Last Chance Knit & Stitch (3 page)

“Simon”—Millie invested his name with a world of censure—”that would be exactly like warehousing her.”

Millie was right, of course, and that thought wrapped itself around his neck and squeezed. Then Millie went on to tighten the noose.

“You know, son,” she said, “you’re going to have to stay for a little while anyway. There are legal issues. Eugene Hanks wants to talk with you about your father’s will. And your uncle Ryan is very agitated about the financial situation at the dealership. You know his bank loaned your daddy a lot of money.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your daddy’s business is practically bankrupt.”

“How could a Ford dealership be failing in a place like Allenberg County?”

“The economic downturn hurt business, I guess. Your uncle Ryan has been talking about forcing the dealership into receivership. Of course, if you were willing to stay and help run the business, your uncle might change his mind. And it’s important to save the dealership. There are about forty people who work there. It would be a disaster for this town if Wolfe Ford went out of business.”

He looked at his watch again. He didn’t know where else to look. Aunt Millie was crazy if she thought he was going to go into the business of selling cars. The
bank would never go for it. Simon was an artist, not a car salesman. And he had a very big commission due in two months. He didn’t have time for this.

He looked up toward the casket. His mother sat dry-eyed and hunched-shouldered by his father’s corpse. Hell and damnation. How had it come to this?

He rudely turned away from Aunt Millie and went searching for the outside door—the one that led to the garden he’d seen through the windows. He sat down on a bench in the warm sunshine and watched a couple of goldfinches as they visited a bird feeder. They were the same color as the coreopsis that grew in clumps along the perennial border. He tried to clear his mind and focus on nothing at all.

But the coreopsis sent him back in time.

He remembered the day his mother had taught him the name of that flower. He’d been a little boy. He used to love spending time with Mother in the garden, getting dirty and learning the names of the flowers and the colors that went with them. All those different shadings of yellow, from buttercup to Carolina lupine. He’d learned them all at his mother’s knee, along with an appreciation for how colors go together. He used that knowledge every day he painted.

And now the woman who had taught him this one, important thing didn’t even recognize him.

Despite all his efforts to dam them up, a flood of tears deluged him.

Molly stood beside Ira’s casket gazing down at his body. He looked pretty good for a dead man.

Ira Wolfe had been one of Davis High’s biggest boosters.
His contributions had refurbished the football field, paid for the new lighting system, and kept the team in uniforms. Which probably explained why the dealership was having some financial problems. Ira was generous to a fault.

Her vision smeared with unwanted tears. Who the heck was she crying for? Ira for being dead, Momma for being gone, or herself for having her life scrambled? Jeez louise, this was pitiful. She never cried. About anything. It was one of her life rules. No one would take a girl mechanic seriously if she cried. Ever.

“Thank you for coming.” The voice was deep and accent-free. She turned. Well, hell. Simon Wolfe obviously didn’t have any rules about crying. His eyes looked puffy and bloodshot.

And they widened in surprise. “It’s you,” he said. “I should have realized.” His gaze traveled upward, taking in her hair, which she’d left down because she’d been too late to wrestle with it. She really needed to whack it off.

Simon’s gaze dropped and lingered for more than a moment. Holy crap, he was ogling her boobs.

A totally unwanted body flush knocked her sideways. Whoa. What was that all about?

Guys in Last Chance never ogled her. She wasn’t pretty or graceful or anything like that. So of course, guys talked cars and sports with her rather than looking or touching or making themselves nuisances. Over the years, she’d had a couple of friends with benefits. But they were just bed buddies. And besides, she wasn’t interested in girl-boy entanglements. They were a big waste of time and always managed to get messy and emotional.

She needed to put distance between herself and this
guy who was old enough to be a member of the 1990 dream team. Which made him practically middle-aged.

