Chapter Twenty-Two
Lori
“This is all my fault,” I told Sam. “If I hadn’t bought all the new furniture over the weekend, we might have enough money to cover the expense.”
Sam had been graciously listening to a version of this argument for much of the previous day. It was Tuesday morning, and we were both failing badly at looking cheerful as we served the handful of customers who had braved the rain to visit the bakery for breakfast.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Sam, sliding a lemon bar across the counter toward Cheryl. “Even if you add up the cost of the bookcase and the coffee table, that’s about $700. If we were able to take them back and get a refund, it wouldn’t begin to cover our new expenses.”
“Well,” I said shyly, “there’s also the new sofa.”
Sam leaned over the counter, bewildered. “What new sofa?”
Right as she said this, the front door opened and two men in grey uniforms came stumbling in carrying a brown leather sofa in both arms. It wouldn’t fit all the way in when they lifted it horizontally, so they were obliged to turn it over on its side. “Where you want this to go?” asked the man bringing up the rear.
I motioned toward the back, hot flashes of shame heating my insides. They carried the sofa toward the back while Sam looked on, speechless.
“See, I really shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “Do you think if I just went and talked to them—?”
“No, Lori,” said Sam. “What’s done is done. And unless that sofa cost upwards of $70,000, taking it back to the store isn’t going to help us much, either.”
I shook my head firmly. In my year co-managing the bakery, I had made some pretty egregious mistakes, but I never would have been dumb enough to shell out almost a hundred thousand for a sofa. I wasn’t even sure a sofa could cost that much.
“Don’t trouble yourself too much about it,” said Cheryl, who had been listening attentively to our discussion as she cut up her lemon bar into tiny squares with a fork. “The universe has a way of providing money for those who are in most need of it.”
“I wish that were true,” said Sam.
Cheryl wasn’t discouraged by her skepticism. “Famous in England is the tale of John Chapman, a peddler whose shop was about to be confiscated. In despair, because his wife was pregnant and he had no way of providing for them, he dreamt that if he stood in the middle of London Bridge, a man would appear and tell him how to become rich. For hours, he stood there, waiting and feeling stupid. Finally, he fell into conversation with a shopkeeper who also happened to be standing on the bridge. The shopkeeper said he had had a dream the night before in which he found treasure buried in the yard of a man named John Chapman. So, of course, Chapman went home and dug in the yard, where he found a chest containing enough jewels to save his business and family.”
She crossed her fork over her plate and sat back with a triumphant air. “That is quite a story, Cheryl,” said Sam, incredulous.
“I know,” I said sadly. “If only we could find treasure as easily as they did back in the old days when all you had to do was venture into the woods at dusk and offer your bread to the old homeless man sitting by the roadside, who inevitably proved to be a prince in disguise.”
Cheryl studied us suspiciously, as though certain she was being made fun of but not entirely sure how. “English lore is full of fascinating stories like that. I’m fond of the one about the baker’s daughter who refused to serve a slab of bread to a homeless man. Of course, the homeless man turned out to be Jesus, and he turned her into a giant owl.”
“Wow, that seems… awfully vindictive, for Jesus,” said Sam.
“I wish we could turn people into giant owls,” I muttered. “It might solve some of our current problems.”
“I think that would cause more problems than it solved,” said Sam.
Just then one of the movers came striding up to the counter. “Bad news about the sofa,” he said, mopping the sweat off his face with a paper towel, “It doesn’t quite fit. You’re going to have to move one of the small tables in the back.”
I left Sam standing at the counter and followed them toward the back. The sight of the sofa gave me a queasy feeling. I didn’t like being reminded of my extraneous purchase, nor of the happier times in which we thought we could afford it. I shoved the table a few feet forward, and the sofa slotted in perfectly. “Not that it really matters,” I told him. “We’ll probably be moving again in a few weeks.”
“Well, this should do for now.” He ran a bottle of ice water over his sweat-soaked shirt. “When we were pulling up, we saw some guys moving equipment into that abandoned store next door—speakers, sound booth, electrical supplies. It’s like a rock band is taking over the strip center.”
“If only that were the case,” I said under my breath.
Once the movers were gone, I sat down on the couch. For some reason, it didn’t feel nearly as comfortable as it had in the store. Sitting up made my back and neck hurt, and lying down wasn’t much of an improvement.
“Do you think we’ll ever be happy?” I asked Sam that night as we drove back to La Hacienda. “I mean really happy?”
“Why wouldn’t we be?”
“I don’t know. I guess because it took us so long to get the store just how we wanted it. I spent all those months thinking, ‘Once we can get the bookcase and some new furniture installed, this place is really going to feel like a home!’ And now that it’s happened, it just feels disappointing.”
“Well, the circumstances probably don’t help much,” she pointed out. “I’m sure you’d be a lot happier if you weren’t wracked with anxiety about having to move.”
“Perhaps not. That and the people moving in next door.” Toward the end of the day, we had gotten a few customers from SCHOP. Although they were affable, they left me with an uneasy feeling. I didn’t like the way they looked at the store, like they were already planning what they were going to do with it once they had gotten rid of us. I wondered if that was how they felt about the world in general, like they were just biding their time until the rest of us were gone and they took over.
“Maybe we ought to take them some lemon bars,” said Sam. Before I could object, she added, “I get the feeling they don’t trust other people much. It might help to lower the tensions between us.”
“I thought you were dead-set against helping them,” I pointed out.
“I was, but I’m thinking strategically here. Sometimes kindness is the way to a person’s heart. It might not help us out of our financial debacle, but at least they won’t think of us as their enemies.”
I shook my head skeptically. The last thing I wanted was for the members of that church to think of us as their friends. I had a sudden unhappy vision of the two of us standing at the counter struggling to smile while a group of them invited us to church. If we stayed in our current location, that was more likely to happen than not.
“Sitting on the couch earlier,” I told Sam, “I remember thinking, ‘This is it. This is what we wanted: for the store to feel like a home.’ And now it finally did, and I couldn’t enjoy it, thinking about how soon it was all going to be taken away from us. It’s like I can’t even sit still for a moment and enjoy something before life throws another obstacle in my path.”
“Well, I’m sure we’ll get it sorted,” said Sam. We pulled into the parking lot of La Hacienda and parked in an empty space next to Marshall’s car. “It’s fortunate that Marshall’s best friend is a lawyer. He’ll be able to make sense of it.”
But when we entered the restaurant and met Marshall and Sean, I wasn’t exactly filled with confidence.
Sean looked like he had been hiking in the woods until approximately two minutes before we came through the door. He was wearing a pair of denim overalls and a red flannel shirt covered in leaves and twigs. There was a fresh cut on his lower left arm, and he smelled faintly of swamp water.
“Well, shall we get down to business?” he asked, motioning for us to take a seat.
Sam and I stared nervously at one another. “Yeah, we’d better get this out of the way,” she said with a reluctant sigh and sat down next to Marshall.