Dream a Little Dream. Debra Clopton

A pound cake. Yes, from this distance she thought it looked like a pound cake settled on a square of foil-covered cardboard, wrapped with pink transparent plastic wrap. She squinted in the sunlight and could see a purple square in the center, like a name tag.

      Was there a cake sale going on somewhere Molly didn’t know about? Maybe there was a fund-raiser going on? No, she would have known if there was a fund-raiser. That was her job to know these things.

      Prudy ambled out of the grease bay squinting at the woman through his oil-speckled glasses. Molly racked her brain, making mental notes as she tugged her pencil from behind her ear and pulled her emergency notepad from her back pocket. Nearing Prudy’s, she heard the woman ask a question. Molly knew it was a question, because all of a sudden Prudy’s greasy hands began to move and wave and gesture. Everyone knew Gordon P. Rudy—Prudy for short—talked with his hands. It was fairly entertaining. And since Mule Hollow was such a small place, a person needed all the entertaining they could get. The problem was that most of the time Molly didn’t understand Prudy’s sign language!

      Nobody did.

      So there she was, pencil poised, paper in hand, only to watch as her story sashayed back to her van, yelled at the kids to buckle up, then sped off.