“Uh, look,” she said in a no-nonsense voice, “there’s something I need to tell you. See, your daddy loaned me some space in his garage, where I’ve just started working on a full body restoration of a 1966 Shelby Mustang that I found in a barn up in Olar. I work there after hours, and I’m aiming to get the car finished by September for the Barrett-Jackson auction in Vegas. I’m hoping to hit pay dirt with this car so I can quit working for LeRoy and start a restoration business of my own. So, anyway, when you get around to taking a tour of the dealership, I just want you to understand that the Shelby belongs to me and my partner, Les Hayes, who’s your daddy’s chief mechanic. Don’t be thinking that that car is one of your assets. Oh, and I have a set of keys to the building. So don’t freak out if you see me there late at night, okay?”

The curls at the corner of Simon’s mouth deepened into a semi-smile, which looked a bit incongruous given the state of his eyes. “I’m not planning to take a tour of the dealership,” he said. “And I’m not all that interested in cars.”

“Not even a Shelby Mustang?” Her incredulity showed in her voice.

“Not even a Shelby Mustang. My plan is to wrap up things here just as fast as I can and head back home. I think you should plan on the dealership being closed or sold.”

“You’re going to close the dealership?”

The muted conversations in the room halted, and a dozen heads turned in their direction. Oh, crap, she’d practically shouted the words, hadn’t she?

“Uh, sorry,” she said in a much smaller voice, even though she felt like screaming her outrage at the sudden reversals in her life. “But you can’t let that happen.”

“There’s nothing I can do to prevent it.”

“But I’ll lose my garage space. Not to mention the fact that half of my friends own F-150s and go to Wolfe for their warranty service.”

“What do you expect me to do, Molly? I’m an artist, not a car salesman or mechanic. I have no business running a car dealership.”

Well, that was obvious. She just hadn’t put all the puzzle pieces together until right this minute. Of course Ira’s death was going to screw up everything.

“But what are you going to do with your momma?” She was grasping at straws now. This was the man who’d run away from home and never come back. Not once. Not even at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

“I don’t know. But I do know I’m not staying, and I’m not going to take over Daddy’s dealership. I’m not a car guy.”

“Which makes you really odd for a man, you know that?”

Annoyance sparked in his dark eyes, and Molly immediately regretted the rancor in her words. Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut? Or learn how to deliver a put-down with a saccharine voice, like a southern belle. Unfortunately, she was missing the Scarlett O’Hara gene.

“I’m not the only odd one here,” he said. “I’m willing to bet you don’t know how to sew or knit or cook.”

“Ha! I do so too know how to knit.”

“Oh?” He frowned, his dark gaze cataloging her. “Don’t tell me. You knitted that sweater, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“It’s very nice.” He said this with another obvious glance at her boobs. Her internal thermostat went wacky again. Or maybe the funeral home’s air-conditioning was on the fritz.

She was tempted to let him think she was some kind of super woman, capable of changing spark plugs and whipping up an apple pie all in a day’s work. But actually, she didn’t want to be a super woman. So why was she arguing with him?

She met Simon’s gaze directly, squared her shoulders, and told the truth. “My mother owns the Knit & Stitch, the yarn shop in town. She taught me to knit when I was little, and I took to it. I blow at cooking and sewing, though, and I don’t even care.”

“Well, half odd is better than all the way odd,” he said in a teasing tone.

Jeez louise! This conversation had taken a strange and uncomfortable turn. It was time to extricate herself. “Look, I’m sorry for your loss. I loved your daddy. He believed in me when no one else would, and he gave me a place to see if I could realize my dreams. I told him a million times that he needed to quit smoking those cigars, and …” Her voice wobbled the minute she thought about Ira standing in the middle of the showroom with an unlit cigar clenched in his teeth. She was never going to see him there again. He was never going to stop by and admire her body work. She was on her own now. And about to lose her garage space.

Her nose filled up with snot, and the urge to bawl became almost unbearable. She sniffled back her suddenly overflowing nasal passages. She was not going to
cry. Not even for Ira Wolfe. He wouldn’t want her to cry over him. Not in a million years.

Ira would just want her to finish that Shelby and get going building her business.

And wouldn’t you know it, right then Ira’s too-handsome and somewhat odd son reached into his pocket and pulled out a fine linen handkerchief. He held it out for her, his eyes filled with kindness and deep empathy. “You know, Molly, I could say the same thing about your father. He definitely believed in me when no one else did. I owe him a great deal.”

