Sally tapped the sheet of paper. “I must have accidentally deleted the P when I went in to edit the design before I sent it to the printer.”
“You edited Mabel’s design?” Cal asked with a crease to his brow.
It was a good question.
“I thought you were going to forward the email I sent you to the printer,” she added, sharing a perplexed look with her broody farmer.
Sally released a heavy sigh. “You and Cal have been so busy preparing for today. I didn’t want to bother you. And it was an easy edit. I just popped it into the photo editor program and added another square for our booth,” the woman finished with a wave of her hand.
Mabel shared another mystified glance with Cal. She’d been surprised when Sally indicated that she was happy to forward the email to the printer after the council approved the design. When the heck did the old Young sisters learn to edit photos?
“Your booth?” Cal pressed. “I didn’t think you had a booth. I thought the Martinez farm was going to take care of selling your pies?”
Another good question! What were the sisters up to?
Sally’s look of worry dissolved into a wide grin. “Yes, they’ve got all the pies. But we have another booth—a horoscope and future predicting booth.”
Sweet Jesus!
For what seemed like the millionth time, Mabel shared another stunned look with Cal.
“Betty came up with it!” Margaret added. “We’re going to predict people’s futures based on their horoscope and charge them five bucks to do it!”
“Mm-hmm,” Betty chimed.
Mabel stared at the square on the sheet containing a few Zodiac symbols, then read the copy beneath the image. “Meet the old Young sisters and learn your destiny.”
“You know about people calling you the…?” Cal trailed off, looking awfully guilty.
“The old Young sisters, thing?” Margaret supplied like the cat who ate the canary.
“Yeah,” Cal answered.
The sisters chuckled.
“Oh, honey! Of course, we know,” Margaret conceded. “We run the only diner in town. We’ve been here our entire lives. We know everything.”
“Everything?” Cal repeated with a thread of trepidation.
Betty leaned forward and waved him in. “Everything,” the women whispered like an incantation.
Mabel stared at the sisters and swallowed hard. Did they know about her and Cal? Were the old Young sisters involved in witchcraft? Could they read minds? She shook off the ridiculous thought. But Betty was eyeing her pretty closely like she suspected something.
No! They were three nice old ladies who read a lot of astrology and believed in old wives’ tales—and, it appeared, had become proficient with graphic design. It was a stretch, but it could happen. Her gaze flicked back to the stack of assports. Take away the whole missing P debacle, and Sally had done an amazing job on the design.
“You really did this yourself, Sally—on the computer?” she asked. She had to double-check.
“Sure did,” the woman answered, patting her coif of gray bobbed hair.
Mabel shook her head in disbelief. “I’m impressed you were even able to open the file. Back when I used to work here, you guys never used a computer. You even despised the credit card machine.”
“That’s because we didn’t understand it,” Margaret replied. “Now, we do.”
“That’s right,” Sally said, nodding. “A volunteer at the library started teaching computer classes to the seniors. We all picked it up lickety-split. You should have seen—”
“Sally,” Margaret interrupted. “Mabel and Cal don’t want to hear about what a bunch of senior citizens do at the library, and we’ve got to get to work fixing these farmers’ market passports. There’s room. We can just write in the letter P. It won’t be perfect but…”
“It’s better than leaving it as assport,” Betty deadpanned with a wry grin.
“We don’t have to change every single one of them, do we?” Cal asked, surveying the giant stack.
Mabel sucked in a tight breath as anxiety panged in her chest. She hadn’t shared this nugget of information with Cal yet.
“We probably do,” she answered with a slight wince.
“How many do you have there?” he asked.
Sally patted the stack. “Five thousand.”
Cal reared back. “Five thousand! Why’d you order that many, Mabel?”
She chewed her lip. She could hardly believe they would need that many, but when she’d checked the interest post, she’d almost passed out. “I didn’t want to say anything to jinx it.”
“Mabel,” Cal said, staring at her and going all Mr. Broody.
“You know that doesn’t work on me, Cal,” she shot back.
He threw up his hands. “Then what’s going on? Are five thousand people supposed to come today?”
She adjusted her hat and glanced out the window. “Five thousand people RSVP’d yes, and another two thousand are maybes.”
“Seven thousand people could show up?” Cal exclaimed.
Maybe she should have mentioned it to him earlier.
She pasted on a grin. “It could be less, or it could be more. However, when someone RSVPs, they usually don’t come alone.”
“Holy—” Cal began, but she slapped her hand over his mouth.
Mabel glanced between Cal and the sisters. “You never know for sure what could happen when people RSVP online. When I,” she paused. “When my former client back in New York once RSVP’d to a sample sale for designer handbags, a couple hundred people RSVP’d online, but several thousand showed up.”
“Thousands of people could show up in Elverna?” Cal cried, abandoning his stoic farmer persona and opting for something more in line with a discombobulated hyena.
“It’s possible,” she replied gently. “I listed the farmers’ market as an event people could RSVP for, and it got a lot of traffic.”
Margaret assessed the towering stack of assports, then glanced at the clock on the wall. “You’re going to need a lot of hands to get that many papers corrected in less than an hour.”
The old Young sister was right. Time was not their friend. Mabel paced the length of the diner, then stopped in front of a community bulletin board. She stared at a flyer then gasped.
“What is it?” Cal asked, coming to her side.
“I have an idea,” she said as an invigorating jolt of adrenaline hit her system. “Give me your keys?”
“To the truck?” he questioned.
“No, to the city,” she deadpanned. Ugh! Couldn’t this man see that she’d had an epiphany? Well, epiphany might be pushing it. It was more like a hairbrained idea that just might work.
Cal cocked his head to the side.
“Yes, hand over the keys to the truck!”
“Why?” he asked, handing over said keys.
She glanced at the clock. They did not have time to lose. “Because you have to carry all the assports.”
“We’re leaving?”
This man!
“Yes,” she huffed, heading toward the door, then stopped and stared at the old coffee can next to the register crammed with pens that probably dated back to 1965. “Can I take these?” she asked the sisters.