Who Needs Cupid?

by Debra Salonen, Molly O’Keefe

  “Yes,” she exclaimed. “A picture.”

  Of a beautiful black Lab. Nice pink tongue. Cheerful red and white kerchief. “My best friend, Jeremiah,” the caption read. “He’s better looking than me. Sorry.”

  Elle shook her head, made her gut reaction in the box provided and watched as Ron B. disappeared into Cupid’s red heart icon. So far, he’d probably gotten the best ranking from her, but she sincerely hoped he wouldn’t show up on Wednesday for a date—dog or no dog.

  “This was a really bad idea, wasn’t it?” she muttered after two more dismal entries failed to interest her. Each of them sounded impossibly young and immature. Their responses reminded her of…of…she couldn’t quite pin it down, but the niggling idea disappeared when Rebecca walked in the door.

  “Hi, Aunt Elle. Smells good in here. And look at all these people. Cool.”

  Elle closed down her page and got up. She walked to where her niece was standing and gave her a hug. “How are you? Still getting flack from your mother?”

  Rebecca didn’t answer. Instead she opened her coat and took out a plastic grocery bag, from which she withdrew a two-inch stack of folded cards and envelopes. “I was going to drop them off last night, but when I drove by your house, I saw Mr. Maxwell’s truck out front. Did you go out on a date?”

  “Um…sorta.”

  “Oh. Well, I would have run them over this morning but Mom gave me four new tax clients.”

  “Honey, I’m sorry. How will you have time for your art classes?” Rebecca looked so bleak, Elle wanted to kick her sister in the back of her high-tech ergonomic chair. “Come on, kiddo. You need a cappuccino. I can tell.”

  “Why does Mom hate art, Aunt Elle?”

  Elle held the stainless steel mug to the frother. It made too much noise for her to answer, so she used the time to think about the question. Did Jane hate all art or just her daughter’s?

  As she poured the fragrant caramel-colored liquid into a paper cup, she said, “Jane is a lot like your grandmother. They both craved order and routine. Numbers give you that. They’re clean and neat and you can usually tell at a glance when you’ve made a mistake. Art definitely isn’t that clear-cut.”

  “She has a few paintings on the walls. And some photographs that someone told her were going to go up in value someday.”

  Elle shrugged. “We’ve never had the same taste in anything, especially art. I’m really sorry if my big mouth made things tougher for you.”

  Rebecca shrugged. “I’m a grown-up. I can handle it.”

  Elle agreed. She just hoped her sister wouldn’t burn any bridges she’d later regret.

  A few minutes later, the noon rush hit. Several new faces. A few older folks who looked kind of familiar, like maybe they’d been customers of her parents or something. And four of Max’s chess club members. The latter ate two bowls of soup each and bought drinks, cookies and coffees. Her cash register had never looked so healthy.

  As she was standing at it, sorting bills, she happened to glance at the Valentine’s Day table. One of Max’s students whom she couldn’t remember by name pointed to the screen of the open laptop and laughed.

  That’s when it hit her. They were responsible for the new entries on her page that morning. She wondered if Max had put them up to it. No, of course not. They were just lusty young boys and this was a game to them.

  On a hunch, she picked up a box of candy hearts and walked to the table. “Hey,” she said, “which one of you has a Lab named Jeremiah?”

  The shortest one, with curly brown hair and glasses, looked up. “I do. How’d you know…oh, damn.”

  His blush was endearing, and she knew his friends would tease him relentlessly for blowing their joke. So, she presented him with the little candies and gave him a kiss on the cheek, then sent them back to school. Let their teacher worry about discipline. That wasn’t her thing.

  MAX COULD TELL something was up with the kids in his first class after lunch. His conscience made him worry that his ever-perceptive students had somehow guessed that he’d gotten lucky—better than lucky—last night. But as he covertly listened, he picked up bits and pieces of some embarrassing fiasco involving four of his chess kids.

  After a quick quiz, the class broke into small groups to work on their science fair projects. He moved stealthily and ambushed them when they were huddled together, deep in conversation.

