by Pamela Tracy
Right now, though, the store was quiet. The Nutty Knitters were gone, and no one was stopping by during a lunch break.
At the end of May and all through June, she'd sponsored a Kids' Club. From ten to eleven every morning, the knitters had taught young girls how to make forever cowls and crocheted purses. Amy had sat with them and learned. It would always be a cherished memory. She now had five misshapen cowls and one interesting-looking purse. The club members, all young girls from eight to sixteen, treated her as if she were one of them.
A friend.
When Amy had been eight all she'd wanted to do was fade into the background. At sixteen she'd figured out how to escape and did. She'd never had time to make friends in between.
Amy wondered what kind of sewing club she could offer now. Most of the girls were on vacation, since it was July. She almost wished a delivery would arrive. At least then she'd have inventory to stock. As it was, she sorted buttons from a tin she'd purchased at a garage sale. One thing she'd learned early on: people who sewed loved all kinds of notions. Into different containers, all four inches by four inches with Craft Away the Day written on them, she divided buttons by both color and then by design. One container had animal buttons and another had holidays.
A ragged black truck pulled in front of the shop. Amy's heart stopped for a moment. Well, she'd been wishing for a diversion, but she'd not expected Daniel Starr. She forced herself to stay behind the counter, acting busy. He went to the back of his truck and let down the tailgate. Next thing she knew he was standing at the door, saying exactly the same thing he'd said last time he'd stood there.
"A little help here, please."
She frowned at him, trying not to notice the wave of his black hair, the twinkle in his dark brown eyes, or the way his tall body filled the doorframe. But her expression faltered, because she was so dang curious.
"What kind of help do you need?"
"I've a shelf in the back of the truck. I knew you couldn't salvage the one Butterscotch ruined."
She left her seat so quickly that her elbow hit a container of buttons, which promptly sailed off the counter, overturned, and scattered its contents across the floor. Luckily the buttons were red and easy to see. Unluckily, once again, she appeared a klutz in front of Daniel Starr.
This time instead of watching her, he bent down to help. He was way too close, but she was mesmerized watching his fingers, almost twice the size of hers, as they nimbly gathered the buttons.
"Thanks," she said once they had everything returned to order.
He smiled, looking unfazed, and motioned her to the door. "I hope you like it."
His truck—with something big under a dark brown blanket in the back—was garnering attention. Usually in July, downtown Pecan, Texas, was more ghost town than thriving community. Now, Jax Moore managed to be out sweeping the sidewalk in front of the market. The shopkeeper waved. Across the street, Frank Williams, the preacher, walked past the storefronts. Twice he'd stopped by the shop to hand her a flyer about the times church met and the various activities it sponsored. She'd taken the flyer, nodded, and then thrown it away after he left.
Quickly she looked at Daniel. He was nodding a welcome to Frank, looking like he wanted the man to stop for a chat. Preachers, at least to Amy's mind, didn't chat. They preached, judged.
Too many times as a child she'd stood in a church foyer accepting bags of clothes, toys, or food. Often, the handing over was accompanied by a tract listing the times of services, which her mother promised to attend but never did. Always, the handing over was accompanied by a look of condescension, poorly disguised as sympathy.
Amy had promised herself that if she ever made good, she'd never enter a church foyer again. It had been the only disagreement her aunt and she had. Abigail wanted Amy to attend church with her. Amy stayed home.
Except for the one time when she'd had no choice.
Frank crossed the street, smiled at Amy, and held his hand out to Daniel for a shake. "Good to have you back. I know Shirley's excited. How is she?"
"Aching to come to church. Burt's with her now. They're playing Scrabble at the kitchen table."
Frank laughed. "Your grandmother beat me three times before I realized I should suggest a different game."
"I played her twice," Amy admitted. "She left me in the dust."
Daniel chuckled. "I won the state spelling bee in eighth grade because of Gramma."
Amy stepped back. This cowboy was a scholar? Yes, she could believe it. And she could imagine family nights spent playing Scrabble. Shirley Starr probably was as tough on a misspelled word as she was on a missed quilt stitch. "What about your brothers? Did they compete too?"
"Luke did. Dusty was too involved in 4-H to have time." Daniel motioned towards the back of his truck, and soon he and Frank revealed what the blanket was hiding.
"Wow," she whispered.
"I went online and looked at photos of how to display yarn. Then, it was easy."
"Wow," she whispered again. For one thing, it was bigger than the one that had broken. It also was made of thicker boards. She'd have room to not only write color and skein type, but to also keep order notes if she added plastic labels. He'd really put some time into this. Before she was done admiring the shelves, Frank and Daniel were unloading and guiding it into Amy's store.
"I need to pay for this," she said. "It's better than the one that broke."
"No need. I used wood we had lying around my grandpa's work shed."
She looked at the light brown, stained bookcase and then back at Daniel. "You made this?" No one had ever made her anything, not of this caliber, and not without wanting something in return.
If he wanted something in return, surely he wouldn't be so willing to have the preacher help with delivery.
"I did," Daniel said. "Late evenings when Gramma was sleeping and I needed something to do with my hands. Stained it a few days ago, lacquered it yesterday morning, and it was dry about noon today. When Burt came over, I thought it the perfect time to run it in."