She could refuse that hankie the way he’d refused to shake her hand earlier in the day. Or she could accept the handkerchief and his words as the peace offering they were intended to be.

She snatched the handkerchief and quickly blotted her eyes and blew her nose. She wanted to hand it back to him but realized that a snotty handkerchief was kind of gross. “Uh, I’ll wash it and get it back to you,” she said as she crammed the soggy cloth into the pocket of her slacks. “I guess I’ll need to remember to bring tissues for the funeral tomorrow.”

Simon glanced down at his father. “Me too.”

A
lonely fluorescent light illuminated a corner of the Wolfe Ford service center, lending the cavernous space an eerie quality. Molly hurried across the spotless gray floor, her sneakers squeaking with each step. She’d stopped at home on her way back from Ira’s wake to change into her work clothes. She was brimming with news and gossip.

Les Hayes, Molly’s best friend, was going to blow more than a gasket when he heard what she had to say. Heck, he was probably going to throw a piston, too.

She found him bent over the Shelby’s engine compartment, which had been divested of the radiator, the battery, and all of the engine’s hoses and belts. Tonight they were supposed to pull the block and the tranny. The plan from there was for Les to rebuild the engine while Molly started work on the body.

The car’s seats and dashboard had already been pulled last week and sent to an auto upholsterer up in Columbia that Molly worked with.

“Hey, Molly,” Les said without looking up from the engine compartment. “How was your day?”

“Probably the crappiest of my life.”

Les looked up. Grease darkened his forehead and smudged one cheek, making his baby blues look bluer than ever. His curly brown hair puffed from around his Wolfe Ford hat. Momma always said that Les was a cool, tall drink of water. Yeah, branch water, maybe. He had an unpredictable temper.

Which made him a lot like Molly. They could fight like a couple of junkyard dogs sometimes over the right way to proceed on a restoration.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Well for starters, Momma ran away and left me in charge of the Knit & Stitch.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. So now that you’re
in charge
, are you going to reopen the store?” He said this with a wicked grin.

“Stop it. It’s serious. I’ve got twenty messages from knitters in my voice mail. They aren’t going to be happy when they find out I’m not going to reopen the shop.”

“So don’t fret about it.”

“I’m not going to. Not about the yarn shop, anyway. We have much bigger problems. I just came from Ira’s wake, and his son is planning to close the dealership.”

“What?”

“That’s what he told me. He’s hot to get his daddy’s estate in order, and then he’s hightailing it back to Paradise.”

“Paradise?”

“That’s where he lives. It’s in California.”

Les laughed. His laugh was goofy and adorable and
kind of high-pitched and joyous. And seemed out of proportion to the crisis at hand. “Don’t you laugh, Leslie Hayes. This is serious. What are we going to do if Wolfe Ford goes out of business?” She started pacing.

“Oh, I doubt it will go out of business. The family will probably sell it. There are a lot of Ford owners living around here who need warranty service. No one’s going to leave those folks high and dry. So we can negotiate with the new owners, whoever they turn out to be.”

She stopped pacing. “I wouldn’t be so sure. You didn’t talk to Simon Wolfe. He couldn’t have cared less about the business. And he’s not a car guy. He’s always looking at his watch like he can’t wait to leave. He could give a crap about the Ford owners in Allenberg County. I have a bad feeling about this. We’re going to lose our garage space for the Shelby.”

“Mol, you don’t know that for sure, and you’re just making yourself crazy worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet.”

“Maybe it hasn’t happened, but we need to plan for it anyway. It’s a shame we can’t afford to buy the old Coca-Cola building yet.”

Molly’s long-range plan was to buy that abandoned building in Last Chance and turn it into a car-restoration business with a garage in the back where the old loading dock was and a showroom in the front. She had other dreams, too. Big ones. Like trying to interest Speed Channel in a show about a lady garage owner.

But first, she needed to restore the Shelby. Everything hung on that car. Finding it had been her stroke of good luck. The little old lady in Olar had no idea what was sitting in her barn. She’d wanted only four thousand dollars
for the old car. Restored, the Shelby would probably sell for close to a quarter of a million.