Does it hurt, Oompa?” Beth tempered her concern to make the question sound more related to a skinned knee rather than a heart episode with a side of broken ribs.
“Only when I … breathe.” His grimace proved his point.
“Are you going to be okay here in the shop rather than in bed?” His rocker in the conversation area had an Oompa-shaped depression that seemed to cradle him, but was the strain of sitting and interacting with the Yarn Shop customers going to be too much? What alternative did they have? Neither of them could afford in-home help while he recovered. And he was too alert, too well for nursing home care. Once word got out, all the warmhearted Cedarburg residents would be by to check on him. She supposed this was as good a place as any for her to keep an eye on him and for him to entertain visitors and well-wishers, those he’d been regaling with his stories for decades.
She tucked a stocking stitch lap robe around him.
“Beth, are you trying to help me or make me croak from the heat?” He tore the wool blanket away and tossed it aside.
“Croak? Don’t talk like that.” She retrieved the blanket, folded it, and laid it over the arm of a chair near him.
“People die, Beth. We all do.”
Not you. You’re all I have left. “Planning your funeral might be a bit off-putting to customers, Oompa. Could we save that kind of talk for some other time?”
She plumped the throw pillows on the other chairs in the circle, the ones without his shape in them and his spirit giving them life, and fanned the classic children’s books she kept on the side table.
He stirred. Leaned forward. Her peripheral vision caught the movement.
“So,” he said, his voice weak but his message strong, “we will talk about it sometime?”
She let out more rope in her invisible tether to him, venturing as far as the window display and the Closed sign she was about to flip to Open. “About what?”
“My dying.”
The words spun her around and sent a jolt through her nerve endings. “Oompa, think positively.”
“I am. I’m positively sure I’m gonna die.”
She could threaten to wash his mouth out with soap, but that hardly seemed appropriate. “So, do you hear the death angel knocking at your door?” The nerve jolt exited through her mouth as an artificial chuckle.
“No, that would be your Derrick.” He nodded to a spot behind her and to the right. Derrick stood crouched to fit within the boundaries of the entrance door window. With his nose pressed against the glass, he smiled at her and pointed to the small box he carried—dark chocolate brown with a milk chocolate satin ribbon.
She opened the ancient brass lock and let in a whiff of cool October morning air, a smattering of sunbaked leaves, and a “giant” bearing something that smelled divine. Cinnamon? Sugar, definitely. What else?
“If you give me a minute, I’ll actually open the box so you don’t have to sniff through the lid,” he said, dangling the box just above her head.
“Oompa isn’t supposed to have chocolate for a while. The caffeine will mess with his heart medications.”
Derrick gave the ribbon one tug and it fell away, as did the sides of the box. The chocolate magician. “That’s why I made a blond brownie for him. Notice how it’s three toned? Like your hair?”
Beth tugged at her feathered bangs.
He spun the now-splayed box like a basketball player might spin a ball. “And for the lady …”
“Derrick, it’s not even nine in the morning. I may have a soft heart for brownies”—and those who create them—“but at this hour I need—”
“… my latest experiment—Caramel Apple Sour Cream Coffee Cake.”
“What? No chocolate?”
His eyes wide—oh, good, they were the same color today, like gourmet tea steeped a little longer than required—he laid the confections on the counter and left the building. Dark tea? His real eye color? What happened to the blue?
Beth looked at Oompa across the room. He shrugged.
Within seconds Derrick was back, steadying an egg carton drink holder bearing three pottery mugs. “Hot cider for Mr. Schurmer. Double Dutch Chocolate lattes for Ms. Schurmer and the Crusher.” He waited for Beth to take her mug then delivered the cider. On his return toward the front of the shop, he tripped on a wrinkle in the air and toppled forward, his arms extended with the off-balance single mug still lodged in the egg carton holder.
Beth sucked in a breath and reached toward him, not that it would help.
