“Well, duh. It was Aunt Gertrude. Nobody with half a brain would stick around. He’s dead, of course. A one-hit wonder. A boring writer.”
He rubbed his chin. “His book was a rather important shift in American literature.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Why do you know so much about it?”
“Everyone has read Robin Hartchick.”
Except me. I stared at his profile. Without his glasses on, he was perfect. Aquiline nose, ridge at the forehead. Strong jaw. Kit bloody Bond!
If I was going to spend more time in Truhart, at least I had something better to look at than a bunch of books.
Chapter 6
I stood before a disappointing organic-produce section and tried to decide where to start. It had been a while since I had access to a full kitchen. In my cart were several cans of beans, whole-wheat tortillas, and a box of organic soy-grain bars. I threw a bag of carrots and celery in and wondered if the Family Fare had polenta or tofu.
“Do you think she needs help?” Two ladies huddled at the end of the aisle, heads together, trying to keep their voices low. I heard them anyway.
“Marva says Gertrude spent hours trying to teach her how to read. She didn’t never get it right.”
“Maybe we should ask if she needs help.”
I gripped the handle of the grocery cart. Forget the tofu. Moby was waiting patiently in Lulu. I would grab whichever bag of dog food looked like it was healthy and get out of here.
“I heard she was sleeping in her car, of all places—”
I didn’t stick around to hear the rest. My ears were ringing enough already. Fortunately, the dog food was on the opposite side of the store. I passed the dairy items, until I was at the pet aisle. Then I scanned the bags for the senior dog food. My budget was limited, but I couldn’t bring myself to scrimp on Moby’s food. He was somewhere around nine or ten years old. An octogenarian. I could eat cheaply and be fine. He needed better nutrition. Someday I would find him the perfect family. One with green fields and sheep and lots of money.
“Can I help you find anything?”
There she was again. Marva. The owner of the pink-rimmed glasses I had admired just yesterday, stood behind me. Had she been following me?
“Nope, I’m all set.” I grabbed a bag of dog chow with the words all natural in large block letters and I brushed past her in search of the checkout.
I made a circle around several customers who were milling in front of a Halloween display and pulled my cart up to the cash register. I was almost finished unloading the items in my cart when the checkout lady asked, “Do you have a super-saver shopping card?”
I weighed the advantage of getting a saver card against the benefit of getting out of the store unscathed. “How do I get one?”
Marva appeared beside the cashier. My eyes wandered to the toucan pictures printed on her pants. She adjusted her glasses and took a form from behind the register. In a slow voice that was even louder than when she had been in the dog-food aisle, she explained the process. “I can fill this out for you, honey. Just give me your information. Or better yet, your license. That has all the information we need.”
She was trying to be nice. But it felt condescending. An old breathless feeling rose in my chest. “It’s all right. I can fill it out.”
She held the form closer to her chest. “No problem at all,” she said, nodding her head at two customers who appeared behind me. “You ladies don’t mind if we take a little time here, do you?”
I turned to see two gray-haired sisters—they looked like twins—standing behind me. “Oh, we don’t have anything going on today. Do we, Brenda?”
“Well, we are supposed to—”
“Like I said, nothing at all,” said her sister.
“Thanks, Barbara.” Marva nodded and straightened her purple smock.
“Yeah, thanks a lot, Barbara,” I said. She smiled, failing to hear the irony in my tone.
Marva pushed her glasses up on top of her head and leaned down, resting her elbows on the conveyor belt.
“Name. I got this part. Gertrude Brown, right?”
“How did you remember me?”
“Address? The bookstore, right?” Her glasses slipped off her head to her nose. She pushed them back to the top of the head. “You wouldn’t happen to remember the address—no, never mind. I can look it up. I’ll just leave this blank—.”
“Sixteen Main Street.”
