“Drop it! Her arm’s caught!”
A woman in a leather jacket caught me under the shoulder. My right knee was on the pavement. My left arm was stretched toward a man I had never seen before, and all three of us were attached to the same canvas bag.
Two other riders came in from the side. The man let go. When he swung at the woman helping me, they caught him and held him against the brick wall.
The strap finally came loose.
I looked past the woman’s shoulder. Annie stood inside the bakery with my yellow umbrella in her hand.
“Annie! Turn the lock!”
I heard the click through the glass. Then her face disappeared below the window.
My name is Rose Finch. I was seventy-four, and I’d closed Finch’s Bakery so many times I could count the cash drawer while listening to the baseball scores. That Friday, Annie had done the count. She was seventeen. It was her first week learning to close.
We had argued over eighteen cents.
Her till came up eighteen cents short. She wanted to put two dimes from her pocket into the drawer. I told her to write down the shortage so we could check it in the morning.
She thought I didn’t trust her. I thought she understood what I meant. We put on our coats without settling it.
Rain was bouncing off the awning. I left through the front door and had taken maybe six steps when someone grabbed my bag. Annie, seeing that I’d forgotten my umbrella, had come after me.
That was the part nobody else saw. She was opening the door while the man was still pulling me toward the alley. If the riders hadn’t been there, she would have come straight out to help me.
The woman kneeling beside me introduced herself as Tess.
“Can you feel your fingers, Rose?”
I moved them. My knee hurt worse than my arm.
“My apprentice is alone.”
“I saw her lock up.”
“She went down behind the counter. Please check.”
Tess walked back to the bakery. She didn’t rattle the handle or demand that Annie open up. She tapped the glass, then held her phone to her ear and pointed toward me. I called the shop.
Annie answered on the first ring.
“Miss Rose? I’ve got the police on my cell. I’m on the floor because they said to stay away from the glass. I can see your brown shoe. Is that you sitting up?”
I looked at my shoe. The sole had split at the toe.
“Yes, sweetheart. It’s me.”
“Then tell the lady with you the ambulance is coming from Orchard. The road on this end is closed.”
Tess sent two riders to the corner. The rest of the group moved their motorcycles out of the lane. When the ambulance turned onto Orchard, there was somebody waiting to direct it straight to me.
The police took the man into custody. My canvas bag lay where it had fallen. The officer who picked it up asked if anything valuable was inside.
“My lunch container, a crossword book, and half a loaf of rye.”
He zipped it up for me.
My knee needed stitches. Tess stayed until Annie’s mother came, then met us at urgent care with a dry sweatshirt that reached almost to my knees.
Annie sat beside me in the waiting room, still holding that umbrella.
“I almost ran outside,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“I saw what he was doing to you.”
“I saw you too. That’s why I yelled.”
She rubbed at a streak of flour on the yellow handle. “When I locked the door, it felt like I’d shut you out.”
I told her something I had never told a new employee. Twenty years earlier, a customer had collapsed in my shop. I’d run into the street shouting for a doctor. My husband had stayed at the register and called an ambulance. For years I remembered myself as the one who had gone for help. The ambulance that actually got there was the one he called.
“You knew which road was open,” I said. “You put people on the right corner. That was helping me, Annie.”
The next morning, we found the eighteen cents. Two dimes had slipped under the tray, and somebody had put two pennies in the nickels. We counted it together until we understood every cent.
A week later the riders returned for coffee. All sixteen came in. Tess offered to pay for the group. Annie worked the register while I sat by the window with my sore knee on a stool.
Tess spotted the yellow umbrella drying beside me.
“You finally got it back.”
I shook my head. Annie had written her initials inside it.
“That’s hers now. Practically part of the uniform.”
At closing time, Annie counted the drawer. Then she checked the weather, called her mother and walked me to her car. This time we both fit under the umbrella.
For more split-second rescues and unexpected turns, read about the stranger at the bus stop who kept saying “Fourteen” and the red leash moving beneath a closing shutter. And for another moment when someone steps in, there’s the girl who asked for a second fork.
