Free Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan Page B

gray coils on the pavement where flares had burned out.
    Dell’s car drove straight over the ash.

    They swung into the parking lot in front of Happy Polish Nails, and Mai opened the car door immediately. She and Quang-ha seemed to be in a race to get inside the shop.
    But Willow didn’t move.
    Dell decided to wait with her, but it was killing him.
    The real action was obviously going on behind the plate-glass window that had purple sausage-shaped writing, which said:
    MAN + PED EURO-STYLE SPECIAL!
    WALK-INS VERY WELCOME!
    Dell read the message at least a dozen times and could make no sense of it.
    He had to concentrate.
    Not only were two people dead, but there would now be all kinds of official reports filed, and it was going to become pretty darn obvious that Mr. Dell Duke had taken three kids from the school district off school property to have ice cream and French fries and look at geese.
    Talk about terrible timing.
    There were police involved and social workers already on high alert.
    This was a nightmare.
    In so many ways.
    It was crucial that Dell look professional, which was one of the hardest things for him to do.
    He glanced up into the rearview mirror at Willow.
    She had her eyes closed, yet tears still oozed out of the corners and ran at intervals down her dark cheeks.
    He wished that he could think of something to say that would be comforting to her. He was, after all, a trained counselor.
    And so he turned to the backseat and sputtered:
    â€œThis is such a big loss.”
    He then exhaled and more words dribbled out like applesauce from a baby’s mouth. Just audible lumps:
    â€œIt’s not much consolation, but you’ll probably never have any loss this big again.”
    Dell continued, unable to stop himself.
    â€œSo that’s kind of comforting—knowing that the worst thing in life is already behind you. I mean, once it actually
is
behind you. Which it won’t be for a while, obviously.”
    To Dell’s horror, her level of distress seemed to increase with his every word.
    What was he talking about?
    Dell cleared his throat and tried to steady his voice as he finished with:
    â€œBecause this is life. And these things just happen . . .”
    Wow.
Did he really just say that?
    How many kids go to school and come home to find that both of their parents are dead? Maybe in war-torn Somalia or someplace like that. Then maybe he could legitimately say: “These things happen.”
    But here?
    In Bakersfield?
    A total meatball move.
    Dell bit down on the inside of his left cheek and held his mouth closed until he could detect the taste of blood.
    That’s what it took to shut himself up.

Chapter 19
    pattie nguyen
    A leader organizes people whether they know it or not.

    I t was a slow afternoon at the salon and Pattie was doing inventory, which was never her favorite thing.
    But it had to be done. Bottles of nail polish vanished almost every day. She was certain that it was the result of theft from both her workers and her clients, so it was essential to stay on top of the situation.
    As a small-business owner, you had to show that you cared about these things, even if the nail polish, bought in bulk, only ended up costing her sixty-nine cents a pop.
    That was one of the secrets to success: caring about the big things
and
the small things.
    Or in Pattie’s case, you cared about everything.
    She wished all of her customers just wanted red nails. Red was lucky.
    But Pattie carried over one hundred shades in their squat little glass containers.
    She put down a bottle of fire-engine red and picked up peacock blue,
a new shade that was very popular but carried no good fortune
.
    With the annoying blue in her right hand, she looked through the front window and suddenly saw a dusty sedan pull into the parking lot.
    A police car was right behind it.
    Not good.
    Maybe if she had kept the red bottle in her hand, this wouldn’t have happened. She knew that