She seemed to doubt my memory. “We’ll see. And not to confuse you, but we’re changing the name to Autumn Lane. Just for October. I wanted it to be called Haunted Avenue. But Annie Adler and Flo Jarvis thought the youngsters might be scared and well . . .” She caught my blank stare and cleared her throat. “And your e-mail address?”
“I don’t have one.”
Her eyes popped. “What?”
“I don’t have one.” What was the point in telling her I thought that the internet and e-mailing were a waste of time?
“Do you have a phone number?”
“Yes.” I gave her my non–smart cell phone number and declined to tell her it was a pay-as-you-go model. I always forgot to charge it.
“Birth date.”
“Look, how many questions are on that form?” If it weren’t for the dog food I would have torn it in two and left.
“This is the last one, honey. Don’t worry.” She tilted her head and sent an ‘I told you so’ look to the women in back of me.
I gave her my birth date.
“A Halloween baby. How interesting!”
“And I’m twenty-seven years old!” I added. She nodded her head, glad that I could add.
She stepped away and I sighed, relieved to have that little pity party over with. “Here you go, Ginger.” She let the checkout lady scan the zebra code. “And there are coupons for that dog food too. So you will save seven dollars and thirty cents.”
“That was forty-five dollars and twenty cents. Now it’s less seven dollars and thirty cents.” She could have hosted a children’s TV show with that slow and deliberate voice she was using on me. She pointed at the final price on the screen in front of me. Numbers were sometimes as bad as letters. If she had just told me the final amount, I would have been fine.
I felt cold sweat at the back of my neck. It joined the invisible belt that was cinching my chest, making me breathless. I longed for my car and Moby and a long stretch of road.
I pulled out a flowered change purse. It had been my mother’s. My hand shook. I lifted out several twenties and placed them on the belt. “I don’t have any change,” I said at the same time that all my change decided to drop out of the purse, bounce onto the counter, and fall to the floor.
“Of course, that happened,” I said, reaching down to pick up the coins at my feet.
The lady behind me said, “Count it out for her, Ginger. Poor thing—”
When I straightened up, Ginger was holding up a few bills in her hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll make change for the twenties.”
“I can do it—” I started to say. But she was already handing me my two singles and a dime. “That is two dollars and ten cents change.” She smiled brightly and sent the ladies a dazzling grin, as if she had just managed to save an entire third-world country.
“Thanks,” I responded flatly. One of the twins behind me clucked at my rude tone.
Wheeling the cart and the dog food out the door, I hit a sharp downward slope by the curb. Rather than let the cart get away from me, I stepped on the back and took a joyride before it came to a stop near the handicapped spaces. The ladies watched me from the automatic double doors. I had just reinforced their views on my mental state.
When I was little, I combated those kind of looks by sticking out my tongue. I was tempted to do it now. But Moby whined from Lulu’s open window and stuck his own tongue out for me.
I loaded my groceries onto the floor of the backseat. Moby sniffed the air above them and put his nose inside a bag.
“Don’t get any idea
s.”
His tongue orbited the outside of his mouth and he made no attempt to cover his thoughts. Thinking better of my grocery placement, I pulled a bag off the floor and put it in the front seat where I could keep an eye on it. It was then that I noticed the truck that sat in the parking-lot lane in front of me.
At first I couldn’t believe what I was looking at: A garbage truck with what appeared to be teddy bears, plastered all over it. And they thought I was crazy? I stomped my foot at the ridiculous way the driver had parked. I had been so careful to position Lulu facing out, like I always did. But whoever owned this absurd-looking truck had parked right across Lulu’s front bumper. Like everything else in my day, things were not going as planned.
There was no one in the driver’s seat of the truck. I gazed back at the front of the Family Fare. No garbage men with stuffed animal fetishes were anywhere in sight. The spectators were still standing by the doors. They had no idea how much better this show was about to get.
I clutched Pikachu, wishing there was some way to make this look normal.