  “Do you think she’ll tell Mr. M?”

  “Naw, she’s cool. She gave you candy hearts. I think she likes you.”

  “Really? Like maybe she’d let me see her naked?”

  “You are one sick little pup, Pete. If Mr. M finds out—”

  “Finds out what?” Max asked.

  The three seniors suddenly looked as mature as his granddaughter. They stammered and hemmed and hawed until the story finally came out.

  “You hacked into Ms. Adams’s Valentine’s Day Dateathon page?” How did I miss that? Oh, right, I was in bed with Ms. Adams. “Why?”

  “Because we like her and whenever we checked the Cup O’ Love’s home page, we’d only see one or two hits listed under her name. We couldn’t figure out why,” the acknowledged leader of the group said.

  “So, we bypassed the gatekeeper and sent in our names. Well, not our real names,” Peter Ellison added.

  “I see. Well, you do know you’re supposed to be twenty-one to participate in this dateathon, right? And there’s a charge.”

  Peter looked down. “Yeah, we know, but we spent all our money on lunch at the Cup.”

  Max fought back a smile. “You know Elle…Ms. Adams didn’t set this up so a bunch of high school boys could flirt with her. I take it she found out somehow?”

  “Pete can’t keep a secret,” Ham said.

  Peter blushed a brilliant shade of red that nearly matched the little square box sticking out of his breast pocket.

  Candy hearts. Max had seen them for sale at the Cup.

  “Did you apologize?”

  They nodded in unison.

  “But did you grovel?”

  They looked at each other. “Huh?” their tenors hummed.

  “Here’s a hint. She likes butterflies.”

  And she’s quite fond of having her belly button licked. But he’d keep that little tidbit to himself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ELLE LOVED the four o’clock lull. It gave her time to make whatever roll-up she had in mind for the day. Today’s selection would be chopped black olives, salami, three kinds of cheese and strips of roasted red pepper.

  If her sandwiches went over as well as her soup did at lunch today, she’d be able to say with pride that Cup O’ Love had its best day of business ever. She crossed her fingers and knocked on the wooden chopping block just in case.

  She heard the exterior door jingle, but she kept rolling the cracker bread.

  “A delivery, Elle,” Noreen, her part-time assistant, said. “You have to sign for it.”

  That was surprising. Usually if Tony, the FedEx guy, had something for her, he just left it on her desk. “I’ll be right there.”

  She secured the roll-up with toothpicks, then wrapped it in plastic wrap and carried it to the display case. She sold roll-ups by the inch and wouldn’t cut it until someone ordered a specific size.

  She looked around as she wiped her hands on a towel. No Tony.

  “Over there,” Noreen said, motioning with her head.

  The man in question wasn’t wearing a uniform. He looked more like an attorney than a messenger boy.

  “I’m Ellenore Adams. You have something for me?”

  He turned on the heel of his shiny black shoes and produced a sealed manila envelope that bore her name and the Cup O’ Love address. “I need to sign something?”

  He had a small receipt book. The kind offices used to keep track of petty cash. She signed her name, then looked at him. “Who are you? Who do you work for? I don’t think I’ve seen you around before. Do you want a cup of coffee? On the house.”


  He was young, mid-twenties, she’d guess given the number of blemishes. Her suggestion appeared to come as a surprise to him, but he stammered a “No, thank you” and left in a hurry.

  “Odd,” Elle said, carrying the envelope to her office. It was lightweight, only a page or two. A few weeks earlier she’d gotten a registered letter inviting her to a time-share hotel in Hawaii. Maybe this was something similar, she thought, ripping open the seal. There was no return address. What kind of company would pass up the chance to plaster its logo on…

  The thought disappeared as she scanned the piece of paper. Her hand began shaking and she placed it flat on the desk to finish reading the six paragraphs of typed print, which she saw carried a notary seal on the bottom.

  “She’s kicking me out?” Elle murmured, squinting at the words that made no sense. “For letting her daughter use my empty second-floor space?”