"Thanks."
The preacher's cell phone rang, and he stepped outside. Daniel, however, stayed and looked over the shop. "Gramma says you need to learn how to sew. Strange to own a sewing shop and not know how to sew."
She laughed. Coming from anyone else, she might have been insulted. But this man not only was Shirley's grandson but also had just made her perfect shelving for her displays. "I'm sure she told you I inherited the shop from my Aunt Abigail. She'd made it into a successful business. I'm trying to keep it that way. But I seem to have all thumbs."
Stability. Craft Away the Day offered stability. She could learn to sew, would learn to love sewing, like her Aunt Abigail.
"I met Abigail a time or two. She seemed nice."
Amy doubted an old-maid yarn store owner and a young cowboy would have much in common.
"At church," Daniel said, "she was the one who brought in flowers and made sure the preacher's podium looked nice."
"She liked things to be colorful and in order." Amy hoped she would develop that talent. Aunt Abigail not only owned this shop, but she'd owned the other storefronts on this side of the street. Many of them empty. Abigail had complained about that, citing the economy. Still, every month, Amy's bank account increased just enough to pay the bills because of money paid to her through a corporation handling the tenants' rent.
Her aunt had had a good head for business. Amy intended to follow her lead. Not that she was successful yet. She wasn't turning a profit at Craft Away the Day. And, what she really wanted was to open a bakery in the next storefront, have an opening connecting the two shops, hire someone to run the craft shop, and then she could make a living doing something she truly loved.
If she could just save up the money. She really needed tenants in the empty buildings. Right now, it was enough that she owned Craft Away the Day.
"Would you like to sit down for a moment?" she asked Daniel. "Maybe have some cookies?"
"
The kind you shared last Tuesday? Or the kind you left on the kitchen table for me to find on Monday when I arrived home?"
She felt her face flush. "I'm sorry about that. How about you tell me your favorite kind, and I'll make you a dozen." Or two, or three, or four. She always baked when something got her flustered, and she was getting the idea that this man knew how to fluster.
To her relief, he laughed. She rewarded him with a smile of her own.
"Remind me," he said, "not to eat anything you make, especially cookies, when you're a lot annoyed at me."
#
Something about her made him want to pick her up, swing her around, and promise to keep that smile on her face forever.
She disappeared up a set of stairs behind her counter and in a moment reappeared with three different kinds of cookies and two glasses of milk.
He couldn't remember the last time he'd drunk milk. Sure, he put it on his cereal, but as a beverage choice...
All serious, she pushed aside what looked like a few patterns as well as some yarn remainders and set the cookies in front of him. She dug out red, white, and blue napkins and set them under the milk glasses.
"They're left over from my Fourth of July sale," she said.
He chose a peanut butter and Hershey kiss cookie, plopped it into his mouth, and gave a moan of delight. When he'd swallowed, he said, "You should open a bakery."
"I want to, in the store next door. It's been empty for a few years."
"It used to be the newspaper office," Daniel remembered.
"Now we get all our news online."
Daniel nodded. Not that he'd really read the newspaper except for the cartoons or the articles when he and his brothers were mentioned. Still, he knew his grandpa had liked having local news.
"So, think you'll be here for a while?"
Before she could answer, Frank Williams came in saying, "I've got to go. The church secretary called and something's wrong with the men's bathroom at church."
Amy gave him three cookies before he left.
"A preacher's a jack of all trades," Daniel said. "I attend cowboy church. The best preacher I know not only ropes calves but has a huge motor home where he operates a leather company."
"I saw something on television about a man like that. He traveled the United States in an RV promoting and selling his leather works. I wonder if he's the same guy."
"Did he talk up his being a preacher or his leather shop?" Daniel asked.
"His leather shop. I don't remember the whole show, though."
"If the show spotlighted only the leather, then it wasn't Gary. He can't go a sentence without talking God."
"It was my favorite show until it went off the air. The host went from town to town and showed unusual careers. I thought it might help me figure out a good job for me."
"And did it?"
"No, but I learned how cows are milked nowadays compared to fifty years ago. Best of all, a few years ago, the reporter, investigator, whatever he was, came to Pecan and walked down Main Street. He came into this building, my Aunt Abigail Benjamin's shop."
"Cool, you got to see your own aunt."
"I didn't know she was my aunt, that I even had an aunt. And, the name Benjamin is fairly common. What caught my interest, besides the last name, was when she mentioned her hometown. Leopaldo, Arizona."
"Never heard of it."
"Believe me, it's smaller than Pecan."
"And that's where you're from?"
Amy shook her head. He noticed a subtle dimming in her eyes. She did a good job hiding her feelings, but he'd been around his little brother Luke, knew the signs of a deep wound, and knew how to tiptoe around those feelings.
Finally, she continued. "I looked it up on a map. It barely rates a dot. It's where my mother was born. And that was too much of a coincidence to ignore."
"So you came here looking for Abigail?"
"I did. Best day of my life when she welcomed me into her life. I…well, I'd been feeling alone for quite a while. She treated me like family from day one."
