Last Chance Knit & Stitch by Hope Ramsay Read Free Book Online Page A

house with them, you know, sort of like Lincoln Logs?”
    “Right.” Molly nodded and headed into the storeroom. “A few packages” turned out to be more than a dozen, and the crochet hooks were scattered everywhere. She headed into the bathroom in the back and inspected herself in the mirror.
    There wasn’t a speck of grease on her face. So why had Savannah given her that goofy look? Why had she lied about the grease? Molly looked down at her hands. They were pretty clean, too.
    She turned on the tap and started washing them again, cognizant that all of this was part of Momma’s grand plan to turn her into some kind of girlie-girl who wanted to run a knitting shop instead of a body shop.
    Junior was fearless and opinionated and not the least bit worried about being with a stranger.
    Simon wondered if he’d ever been this fearless or this sure of himself. He could remember when he was four or five, walking to town with Mother. He’d been required to walk at a steady pace—not too fast, not too slow. He’d been required to hold Mother’s hand at every intersection, even when he’d been eight or nine, as if Mother had tried to keep him a baby. She had never understood just how humiliating many of her rules were for an active boy.
    But he’d never rebelled. For some reason, he’d never found the courage to break away until he was an adult.
    Of course, he had managed to escape from time to time, especially in the summer, when Luke Raintree liberated him. And since Luke was the grandson of a former governor, Mother had allowed Simon to spend endless unsupervised hours out at the Jonquil House, the Raintree family’s summer home on the Edisto River.
    A happy sigh escaped his control as warm, sun-drenched memories tumbled through his mind. He hadn’t thought about Luke in a long, long time. He’d suppressed a lot of those memories. Now he was stunned to discover that some of them weren’t painful.
    No doubt he was thinking about Luke because Junior had red hair and freckles. And Junior seemed to have the same
joie de vivre
that Luke had possessed in vast quantities. Luke was the kind of person that drew people to him. He was a natural-born leader.
    Simon swung the toddler up onto his hip, just before the kid raced into traffic. “So, kiddo, are you going to be a leader one day?”
    “No!” the toddler said emphatically and squirmed. “Down!”
    “Not in the middle of the street.” He pointed to the truck going by. “You’d get smashed flat.”
    “Mah fat,” Junior parroted with an emphatic nod of his head. “No no.” He waved his finger in the air and looked so adorable that Simon laughed.
    “What an unexpected delight you are,” Simon said to the kid. And he meant it. He had no desire to be a parent. God only knew what damage he might do to some unsuspecting child. He had no good parental role models. Butthere was something about the innocence of children that always cheered him up.
    Just so long as he could hand the kids back to their parents when they soiled their diapers. He gave Junior a little sniff test. Thankfully, the kid passed.
    They crossed the street so Simon could walk by the old Kismet movie theater. It was shrouded in scaffolding, while the sounds of drills and saws wafted out from the open doors. Simon remembered sitting up in the back row with Luke and Gabe Raintree watching horror movies and eating Dots. Simon hated the black ones, but Luke had loved them.
    It made him happy to see The Kismet rising from the ashes. The last time Simon had come to Last Chance, the theater had been closed. It was like an omen to him then.
    And now?
    He was pondering that question when the past found him.
    Zeph Gibbs came sauntering out of the movie theater wearing a pair of frayed overalls and looking a whole lot older than Simon remembered.
    Simon stopped in his tracks, and Junior squirmed and said, “Down.”
    “Zeph?” Simon said.
    The old black man turned. “Well, I declare.” A big smile