  “A clear violation of rule 7, subparagraph 3 of a signed lease,” the letter said.

  “Rule seven?” Elle repeated. “What rules? What lease? What the hell is she talking about?”

  Her voice rose as her hysteria grew and must have carried beyond her open door because a second later two people joined her in the tiny cubicle. Lucky, who snatched the paper off the desk and started reading it aloud, and Max, who was looking at Elle with such concern, Elle almost burst into tears.

  “Your sister sent you this?” Lucky asked, her voice taut and angry. “What a chicken-poop thing to do. Noreen said she had some snot-nosed messenger boy deliver it, too. She wasn’t even woman enough to tell you face-to-face that she was revoking your lease.”

  “Revoking?” Max grabbed the page and scanned it. “Did you sign a lease, Elle?”

  Had she? Jane had wanted to keep everything clean and neat, and Elle had agreed. She’d always heard that was the best way to do business with family. “I don’t know for sure. I might have. I signed something, but I thought it had to do with power of attorney if anything happened to me. That made sense, I thought, with Nora so far away and hard to reach.”

  “You must have signed a lease, too, since she acts so confident. I don’t picture Jane as the type to bluff.”

  Elle’s stomach turned over. Had she blown it again? Trusted the wrong person and wound up in trouble? But not Jane, a small voice cried. Her sister wouldn’t publicly humiliate her and kick her out. Not when Elle’s business was finally taking off.

  “Today was a good day,” she said in a small voice. “Best sales, yet.”

  “Listen,” Lucky said. “I don’t know much about the law, but I do know you’re entitled to due process. She can’t just kick you out in three days. That’s silly. Ridiculous.”

  “Three days?” Max asked, his brows drawing together.

  “Cease and desist by February 15, it says. Wednesday is Valentine’s Day, right? Elle’s dateathon party. What’s Jane going to do—show up the next day with the sheriff in tow?”

  “Her husband goes duck hunting with the sheriff,” Elle said, starting to feel that same numbness she had when the doctor had said her mother was dead. The sense of finality was so profound and suffocating, she could hardly draw a breath.

  “Elle.” Max took her shoulders between his hands and made her look at him. “I’ll call Jared. He’s a lawyer. He’ll give us some idea where you stand, but it would probably help if I could fax him a copy of the lease.”

  She looked into his eyes. Max. In her corner. She suddenly knew she wasn’t going into this battle alone. The realization made her start to cry.

  “Oh, Elle,” he said obviously misinterpreting her tears. He pulled her into his arms and wrapped her in a tight hug.

  “Oh,” Lucky peeped.

  The look on her friend’s face made Elle ease free of Max’s hold. Lucky had put her faith in one man’s hands and wound up losing all hope. Elle wasn’t going to lose her head over this. She’d been in tight spots before and she’d gotten out of them without some man coming to the rescue.

  “The lease should be in my file cabinet, if I have a copy. Jane was insistent that important papers stay with her…in case I burned down the place my first week of business.”

  Max was tempted to use a word he heard too often from the lips of his students. It described Jane perfectly. Watching the woman he loved stoically thumb through the files in her desk drawer made him want to storm the accounting office and face down Elle’s sister in person.

  He checked his watch. Jared would still be at the office, he was sure. When he’d dined with his son and Jared’s new friend, Ricco, a few weeks earlier, a great deal of the conversation had been devoted to Jared’s workaholic tendencies.

  Personally Max thought his son could do better, but he’d managed to keep his opinion to himself. Maybe all parents thought that way, although after hearing Elle’s enthusiastic gushing about a young man she’d never met—based solely on her daughter’s assessment of the guy—Max had decided to take a lesson in tolerance and let his son come to his own decisions in matters of the heart.

  “Can I use this line?” he asked, picking up the phone.

  “Of course.” she answered without looking up. A second later, she said, “I think this is it.” She produced a single piece of paper.

  Five big letters across the top of the page read: Lease. Max’s stomach released a dose of acid usually reserved for watching a tight chess match in which one of his players was losing.

