I supported the Underwood on my hip and knocked on the top of the counter, startling Marion to opened-eyed surprise. She pulled the buds out of her ears.
“Aunt Clare, Mirabelle, sorry. I didn’t think anyone was in here,” she said as she stood, because standing somehow must have seemed like the right thing to do.
“It’s okay, dear,” Mirabelle said. “Are you listening to one of those rapper singers?”
Marion smiled. “No, ma’am. I was listening to some country music.” She looked at me. “I didn’t know where you were. I walked this morning and saw Mirabelle’s hatchback up but didn’t know you two were behind it.”
“Your Jeep okay?”
“Yeah. Just wanted to walk.”
“We must have crossed paths. Do you know if Chester’s in the workshop?”
“No. I just peeked back there and didn’t see anyone.”
“That’s where I left him,” I said, now curious but not concerned as to where my grandfather had gone. He never did like to stay in one place for very long.
“Maybe he went back upstairs,” Marion said.
My grandfather lived upstairs, in the apartment he’d fashioned when my grandmother died twenty years earlier. When she died, their two children were already gone from the house, so he saw no reason to do much of anything but ski whenever he could and work. He sold the house and the lawnmower and moved to the second floor of his building, taking down walls and adding appliances to make it an open and comfortable space, particularly for a bachelor. Even though I do most of the work now, he claims he still loves living a mere twelve steps away from his store, and a quick walk to the nearest chairlift, of course.
“Maybe,” I said. “Any e-mails?” She had become our stationery personalization pro, doing the work on the computer we kept behind the counter.
“I just got a couple of orders, but nothing urgent.” She nodded toward the monitor.
I looked back toward the front, contemplating which task I wanted Marion to tackle first. As my eyes scanned, something flashed from somewhere, or had I just blinked at the wrong angle and thought I’d seen something? I couldn’t be sure. I squinted and peered out the front windows, all the way to the diner across the street. Had the flash—what might have just been a brief reflection of the sunlight—come from outside, or perhaps the diner? I didn’t see much of anything except indistinct summer-clothes-clad figures either walking down the street or moving around inside the diner. Whatever it had been, neither Marion nor Mirabelle seemed to notice it.
“The middle shelves could use some attention, dusting, arranging,” I said. “And Mirabelle would like some more of her favorite blue paper. Would you gather that for her?”
“Sure,” Marion said with a smile. She was mostly a good kid, but unfortunately she was not only a beautiful young woman with long blond curls and big blue eyes, she was also intelligent and seventeen, and better on a snowboard than almost anyone in town. Talks of her participating in the Olympics had gone from “maybe someday” to “probably the next winter games.” Such a lethal combination created a number of sleepless nights for my brother, a single parent who tried not to be overprotective but failed miserably. I thought he was overcompensating for the fact that Marion’s mother took off shortly after her daughter was born. She had left a note though, saying she was sorry she couldn’t handle the responsibilities of being a mother at the tender age of twenty-one. We didn’t talk about it much.
Everyone said Marion looked just like me, but my seventeen hadn’t been a thing like Marion’s. She’d been able to handle contacts, and her braces had been clear and barely noticeable. The hair products I’d found when I got older were at her disposal by age eleven, when she first started caring about her/our unruly hair. I still couldn’t handle contacts, but I thought I wore my black plastic-framed glasses stylishly enough. Besides Marion’s looks, though, her skills with a snowboard gave her a physical strength and confidence that would have been completely foreign to my teenage self. It was interesting to watch her from this side of those years and see just how much confidence could negate an undesirable trait or two.
“And let’s turn the music off for a while and make this a no-earbud zone,” I said.
Marion tried to stop her look of disappointment before it went too far. “Yes, Aunt Clare. Of course.”
“Thank you.” Mirabelle and I shared a smiled as Marion grabbed a duster from a shelf under the counter.
“You want to come back to the workshop with me?” I asked Mirabelle. It wasn’t a question I asked most people, but Mirabelle had been in the workshop many times over the years. She and my grandfather sometimes shared their coffees back there as they shared stories about the days when snowboards hadn’t existed and manual typewriters were all the rage and pretty much the only writing machines available.
“Sure. I’d actually like to talk to Chester if he’s around,” she said.
I thought I saw a pinch of worry in her eyes but it passed quickly so I didn’t comment.
“Let’s see if we can find him.”
I repositioned the Underwood again and led the way down a short hallway and through a plain door. The back of the building had originally been used by the mining company as one of their small warehouses. Chester had found long-forgotten stuff like pick axes and lighted miner hard hats when he purchased the abandoned building. The apartment on the second floor didn’t extend through this space, so the ceilings back here were the full two-story height, the back wall topped by the same kinds of windows that were in the front of the building, but these faced south, toward the rest of the town, the populated valley that stretched out from the bottom of Main Street. A concrete floor, metal shelves, a couple desks, some work tables, our type case filled with type blocks, other press supplies, and our printing press filled the space, but there was still plenty of elbow room. The shelves were currently topped with typewriters, typewriter parts, tools, press plates, and special paper that we didn’t sell out front but used to restore some of the old books or for customers who hired us for small print runs.
