Need You for Always (Heroes of St. Helena)(8)
“The dance at the VFW was a bust,” Ida said with force. “Can’t make friendly with the Johns with all of those younger Janes from the active living community sniffing around, looking for a sugar daddy.”
“You mean the active living community that requires you to be fifty-five or older?” Emerson asked, because she could either give Ida two of her rapidly disappearing minutes to hear her out or the older woman would hold her Sterno cans hostage. Worse, Ida would follow Emerson out to the cart and talk her ear off while every patron in line listened.
“At fifty-five I could dance without wheezing, laugh without wetting my unmentionables, and my nipples still pointed up instead of looking like they were beacons for finding water.” Ida cupped her ample water beacons and lifted them heavenward a good twelve inches. “Anyway, liquoring the men up only to have you pop right out of that top. Pastor Sam nearly had an aneurysm seeing you in those shells.” Ida shook her head. “We want you on the ticket to bring the guys in, but unless you’re in a cardboard box, you’d steal the ones with real teeth.”
“As tempting as that sounds,” Emerson said, dying a little inside at the glimpse into her future, “I can’t cater your event Saturday. I have the farmers’ market all day, and with so many tourists in town for the harvest, I’ve been doing a second serving out by DeLuca Vineyards.”
Crush only lasted a few months, and with the weather turning colder and it getting darker earlier, Emerson was working every angle she could get before winter made her job a whole lot harder.
“Now can I have the bag?” Emerson held out her hand.
“I’ll pay you a hundred dollars more than you’d make at the winery, plus twenty percent of tips if you look like a cork every Saturday and serve tapas,” Ida said as though she were back in the old country, negotiating fava beans for ten cents a pound.
Emerson couldn’t believe she was even considering spending the evening with the geriatric mafia, especially after what was going to be one exhausting week, but an extra hundred bucks was a hundred bucks closer to her goal. Not to mention the tips from the night would be huge.
She estimated how much she’d make at the vineyard, added a hundred, then said, “Six hundred bucks, you hire someone to do cleanup, I get half of the tips, and no costume. Now give me the bag.”
Ida held out the bag, but when Emerson went to take it, the older woman’s bony hands gripped tighter. “Six hundred, I handle cleanup, forty percent of tips, and the costume is nonnegotiable.”
Sadly, a cork didn’t even come close to her most embarrassing costume request, and passing on a regular six-hundred-plus-tips gig for one that would end in a few weeks’ time wasn’t smart business.
Emerson took a deep, calming breath, resigning herself to suiting up, and said, “Deal.” Grabbing the bag, she hurried back to her cart, mentally adding the mechanic’s time and estimated parts it would cost to fix the cart’s heating system, and sighed. It seemed as though every time she got a step closer to her target, there was always some kind of setback.
After taping the Sterno cans together to make two superburners, she placed them under the chafing trays. One flick of the lighter and she was back in business. Feeling very MacGyvery and a bit smug that she had five minutes to spare, she opened the blue-and-white umbrella, which was the national flag of Greece, and turned to the first customer, who was offering up a toothy grin and a twenty.
Seeing the customer, Emerson immediately went into crisis-management mode. A mode she had become familiar with over the past two years.
So much for her five-minute lead.
“What are you doing here, Violet?”
Her six-year-old sister, Violet Blake, stood on the other side of the cart in a pink fuzzy jacket, two curly pigtails, and glittery fairy wings strapped to her back, swishing happily back and forth. Their twenty-three-year age difference raised eyebrows, but surprises happened. And Violet had turned out to be the best surprise. “It’s Pixie Girl. And Dad said I could have some baklava.”
“Sorry, baklava is for humans only.” She ignored Violet’s pout and zeroed her gaze in on her dad, who forced an innocent grin from behind his youngest. “It’s the middle of the school day,” she pointed out.
Roger Blake shrugged as though not seeing the problem with this. His peppered hair was windblown, his Hawaiian shirt slept in, and his feet were in flip-flops. The frayed cargo shorts and sleepy eyes only added to the beach bum image he had going on. “We’re taking a field trip.”
“The principal gave me two days off on account of fairy dust landing in Brooklyn’s eye,” Violet informed the line as though she hadn’t just confessed to being suspended. “Only it’s Taco Tuesday at school, and I like tacos, so I didn’t want to leave.”
Roger rested his hand on Violet’s slim shoulder. “Who wants a taco when we can have dessert for lunch?”
“So Dad brought you here, after getting suspended, to celebrate with dessert?” Emerson asked and both dad and daughter nodded. Emerson dropped her head and took a calming breath. It didn’t help.
This wasn’t the first fairy-inspired incident, and because she was afraid it wouldn’t be the last, she resisted the urge to high-five her sister for giving Brooklyn a dose of her own medicine—an act that would be as irresponsible as buying her a dessert to celebrate her first elementary assault charge. Emerson knelt down and looked her sister in the eye. Long and hard.