.

I’m still under the last reprimand that, if you read Tammy’s book, you know about.

Just suffice to say, my boss saw more of me than what I was planning on when the ladies at the assisted living center and I spent the entire night in the kitchen using plastic wrap and aluminum foil to make ourselves prom dresses.

Hey, sometimes you just have to make your own fun.

Doug doesn’t understand that.

That’s what we’re doing right now.

“We” as in me and Gertrude, who has salt-and-pepper hair that is naturally curly and cut close to her head. She’s in her late 70s, and she’s a hoot.

Although the leader, always the leader, of our little group is Agnes, who has snow-white hair and looks like the grandmother in “Little Red Riding Hood.”

At least, the way I always picture the granny to look. Kind of old, very sweet—the cookie baking kind of grandmother—except Agnes has a lot of tricks up her sleeve.

She’s 80, and she’s celebrating her eighth decade on this earth by getting me into as much trouble as she possibly can.

Let me rephrase.

She doesn’t want to die without completing all the items on her bucket list.

If you keep reading, you’ll hear Agnes talk a lot about her bucket list. It’s my job as the activities director at the Cherry Tree Senior Living Center in Good Grief, Idaho, where the ladies are all residents, to provide entertainment and activities.

Agnes is my right-hand lady.

Sometimes, I think she would do my job better than I do. But she’s too busy coming up with crazy ideas and plans to actually have a job.

She says now that she’s retired—she just retired a couple of years ago in her late seventies, from her job as administrative assistant at a potato-packing factory—that she’s busier now than she was when she was working.

I think Agnes is the kind of lady who was always very busy, but hey, I don’t argue with her.

Now, I suppose before I tell you why I’m in so much trouble—and why I’m sneaking around with a flower shovel in one hand and a bag of dirt in the other, creeping across the yard of Cherry Tree, right behind Agnes—I should tell you about the third member of our group this evening.

Her name is Harriet, and you won’t be able to miss her. Her hair is dyed a bright orange and has been for the last thirty years.

Before that, I think it might have been black, but when it turned gray, she decided she’d always wanted to be a redhead.

Once she chose the color, it turned out bright orange. She decided it gave her verve and made her flashy, and she didn’t want to change it.

So, she’s the easiest to pick out. Although Agnes’s snow-white hair sticks out too.

Regardless, despite being a redhead, or orange head, or whatever you call someone with orange hair, Harriet is the most laid back of the three and most likely to be in the back.

Unless I am.

Most of the time, I’m okay going along with everything we do, but this is kind of pushing things, and I’m already skating on thin ice, as Doug would say. He has a tendency to use old clichés like that, that we might have grown up with back in the olden days of the seventies and eighties.

I assume, although I could be wrong, that he’s older than I am, which is pushing forty.

Only when men age, they look good.

His hair is salt-and-pepper, but it makes him look distinguished. My hair, which is still more pepper than salt but is getting to the half-and-half stage, doesn’t make me look distinguished. It just makes me look old.

I don’t know what Doug looked like when he was younger, but he’s getting a little thick around the waist, which, again, doesn’t look bad on a man his age.

Me? The thickness I’ve gained around the waist stands out like flashing neon lights on a nativity scene at Christmastime.

It looks terrible, in other words.

All right, so you already know I have a shovel and a bag of dirt. And I’m crouched down, following Agnes, who also has a shovel and a bag of dirt.

We’re dumping the dirt at the far end of Cherry Tree.