  He punched in his son’s phone number then looked up when he felt Elle’s hand on his shoulder. As the call went through, he gave what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

  “Thank you,” she mouthed silently.

  Or was it, “I love you”?

  WHEN ELLE RETURNED to the front part of the store, she was shocked to see every chair taken and a line at the counter. Rebecca had apparently jumped in to help when her aunt had failed to emerge from her office as promised.

  Elle was touched, but she wasn’t sure having Rebecca’s help would aid her cause. Rebecca’s mother was determined to make Elle pay for helping nurture Rebecca’s artistic side. Peddling soup and sandwiches was probably even higher up on Jane’s list of no-nos.

  “Thanks, sweetie. I appreciate your pitching in, but you should probably take off. Aiding and abetting the enemy might not sit well with your boss.”

  “Aunt Elle, this is ridiculous. Mother is being a complete putz. I can’t believe it…okay, I can believe it. But I’ll fix things. Honest. This doesn’t have to get out of hand.”

  It already had.

  Rebecca was removing her apron when she said, “Guess what? We sold a bunch of my cards. Can you believe it?”

  Elle gave her niece a one-armed hug, then motioned for the next person in line. “Of course, I can, doll. They’re the best cards in town. I’m only sorry your mother can’t see that.” To her customer, a rather handsome young man who had one of Rebecca’s cards on his pile of goodies, she said, “You have good taste.”

  He leaned partway across the counter to reply, “And everything here tastes good, so we’re even.”

  “Have you been here before?”

  He shook his head. “No, but my younger brother comes here all the time. He said his chess coach brought him here for lunch one day. Raved about the place.”

  The power of word-of-mouth. If her sister had helped spread the word when Elle first opened up, maybe it wouldn’t have taken so long for Cup O’ Love to catch on.

  “Thanks,” she said, handing him his change. She was about to say, “Come again,” but changed her mind. No use encouraging him to return if she was going to be closing in three days.

  The rest of the day flew by. She sold out of soup and sandwiches. A dozen new people signed up for a last-minute attempt to find a match on the dateathon. Two women announced to the entire room that they’d found their soul mates while drinking their decaf lattes.

  “How is that possible?” Elle muttered. “They’re my age, for heaven’s sake.”

  “What are you mumbling abo
ut?” Lucky asked. She’d decided to stick around to show her support, although she flat-out refused to enter the dateathon because she only wanted one man and Josh Watts would never in a million years sign up for that kind of thing.

  “I’m shallow and vain, aren’t I, Lucky? I haven’t grown and matured in the least in thirty years. I’m facing eviction from my own sister and my mind keeps harping on the fact that not a single soul in cyberland finds me attractive.”

  “Maybe there’s something wrong with your Web page,” Lucky said, wiping down the inside of the glass display case.

  “I thought of that, but a couple of Max’s students sent me profiles. They were totally wrong for me, of course, but kinda sweet.”

  Lucky shook her head. “What are you going to do if your sister finds a way to enforce this? I know Max’s son said you were being denied due process, but Jane has a certain following in town. She’s like the town matron. When I first opened my store, I remember somebody saying I’d never make a go of it if Jane didn’t give me her endorsement.”

  “Oh, pah, I don’t believe that. She’s my sister, not God. Free enterprise will prevail.” Although it was becoming increasingly obvious just how little Jane had done to help Cup O’ Love succeed. And that hurt. A lot.

  “Did you tell Jane that Nora is coming for a visit?”

  Elle shook her head. “Never got the chance. But, now, I’m not sure she should bother. Nora has always liked Jane, and with my folks gone, Jane and her family are all we have. This would really fracture future relations. Nora loves me. She’d never understand why Jane is doing this.”

  “Why is Jane doing this?”

  “Maybe she thinks I’m trying to come between her and Rebecca. That by letting Becca use the upstairs without Jane’s okay, I undermined their relationship. All I know for sure is I did sign the stupid lease. And I did blab about renting the upstairs to Rebecca, although for the most part there’s never any money exchanged. She fills in at the counter when she can and I take that off her rent.”