Daniel got the idea there was a whole lot more to the story than Amy was telling. "I take it Abigail didn't know you existed."
"No."
"Why not?
"My mother ran away when she was young. She never contacted family again." Amy said the words matter-of-factly, but he could see by the way she held her shoulders, averted her eyes, that she wasn't as unaffected as she pretended. He started to move toward her, thinking he'd touch her shoulder, maybe her hair, something to let her know how affected he was, but she backed away. It was time to change the direction of his questioning. He took another cookie and, before biting into it, asked, "So, since you're not from Leopaldo, Arizona, where are you from?"
"I was born in Sturgis, South Dakota."
"Famous for motorcycles?"
"Yes. According to my mother, she was there for some motorcycle event. We didn't stay."
"Where did you move to?"
Amy shook her head. "The better question was where didn't we move to. I've lived in Nebraska, Iowa, New Mexico, South Carolina, Maine, California, and here."
He couldn't imagine being uprooted so much as a child. The one move he'd experienced, from his parents' home to his grandparents', had been hard enough. He wanted to touch her, take her into his arms and hold her. But she gave no indication that his touch would be welcome. Instead, he said, "Your mom's work really took you around."
He wanted the statement back almost as soon as he said it. She started fidgeting with the cookies on the plate in front of him, rearranging them and then wiping crumbs from the counter into a napkin. He got busy chewing.
"You sure ask a lot of questions," she finally said.
"I'm always in a new town, meeting new people. I only ask the usual. If you don't want to talk about your past, we can talk about mine."
It was the right thing to say. She relaxed a bit. "Your grandmother, with the help of the Nutty Knitters, has pretty much told me everything."
He laughed, almost spewing out part of a cookie, and managed an "I hope not."
"I know about how you broke your arm falling from one of the pecan trees when you were just nine."
Figures his grandma and her cronies would share that. "Did they tell you how loudly I cried?"
"I heard you scared the dog."
"Silly dog."
"I heard that in fifth grade, you made a Styrofoam Mercury spaceship that was really a puppet stage and wrote a play to go with it. You had six of your friends act out the Mercury's history. It was so good that you and your friends had to do it at a city hall meeting."
"The town was desperate for entertainment back then."
Amy laughed. "I also heard that you and your high school sweetheart went away to Abilene for college, and that she broke your heart."
"Who told you that?"
"One of the Nutty Knitters. She says you've never recovered and that you're relationship shy."
He smirked. "You can't believe everything you hear."
"Sure I can."
Leaning forward, he said, "Then, believe this. At least now you know I have a heart—during that first phone call you questioned whether I had one or not—and that it's broken and needs to be put back together."
To which the serious Miss Amy Benjamin laughed.
Not the response he'd wanted.
Chapter Five
"I'm fine going to church," Gramma insisted. "I've missed two Sundays and a Wednesday. I just need a little help getting there."
Daniel had been home just two hours. He hadn't been too concerned about Gramma while he was gone since Burt was visiting, again. They'd played Scrabble. Now Burt was gone and Gramma relaxed in her wheelchair, rearranging the Scrabble tiles and making the odd comment while Daniel spoke on the phone with Dusty.
Together, they'd looked at the rodeo schedule they'd been following, figured out the upcoming competitions, and tried to figure if Daniel still had a chance at Nationals.
T
he possibility existed, but Daniel would really need to work at it, and soon. He had a spreadsheet with dates and cost. For three of them, he went ahead and filled out the applications, saved them in a file, but didn't send them off.
If Gramma got better...
Apparently, she already felt better. If only she looked better. Something about seeing his grandma in a wheelchair, skinnier than ever before, and sleeping so much...
"It's a short outing," Gramma said. "It will do me good."
Daniel said goodbye to his twin before shaking his head, thinking he'd rather face a thousand-pound bull than tell his grandma that she couldn't go to church. "Gramma, you didn't go the first Sunday because you were lying in a heap on the floor. Last Wednesday you were only one day out of the hospital. I gotta say, God understands. It's okay to take it easy for a while."
Gramma tsked at him. "Like you take it easy. I watched one of your rodeos on television a few months ago. The one where you broke a rib and still rode another bull a few minutes later."
"I'm twenty-six and you're—"
"Still young."
"You scared me," Daniel admitted. "First with the frantic phone call from Amy, and then when I got home and saw the broken bannister."
Gramma pshawed. "That bannister was wobbly since before Hank died. Don't know why it chose to break when it did. And it's just my ankle I broke, not my neck. Quit babying me."
"Somebody needs to baby you. Amy says—"
Gramma laughed. "Amy's a worrier, and we've given her something to worry about. She's never had family. Since Abigail died, I think she's half afraid she's going to lose me and the other knitters."
Maybe Gramma did know a little something about Amy. "How did Abigail die? I mean, I remember you saying something, but I didn't pay much attention."
"She had pancreatic cancer. Came on real fast. At first, she underwent treatment. She'd had Amy in her life for just over a year. She wanted more."
"Only a year."
"I thought you spent the afternoon with Amy?" Gramma said. "Didn't you talk about anything but the shelving? The preacher said you were getting along fine."