The tall press always made me think of Frankenstein, something big and funny looking, put together well but with parts that didn’t all seem to match, or at least were off sized. With a giant screw mechanism in its middle, its handle protruding outward, and the more sleek press plate extending out like a tongue, I’d long ago given it the name Frank. Chester had gone along and that was what he called it too.
The entire space smelled like books and ink and coffee, appealing and pleasant aromas, even when mixed together. At first glance it probably also looked like one big mess, but it was actually very organized. Most of the time I could find whatever I was looking for—even small tools or spare parts; Chester could find anything at any time.
“Oh! You’re working on a book,” Mirabelle said when she saw that I’d placed a readied plate on the press.
“I am. It’s for a man whose father read to him from this book every night when he was sick for a few months as a child. The book has no financial value at all, but it means the world to the customer.”
“What’s the book?”
“Tom Sawyer. It’s an old edition, but not a first; not even a second. There was just one page missing. I did some research to find the words that go on the page, but that was the easy part. I also had to come up with something that would re-create the design at the top of each page.” I’d set the Underwood on a desk. Mirabelle and I both moved to a spot between Frank and another worktable. “See there?” I pointed to the curlicued pattern on a page of the book. “That was the hard part.”
“Gracious, how did you do it? Did you have it—a stamp or something—made?”
“Nope, I got lucky. I could have had a steel type block made, but it costs quite a bit to have something like that tooled. The customer would have paid but I hoped to avoid that if possible. Chester has connections all over the world—
people who collect stuff like these blocks. I found this exact one from a gentleman who lives in Romania. He’s letting us borrow it.”
Mirabelle shook her head slowly. “All for one silly little page in a book?”
I smiled. “Yep, one silly little page.”
“That’s amazing.”
I didn’t counter with how much fun it was. But it was fun to restore a book, whether one page or more, whether printing or rebinding or just cleaning it up a bit. It was also fun to bring an old typewriter back to life: make the keys work again, the bell ding properly, the carriage return smoothly. I’d found my career by accident, by hanging out with my grandfather and Arial when I was a kid. Chester had patiently taught me everything he knew about rescuing all sorts of words, bringing them back to life, perhaps even making them better than they were before.
Mirabelle was about to ask another question when a crash interrupted our conversation. The noise seemed to come from the space at the corner of the workshop, the area where my computer office was hidden behind another door. The staircase that led up to the apartment was on the other side of my office and also hidden from where we stood. I was afraid Chester had fallen down the stairs.
I stepped around the press and the worktable just as a voice called.
“Clare! Get over here and help me, young lady!”
“Chester?” I said as I hurried.
I skidded to a halt once I turned the corner and faced both the stairs and the office. The good news was that Chester wasn’t in a heap at the bottom of the steep steps.
But the news wasn’t so good in my office. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but there was most definitely a heap of my stuff on the office floor, and my grandfather sat clumsily atop it.
2
“Chester, what happened?” I asked as I helped him stand.
“Oh, I got caught,” he said.
Chester Henry was not delicate. Never had been, never would be if he had his way. He was seventy-seven years old but moved like someone much younger. He carried his six-foot frame confidently, his spine straight, with wide shoulders that were still not bony with age. He had a head full of thick white hair with a sizeable, perfectly groomed mustache to match. His skin was pleasantly wrinkled and probably permanently tanned with goggle outlines from years of exposure to the winter sun. From the age of about twelve, he’d also worn glasses. Since the moment he’d first donned them, he’d chosen round, gold wire frames. He’d met my grandmother not long after he’d first acquired the glasses, at the age of thirteen, and she told him that the round shape and the gold color made his blue eyes so “very lovely to look at.” That sealed the deal and he’d never worn any other types of frames.
When not in ski clothing, his typical outfit of choice was a nice pair of pants, a button-up long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves always rolled up, and a sweater-vest, even in the summer. The only change that I ever remembered noticing was when he switched from wearing dress shoes to tennis shoes because they were so much more comfortable. That switch had come when I was probably six or seven.
Though neither physically nor mentally fragile, he did have an Achilles heel that kept him highly deficient in one particular area: technology. For some reason, he’d never quite understood cell phones, and computers had seemed hypocritical for someone “who fixed manual typewriters, for goodness’ sake!” But I’d been pushing him to take the one-page, merely informational website that I’d created for The Rescued Word and expand it, hire someone to create a real online presence, something with a retail facet that would enable us to sell paper and pens to customers visiting us through the World Wide Web. He’d been fighting any such advancement, but we’d managed to get as far as letting customers know that we had a personalized stationery designer in house. One line had been added to our page: “Personalized Stationery Questions? E-mail Marion” and then her e-mail address. Her contribution to the business was growing steadily, but there was more we could do, more we could say to the world about our wonderful little shop nestled in our beautiful Utah mountain town. I’d tried and tried to show him other sites, how shopping carts worked, how easy it would ultimately be to oomph things up. And, though he hadn’t bought on, I’d caught him a couple of times in my office, grimacing at the computer screen and moving the mouse. He’d never fess up to what he was really doing: trying to understand the universe inside that dangburnit box, but I knew.