I shifted Lulu in neutral and unlocked the emergency break to release it. Then I jumped out of the car and began the sadly familiar routine of manually reversing my car. I moved to the front bumper, grimacing at the fact that it was dust-covered and bug-splattered. Lulu needed a bath.
The proximity of the cars parked behind me meant that there wasn’t enough room to do it with one try. Once the front bumper was clear of the car next to me, I walked back and turned the steering wheel. “I don’t suppose you could be useful and learn how to do this,” I said to the dog, who waited patiently for me to complete my reverse. Then I returned to hugging the front bumper and pushed the car again. Lulu moved into the aisle of the parking lot just as a sheriff’s SUV pulled up behind me. Pretending it was perfectly normal to push a car out of a parking spot, I kept my head down and completed the job.
As I moved back to the driver’s door, expecting to get arrested any second now, I heard a deep voice ask, “Everything okay, ma’am?”
I was surprised by the sympathetic eyes of the young officer leaning out the window of his SUV. Next to him sat a curly-headed blonde. She said something to the officer and he exited the SUV.
“Can I help?” he asked. “I can call for a tow.”
“No. I’m fine now.”
“Did you stall? Need a jump?” His eyes traveled from the front bumper to the back and the lopsided grin on his face showed an appreciation for my vintage yellow Beetle.
“No. She’s just a little quirky, that’s all.”
His eyes strayed to the blonde in the passenger’s seat. “Quirky, huh? I know how that goes.”
The blonde waved. She was about my age. The officer could barely take his eyes off her. I patted Lulu. “Worth the inconvenience, though.”
He started to say something, then he caught himself and was back to business. “I’m Deputy Sheriff Hardy. You must be Trudy Brown.”
Instead of letting his assumption offend me, I smiled. “I guess word of my unconventional arrival has already spread through town.”
“Some of our most highly respected residents have made unconventional arrivals.” Judging by the glint in his eyes, I wondered if he was referring to someone close to him.
“J. D. . . .” the blonde warned from the SUV.
He put his hands in his pockets and pretended he didn’t hear her. “If you ever need to get her checked out, you’ll find the doc on M-33, a quarter-mile down from Main Street.”
“The doc?”
“The name on the front window is Auto Doctor. But we just call it Doc’s. His garage doesn’t look like much, but he can work wonders.”
“I’ll make sure to remember that. Thanks.”
A single high-pitched bark came from the car.
“Nice dog.” He moved back to his SUV.
“You want him? He’s looking for a home,” I offered.
“I’ve got my hands full already.” The blonde said something and he laughed.
As I left the parking lot, I glanced at the front door of the Family Fare. Several faces still watched me. I stuck out my tongue after all.
I drove away, triumphant. Ten minutes later, Lulu hit a rut and began to putter out.
* * *
“Aww, I hate to see a dead bug.” A familiar-looking white-haired man said, coming out of the garage holding a bag of candy corn.
“What are you talking about? You make a game out of killing flies with the Shop-Vac,” said a stocky young man who followed him.
“Jesus, Richard, what year were you born again?”
“That’s a little detail I thought you would remember, Dad,” the young man bit back.
While the two argued, I put Lulu in neutral and grasped the emergency brake. My brave car had struggled in gasping fits on the two-lane state highway until we finally made it to the Auto Doctor. She still had life in her, but she was like an old lady. The miles she had traveled since California had forced her into the slow lane.
Moby jumped to the front seat and wagged his tail at the sight of two new friends. I stuck my head out the open window. “Remember me?”
“Hey, it’s the vegan.”
“Murdock, right?”
“Actually, that’s just what my big sister, Corinne, calls me. Most people call me Doc.”
With his receding white hair, height, and large nose that might have been broken a time or three, the name fit him better. “Doc it is. I’ll steer if you don’t mind pushing her.”
He helped me move Lulu into the empty bay in the garage. I secured the brake. When I stepped out of the car, the young man gawked at my boots and vintage jacket. But Doc never took his eyes off Lulu.
“Is that a super-Beetle?”
