Personal Touch by Caroline B. Cooney Read Free Book Online Page A

for living was to get his autograph.
    I refused to participate in the exchange of sweet smiles. I went off to get his umbrellas and when I got back the magic had run out. Now Tim was circled by customers humming like angry wasps as they waited for us to replenish the supply of telescoping umbrellas in three fashionable colors. It turned out our colors weren’t fashionable enough. The customers whined and complained that we didn’t have a sufficient selection and what kind of store was this Chair Fair anyway?
    I was about to tell them that for all I cared, they could go out into the rain and use a maple leaf when Tim put a restraining hand on mine and gently accepted the customers’ wrath and talked them into the purchase anyway; and finally, exhaustingly, they trooped off with their unfashionably colored umbrellas all paid for. My mother was utterly delighted that Tim could handle the situation as diplomatically as that. And I, I will have to admit, was utterly delighted at the presence of Tim’s hand on mine.
    It was the same hand that had once attempted to lynch me, but after all, we were only twelve then, and now was the year to forgive and forget, right?
    Oh, Sunny, I said to myself, have you got it bad!
    I watched Tim ring up another purchase on the cash register and thought how strong and fine his hands were and how—
    I turned away in a hurry. All I needed to do was let Tim see how I was feeling right at that moment. He would laugh himself sick. He would lie down in the aisle and guffaw. Displays would fall to the floor from the vibrations of his laughter. He would remind me that I was the girl by whose brain he wanted to post a sign reading Space For Rent. That it was my body whose only possible use was a bookmark.
    I stumbled around the store trying to find plastic picnic glasses for some poor harried mother who had left her four children in her station wagon and was sure they were going to escape while she was in the store and meet a dreadful, violent end. My advice would have been to shrug and let it happen, but then I am rather low on motherly instincts.
    Anyway, the lady was frantic because I couldn’t find the plastic glasses, and she kept jabbering that couldn’t I understand she was in a hurry ! Naturally, I finally located the glasses about two inches from where I had started hunting ten minutes earlier.
    The lady looked at me as if I were some caterpillar guilty of defoliating her favorite tree. A creature totally incapable of contributing anything useful to society. It did not help at all to see Tim’s eyebrows raised at me as if he were inclined to agree.
    It was only thanks to the firm upbringing of a severe set of parents that I was able to tell the lady a humble “I’m sorry.”
    Tim rang up her plastic glasses and set them gently into a brown paper bag for her. When she had scurried out and we were alone for a moment, he said, “Sunny, old girl, you definitely need a rest. Why don’t you sit down over here?”
    I was so tired by then—what with two jobs to handle and now this ridiculous emotional maelstrom of a crush on Tim—that all I could do was stare at the chair Tim was offering. It was a model we had never carried before: a complex wood and canvas thing that folded into almost nothing.
    I doubted if I had the strength to drag myself around the badminton display to get there.
    I glanced at Tim and he was blushing.
    I stared. “You’re blushing?” I said. “Over a chair?”
    “I know what you’re thinking,” said Tim, cheeks blazing. I very much doubted he knew what I was thinking. He would have been running, not blushing. “I’ve outgrown that kind of thing,” Tim said. “It’s not rigged. This chair is nothing but a chair. It won’t dump you on the floor or make weird noises or anything like that.”
    Tim Lansberry blushing at the memories of past booby traps. It was close to a miracle.
    “I was such a gullible little kid,” I said. “Every time you tied a hammock I