“You got caught?”
“Yes. That wire was somehow wrapped around my elbow. When I went to stand up, I pulled it along the desk and it pulled everything down, me included. See, what I have told you about all this stuff?”
I inspected the “wire” and tried to visualize what had happened. It seemed that the cord from my mouse had somehow become wrapped around Chester, and when he went to stand, he pulled the keyboard and a stack of books that had been sitting on the corner of the desk onto the floor. And then he himself went to the top of the small pile. Just yesterday I’d been thinking about buying a wireless mouse. I guess I needed to get my own technology in gear.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
“Of course not,” he said as he straightened the bottom of his red sweater-vest and adjusted his glasses. “I was just afraid to stand up without you here in case I was still tied to that contraption. Who knows what I might have broken.”
I nodded and smiled. “I understand. What were you doing?”
“Just fiddling around. Taking some time to figure out that crazy computer. See, the fates are against me, Clare, so very heavily armed against me. Every time I try to understand more, I end up understanding less, or creating a mess.”
“It’s not a big mess. Here, we can get it cleaned up quickly,” I said as I made a move to reach toward the items on the floor.
“Hello there, Mirabelle,” Chester said as he took a long-legged step over the pile of books and keyboard. “How wonderful to see you. Has Clare offered you coffee yet?”
The two of them left the vicinity of my office, evidently trusting me to handle the cleanup alone. I was sure they immediately ventured toward the coffee machine and the small table and chairs set at the other corner of the workshop.
Chester was typically pretty conscientious about cleaning up after himself. His hasty exodus was somewhat strange, but maybe he thought it would be rude to Mirabelle to pick up a few books before joining her. Maybe he was simply embarrassed and rattled. I didn’t mind straightening things, but it was all just unusual enough that I became more curious about the entire scene, about what he’d been doing.
After I picked up the books—thankfully, none of them valuable or belonging to customers—and placed them and the undamaged keyboard and mouse back in their respective spots, I sat in the chair and pushed the button on the monitor. If he’d been on the Internet, he’d closed the browser. I clicked it open and immediately went up to the top bar to see the history of sites visited. Jimmy had taught me about checking the history back when Marion had been thirteen.
And suddenly, I didn’t want to see what I was seeing. Chester had figured out how to maneuver, at least a little, through the Web. He’d gone to two sites—a search engine and then a site devoted to the treatment of pancreatic cancer. I clicked on the link to the cancer site.
I could barely read slowly enough to digest the words. Adrenaline sped up my heart rate and what I did read was so awful it was like looking at a horrible traffic accident. Words like “survival rate,” “treatment,” and “deadly disease.”
Did Chester have pancreatic cancer?
No. No. I took a breath, let it out, and told myself not to jump to conclusions. None of this meant he had pancreatic cancer. Maybe he was having odd symptoms and was just researching. I’d done the same once for myself and become convinced that I had a deadly disease. It later proved to be nothing more than an allergic reaction to coconut. I was being ridiculous, thinking my grandfather had cancer based
solely upon an Internet search. Besides, everyone knew that a deadly disease was attached to any Internet symptom search; one just had to click enough links.
I took a deep breath. I’d reacted way too quickly, and with disaster thinking leading the way. I tried to un-rattle myself.
“Get a grip, Clare,” I muttered quietly.
But really though, why would he be looking for such a thing? Why would he use his limited computer ability to search for something cancer related instead of something about book restoration or typewriter repair? There must have been a solid reason for his curiosity. I’d have to ask. I hoped he’d have an answer that made me feel silly for my immediate panic and concern.
“Clare, I need you up front. We have a customer who seems unhappy and I don’t want to bother Chester,” Marion said from the doorway.
I cleared my throat. “I’ll be right there.”
I closed the browser and then pushed the button on the screen. I wished I’d never investigated, which was a phrase I’d heard Jimmy say a time or two when it came to his teenage daughter’s online activities.
As I exited my office, I looked across the workshop. Neither Chester nor Mirabelle paid me a bit of attention. They were seated in facing folding chairs, each of them holding a mug of coffee and each of them with a serious, almost stern look on their face. Were they discussing something grave, something like pancreatic cancer?
Stop!
I’d have to find out later.
The unhappy customer was not dressed like our typical patrons. It was rare that someone who wore leather and chains visited our stationery store. During the summer, people frequently came in who’d been on a hike or were about to go on one, or perhaps just wanted to dress the part to blend in with the Star City population that was somewhat granola. Outdoor clothing and water bottles were common sights. But the tough-looking customer was holding neither a typewriter nor a book, so I quickly assumed he was there for paper or pens.
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