Derrick dipped and swerved, missing the stack of imported wool from Iceland. He twirled past the mosaic of autumn-colored wool she’d so carefully arranged. When he landed—belly down on the floor between display bins—the rust dripped with rich, dark liquid dotted with clouds of cream. The rust of his hair.
Beth exhaled. He lay at her feet, a crown of latte oozing down his face.
He looked up to where she towered over him. “Imagine how hot this would have been without all that extra whipped cream.” Oompa gasped.
Beth stepped over the puddle of Derrick and moved to Oompa’s side. He shivered, his face contorted. Beth crouched to look into his down-turned eyes. His eyebrows tilted up in the middle. Gripping the arms of his chair, he opened his mouth and howled.
“That’s the—funniest—funniest thing I’ve—seen—in—a—” He gave up talking and, holding his ribs, let the howls take over again.
Her grandfather risked checking out of life by laughing too hard. Her new friend sat on the heart-pine floor in the middle of her store, leaking an expensive specialty coffee. What was there to do but eat cake?
She sipped her Double Dutch latte between bites, handed Derrick a wet washcloth and a roll of paper towels, and flipped the Open sign while the two men dove into conversation as deftly as Derrick dove into foamed coffee.
“You know why that is, don’t you?” Oompa held one arm across his chest as he scooted more upright in his chair.
Derrick felt the wince more than saw it. He should have backed off a little during CPR. Another apology wasn’t likely to help matters, though. “No. Why, Mr. Schurmer?”
“To keep the farmers from overloading their hay wagons and the kids from riding on top of the pile.” The older man’s expression held the twinkle of joy reserved for discovering buried treasure. “The top of the Cedarburg covered bridge opening was squared off so farmers couldn’t pile the hay too high and strain the weight limits on the bridge deck.”
Derrick jotted the bit of trivia in his virtual notebook. His memory could only hold so much of the great material Oompa fed him like a full-blast fire hydrant. He’d have to sneak away to get this latest batch of stories keyed into his computer. Oh yeah, and bake something. He chanced a glance at Beth, who stood on tiptoes, broom in hand, poking in the general direction of a dark, Idaho-shaped spot in the ceiling. The full length of the broom left her inches shy of reaching the spot.
He excused himself from Oompa midstory, something about a hayride gone awry—hay gone a’ rye—and crossed the room to where Beth’s arm stretched heavenward.
“Can I help?” He reached to take the broom from her. It looked like an ordinary broom—standard, nonelectric model. Must have been static electricity in the air that caused the faint burst of voltage when his hand brushed hers in the exchange.
“I’d appreciate it,” she said. “There’s such a fine line between antique and old.”
“I can hear you!” Oompa called from his corner.
Beth grinned. “Not you, Oompa. This building. I think the roof’s leaking again.”
Derrick brushed a drop of moisture from Beth’s blushing cheek. “Either the roof is or you are.”
Wrong thing to say. Another gaffe that needed redemption.
She turned away from him, shoulders tilted forward. While she scribbled something on a scrap of paper she’d pulled from a narrow drawer under the cash counter, he turned his attention to the ceiling. Two reserved taps to the Potato State sent the broom handle well past Idaho and on its way to the Balkan Islands. Chunks of damp plaster dandruff floated into his face, hair, head, and shoulders.
He spit one of the smaller flakes out of his mouth. “Tell me—”
Beth followed the trajectory of the plaster snowfall.
“Tell me,” he repeated, “this isn’t asbestos.”
She hugged her arms across her midsection and pressed her left thumb against her closed lips. Her cheeks puffed as if that thumb were the mouthpiece of a trumpet. But the sound she produced was more like wind chimes dancing in a leaf-rattling breeze. Music and laughter in one sweet sound.
“There’s a hole in your ceiling,” Derrick reminded her.
More music. This time accompanied by a nose-kazoo snort.
“Derrick, you’re—” Her sentence died in a choke.
She wouldn’t stop breathing, would she? Breathe, girl. My last attempt at CPR drew mixed reviews.