Page 109 of Smoke and Roses

She laughs. Then she reaches over and puts her hand on my arm.

“Thank you,” she says. “For answering my prayer.”

I look at the shop window, where Lindsey is holding a sunflower like a microphone for a five-year-old.

“She answered mine first,” I say.

The bell rings behind us. Lindsey sticks her head out the door with pollen still on her nose.

“What are you two whispering about?”

“You,” Danielle says.

“Good things?”

“He set an alarm,” Danielle says. “So he didn’t miss the first verse.”

Lindsey comes out onto the steps, climbs right over Danielle’s legs and sits down in my lap. Half the town can see us through the window, and she doesn’t care. She puts her arms around my neck and kisses me right there on Main Street, and she takes her time about it.

Inside the shop, somebody whistles. That’s probably Novak. Danielle grabs her coffee and stands up.

“I’m going to go find my mom,” she says. “Before I throw up from how cute you two are.”

She goes inside, and the bell rings behind her. Lindsey leans back in my lap with her arms still around my neck. She stares at me. Then she drops her face into my shoulder and laughs. “Gotcha.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Everybody else has gone home. Nolene left last, after she hugged me and whispered, “He’s a keeper, sweetie,” loud enough for the street to hear. Now it’s just the two of us, with the lights turned low and the floor covered in rose petals and cake crumbs.

Travis rolls his sleeves up to his elbows and starts folding the chairs Rob missed, and I lose about a minute of my life watching him do it. It should be illegal for a man to stack chairs like that.

“You’re staring,” he says, without turning around.

“I’m supervising.”

“Supervise the casserole pans.”

So I wash Marlene’s casserole pans in the workroom sink, and he comes in and dries them and stacks them by size on the steel table without being asked. I find a plastic fork in the cash register drawer.

“Who puts a fork in a cash register?”

“Novak.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know Novak.”

I turn on Grandma’s old radio on the workroom shelf. It’s been stuck on the country station out of Ogden since I was a kid, because the knob broke off and nobody ever fixed it. The DJ says, “Here’s one for the lovebirds out there,” and the first notes of “Islands in the Stream” come out of the speaker.

I grab the broom and sing Dolly’s part into the handle, sweeping petals across the floor of my shop. Travis leans in the workroom doorway with the dish towel over his shoulder and watches me like there’s nothing else on.

When Kenny comes in, I point the broom handle at him.

“No,” he says.

I sing Kenny’s part too, badly, and he grins at me.

“Good day,” he says when it’s over.