At Wick's End - Tim Myers [31]
“Not a chance, Harrison. I think every regular customer we ever had came by today.”
“To pay their respects?” I asked, stunned by the outpouring for Belle from her customers.
Eve shrugged. “Most of them were sincere, I’m sure, but I’m willing to wager a lot of them were coming by to see if we were CTD.”
“What’s that mean?”
Eve explained with a slight blush, “CTD stands for ‘circling the drain’. One of our best customers works in the Emergency Room over at County Hospital. I suppose I picked up the lingo from her.”
“They think we’re going under?”
“It’s not that outlandish a thought, Harrison. When word traveled through the crafting circles that a neophyte inherited At Wick’s End, what else could they think?”
I threw the deposit into the bag and said, “They could think we’re going to be just fine. What do you think, Eve?”
The question obviously startled her for a moment, so I added, “I want your brutally honest opinion.”
“That’s all I ever give,” she said with a wry smile. Eve pondered the question a few moments, then said, “Honestly? Belle kept the store afloat, but she wasn’t much on promotions and advertising. If things stay the way they were, we’ll do well to break even.”
I’d been told by too many people how borderline the operation was. “Breaking even isn’t going to be good enough. I know how you feel about the tradition of the place, but I want this shop to succeed. If that means we have to try new things in order to bring in more customers, so be it.”
“What did you have in mind?”
I tucked the zippered bag with our deposits under one arm as I headed for the door. “Give me a few days until I can polish my ideas, then we’ll talk about them.” That was purely smoke and mirrors. I didn’t have a clue yet what I was going to do, but by Monday night I would.
After thirty minutes at the library, I had accumulated enough articles on running a small business to take me a month to digest. I gathered up my copies and headed back to the truck. After I dropped the bank deposit off, I planned to dig a little deeper into some of the sheets I’d printed out.
When I got to the parking lot, I walked toward Belle’s truck and saw that someone had broken the passenger window.
My heart raced as I hurried to the vehicle, but my worst fears were realized when I saw the empty deposit bag on the floor of the cab—the one that had just recently been brimming with cash. The checks and credit card receipts were scattered in a mess on the floor, but all of the cash was gone.
How in the world was I going to explain to Eve that I’d forgotten to do the deposit before I went to the library, and had ended up losing so much of our hard-earned money?
Thankfully, Eve was gone by the time I got back to the store. I had two options: call her at home and ruin her weekend, or wait until tomorrow.
Okay, I never said I was the bravest soul in the world. The bad news could wait.
I tore up the deposit slip, subtracted the healthy cash amount from the total and drove that truck straight to the bank, not even stopping to have the glass fixed along the way. That’s what I should have done in the first place. How simple it seemed in hindsight, to take care of business first and save my research for later. I’d learned a valuable, though rather costly lesson, one I swore I’d always remember.
I’d forgotten all about eating, I’d been so upset by the theft I’d invited by leaving the deposit unattended and in plain sight. Millie found me on the steps of the river as she locked up The Crocked Pot. I had no idea how long I’d been sitting there, watching the current flow past in its relentless journey south.
“Hungry?” she asked, shaking a bag at me.
“Not really,” I said as my stomach rumbled, proving me a liar.
She sat beside me on the step and forced the bag on me. “I saw you moping out here like you’d just lost your last friend. What troubles can you have that a sandwich can’t fix?”
I shook my head, then told her about my incredible lapse in judgment.
I half-expected her to rebuke me, but instead I found understanding in Millie’s