Three days later, we hit a major snag.
“Emmie, I think you’d better see this.” Mom comes hurrying into the commercial kitchen where I’m just starting to get ready for the day, Mr. Butters trotting along at her heels. “We have a problem!”
“What’s wrong?” I glance up in alarm from slicing a tray of butter pecan fudge. We dropped Gus off at school and headed into the store together this morning. While I finished restocking the fudge trays in the kitchen, Mom volunteered to do a walk-through of the store before opening time. What in the world has happened?
“There’s a leak in the bathroom! The carpet around the bathroom door is soaked.” Mom looks distraught, wringing her hands.
It’s a bad leak. When I approach the bathroom door, situated next to the office tucked behind the register, my shoes squelch on the soggy carpet. Over a quarter of the carpet in the shop is wet,and the bathroom is completely flooded with a half inch of water. It looks like a pipe burst under the sink. I manage to turn off the water, but the damage is done. We stand in the shop surveying the situation in dismay.
“There’s no way we can open for business until we dry things out,” I tell Mom. And I suspect we are going to need to replace the carpet at the very least.
“Oh dear,” Mom sighs. “How long do you think we’ll need to be closed?”
We both know we can’t afford to lose the daily business we rely on, not to mention we’ll need to cover the cost of the repair bill. I think of the ten thousand dollars Mom has set aside, and my heart falls. Looks like we may need to use some of it to get this place back up and running, but we have no choice. We need to get the store open again as soon as possible.
Mom texts Dot, who comes over to see the damage for herself. Then we start making calls to everyone we can think of who might be able to help us with the repairs. Unfortunately, we come up empty.
“No one wants to take on a project this small,” Mom reports, her mouth pursed in a worried little pucker when we compare notes after calling around. Mr. Butters sits on her foot and gazes up at her in adoration.
“And even if they do handle small projects, most of them are booked out a couple of months at least.” Dot frowns, helping herself to a sample of Oreo fudge from the little clear-plastic-domed sample platter sitting by the register. She’s leaning against the counter by the samples, keeping an eye on her front door in case someone comes into her shop. Business is slow today.
“What are we going to do?” I ask anxiously. “We can’t afford to close the shop for any longer than we have to.”
Correction: We can’t afford to close the shop at all, but it looks like we have no choice. I think regretfully of my chocolate shop plan. It’s going to have to wait until I can get this sorted out. I blow out a breath and try to think of a creative solution. “I guess there’s always YouTube?” I offer. “Maybe we could do it ourselves? How hard do you think it would be to learn to install carpet?”
“Oh, hon, you’re not that desperate,” Dot says. She snaps her fingers. “Wait, I think I might just have a solution. What about Walt?”
The silence is deafening.
“Walt?” I ask skeptically. “As in your brother?”
At the same time, Mom says, “Oh no. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Mom always gets uptight at the mention of Dot’s brother Walt. He and Mom don’t get along for reasons that are not clear to me. Walt is a gruff, grizzled character who pops into the shop every month or so to buy a pound of fudge. He always comes when Mom isn’t at the till, a move I’ve started to suspect might be deliberate. I’ve never understood what Mom has against him, but there is some bad blood there. I’ve always been curious why.
“What’s wrong with Walt?” Dot says, a touch defensively.
Dani comes into the store just in time to hear Dot’s last question. “Are you talking about that argumentative, belligerent old codger of a brother of yours?” Dani says cheerfully as she feeds Mr. Butters a doggy pot pie from her pocket. “Fully one-third of my disorderly conduct calls in this town are about your brother. Last week he was arguing baseball stats with some tourists from Utah down at the Four Corners Tavern. I got a call that he’d threatened to brain one of them with a pool cue for bad-mouthing the Chicago Cubs.” She rolls her eyes and helps herself to a sample of the Oreo fudge too.
“Walt can be a handful,” Dot concedes. “And he does love the Cubs. He just needs a good woman to straighten him out, and something to keep him busy so he doesn’t get into trouble. But he’s got to be better than YouTube.” She looks pointedly at me. I waver. I’ve known Walt all my life. It’s true that he’s a crusty old coot, but he’s handy and he’ll probably work for cheap.
“Ask him what he’ll charge,” I say reluctantly. Dot texts him and a minute later gets a reply.
She reads his response aloud. “ ‘Thirty dollars an hour and a free quarter pound of fudge per day. And I get to choose the flavor.’ ”
Beside me, Mom makes ahmphof displeasure. I cast my eyes around, looking for another option. Walt seems to be our only one unless we want to do it ourselves or wait until September, which is impossible. We need to get started on this right away.
“He says he can meet you here at nine a.m. tomorrow,” Dot adds.
“Tell him yes,” I agree, feeling relief that at least we have someone who can help us, even if Mom’s not a fan of Walt. The thought of trying to learn plumbing repairs on YouTube and doing the work myself is just too much.
We lock up since we can’t welcome customers with part of the store flooded. There’s not much else to do. I’ll work on bills and accounts today at home. Tonight I have to deliver a meal to a family in Gus’s class who just had twins, and I’ll drop Mom off at her weekly puzzle club, the highlight of her social calendar. I wish she had more to occupy her time, but she does love meeting with the ladies and puzzling. At least she’s doing something one evening a week. While she puzzles, I promised Gus we’d build a LEGO spaceship and watch a National Geographic Kids documentary on outer space. Hopefully all of this will keep me fromworrying about the cost of flood repairs. As we walk out the door, Mom sighs in resignation. “We’re depending on Walt Perkins,” she says with a grimace, glancing back at the corner of the shop with the soggy carpet. “I really hope we don’t regret this, Emmie.”
* * *
At nine sharpthe next morning, Walt saunters up the sidewalk to the candy shop just as I unlock the door with Mom, Gus, and Mr. Butters in tow. Gus has a late start at school today, so he’s tagging along with us for part of the morning. Mom sees Walt and steps back as he comes through the door, hitching up his baggy jeans. He nods to her and touches the brim of his ever-present Cubs baseball cap.
“Gwen,” he says gruffly, and she nods back stiffly.