“What?” A third mechanic rolled out from underneath a Chevy. I remembered him too. The man who wore the matching gray coveralls at the diner. Vance. At the sight of Lulu, Vance’s eyes lit up and he dropped his tools. “Joe O’Shea told me he saw one in town yesterday. Seventy-four?”
“Seventy-three,” I said.
Still on his back, he rolled the creeper toward the bug and looked under the chassis. “Original floor pan and suspension?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t keep the pride out of my voice. Lulu was very special.
“How did you keep it from rusting out?”
“She’s a California girl. My brother also kept her in the garage most of the time he owned her.”
Doc walked around Lulu in a full circle. “You drove her from Cali?”
“Yes. But she’s feeling the stress. Besides the wear and tear of the trip, California potholes are nothing to the craters around here.”
Moby barked from the backseat. Doc stopped to pet him through the open window. “No need to get snippety. We’ll give you some attention too, girl.”
“Boy,” I corrected.
The man on the ground rolled over and stood up. The top of his head barely reached my shoulder. “And the car is a girl, I’m guessing?”
I waved my hand across the hood and grinned. “Meet Lulu.”
“You and your family have come to the right place.”
Family? I kind of liked the thought. A foster dog and a car. Nice. “She’s been losing power for the past few miles. I’m pretty sure I left a trail of smoke on M-33.”
The younger man, Richard, wiped his hands on a towel attached to his belt and I wondered why. They were clean from his palms to beneath his fingernails. He swaggered over to the front of the bug and sent the other men a smug look. “Why don’t you just get yourself some coffee and watch Ellen? We’ll let you know what’s wrong with it.”
“I don’t think—”
“That smoke was probably engine coolant. Your head gasket is most likely blown,” he said, searching for the lid handle. “But we’ll take a look for you, right, Dad?”
Doc rubbed the dog behind his ears. He winked at me and curled his lip. “Sure, son.”
The young man lifted the hood of th
e Beetle and jumped back. “What the—”
The two older mechanics doubled over, laughing.
I had to admit, it was pretty funny. The way his mouth dropped open, you would have thought he’d discovered a dead body under the hood.
I walked around the car and opened the trunk. I tapped the engine. “Are you looking for this?”
He peered around Lulu and turned a distinct shade of pink.
“And just for the record, this is an air-cooled car. There is no coolant in the engine.” I turned to the older men. “Everything looked fine to me the last time I had the engine out. But my guess is I may have burned a valve. Also, I have not been able to put her transmission in reverse since Montana. But I don’t think that is a related problem.”
Doc held a hand out to me. “I love a woman who knows her way around an engine. You’ve already met Vance.” He nodded at the tiny man who continued his high-pitched giggle. Doc slapped the boy on the back. “And this boy here is my son, Richie. He’s either seventeen or eighteen. His mom knows. Go easy on him, honey. He’s a Beetle virgin!”
He leaned down to Vance and said under his breath, “He thinks with his brain in his pants the same way a Beetle does.”
Vance laughed even harder. Doc continued: “When he’s not working here, he’s working on his punts. He’s a better football player than a mechanic. So we’ll have to give him credit for something.”
I shook his hand. “I’m Trudy and my friend here is Moby.”
Vance was trying to look in the car, but Moby kept licking his face. “There’s a cat in the office, but he’s pretty good with dogs. Can we let him out?”
Once Moby was sniffing around the garage in search of the cat, we turned our attention back to business. I took off my colorful coat and rolled up my sleeves. Doc and Vance took turns sitting in Lulu. Vance acted like a boy with a crush. He sat in the driver’s seat flipping switches, engrossed by every detail.
At one point he flipped down the visor, pausing to study the picture of Angkor Wat on the brochure. “You goin’ somewhere?”
“That’s the plan.”
“I don’t know my geography much, but this doesn’t look like a place you can get to in a bug.”
The Bookshop on Autumn Lane Page 7