Free Lucky Stuff (Jane Wheel Mysteries) by Sharon Fiffer

settle … While Tim explained all of that and more, Jane stopped listening and accepted the rest of her mother’s sundae, which Nellie pushed in front of her.
    “Eat the rest of that fudge. You’re going to need it.”
    Don said that he was happy they would have Jane with them for a while and Tim interrupted that Jane would stay with him since he had so much more room.
    Nellie watched Jane eat the last bite of ice cream and said nothing.
    Jane finally looked up. Before she could begin telling them she’d prefer to sleep in her car, shouts from the bar interrupted.
    “Call 911. He’s choking, call 911.”
    A busboy ran over, prepared to give the Heimlich maneuver, but was stopped by a burly teamster who told him it was an allergic reaction, not a lodged food particle.
    “He’s got a peanut allergy, he shouldn’t even be in here,” he yelled, pointing to a small dish of nuts at the other end of the bar.
    Jane almost turned over her chair rising and running into the bar. She would be too embarrassed to admit that someone else’s emergency had saved her from thinking about her homeless, stuffless self, but she was weirdly grateful that someone urgently needed something.
    The bartender shouted that the paramedics were on their way.
    “I don’t think he’s breathing,” said the woman on the floor next to the unconscious young man.
    “If he’s not breathing, we have to start CPR,” said Jane, trying to move some of the people in the crowd who had turned to stone. “Let me through.”
    “Oh God, thank you,” said the same woman who had shouted out that he wasn’t breathing.
    Jane looked away from the statues she was trying to budge out of her way and saw Nellie, who had threaded her way through the eight or nine men and women standing slack-jawed and frightened on the other side, drop to her knees, support the man’s head, and bend her head down to breathe life into this stranger.
    The paramedics burst into the barroom and were at the man’s side immediately and Nellie popped up without having to begin the treatment. They backed people away, trying to give themselves room to work and the man air to breathe.
    “I told you we shouldn’t come here,” said Nellie. “Your dad looks like he’s going to faint.”
    Two peanut allergies in one night? thought Jane. Did Lucky have some fetish about hiring people who have the same health problems?
    Jane saw that Tim had left a wad of cash on the table and she followed her parents out to the parking lot.
    Don leaned against Tim’s car, parked closest to the door.
    “Nellie, what were you thinking?” said Don, taking a few deep breaths.
    “Mom was doing the right thing, Dad,” said Jane. The only thing stranger to her than witnessing two reactions to peanut allergies in one evening was the fact that her mother knew CPR and was willing to perform it on a stranger. “That was gutsy.”
    “You never fail to surprise me, Nellie,” said Tim. “I’ve got to admit, I was impressed with your quick thinking and—”
    “Jeez, Nellie, what were you thinking?” said Don.
    Jane was relieved to see color returning to her dad’s face, but surprised at how harshly he was speaking to her mother. He usually championed Nellie no matter what sort of nonsense she spouted and now when she was about to be a real hero, he looked like he wanted to ground her for life.
    “Oh c’mon, Don, I seen it on TV a million times,” Nellie said with a shrug. “How hard can PCR be?”

6
    Jane had looked back and forth between Tim and Nellie, deciding where to spend the night. Tim was perky and bubbly, describing the bedroom he had readied and her own private bathroom he had supplied with her favorite shampoo.
    “Your old room and you share the bathroom with me,” said Nellie. “And I use the store-brand shampoo,” she added, glaring at Lowry.
    Don had hugged Jane and said she was welcome as long as she wanted, though he admitted he had no real estate to share since he had long been