“I can do it.”
I let her go, then opened the door for Tyler’s mom. After a brief tour of my workshop, Lisa was satisfied that I knew what I was doing when it came to books.
“Can you fix it right now?” Tyler asked.
“It’s going to take me a few days, because I want to do the best job possible for you. Can you wait until Saturday to get it back?”
He looked up at his mother with a serious expression on his face. “What day is today?”
“Today is Wednesday,” she told him.
He stared at his hand and counted the days off on his fingers. “Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.” He gazed at me. “That’s four days.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“How much do I have to pay you?” Tyler asked.
I smiled at Lisa, then looked at Tyler. I picked up the book and weighed it in my hands, thought for a moment. Then I knelt down to talk on his level. “I’ll have to take the book apart here, glue new endpapers here, then sew these pages together. See?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I’m going to have to charge you . . . five dollars.”
He nodded once, firmly. “You have a deal.”
We shook hands, and Lisa smiled proudly. Leaning close, she confided, “I told him it might cost one hundred dollars, so now he thinks he’s a smart negotiator.”
With a quick grin for Tyler, I said, “I was thinking of charging you fifty dollars.”
He shook his head. “It’s too late to change your price. We shook hands and everything.”
Giving Lisa and Tyler the quick tour of my workshop had made me anxious to get back to work on the Kama Sutra. But that work would have to wait until Robin was out of the city and safely delivered into my mother’s care.
So first thing the next morning, I called Inspector Lee to make sure it was acceptable for Robin to go to Sonoma. She gave her approval, of course, since it was pretty obvious from Galina’s attack that Robin had become a target. I gave Lee my mother’s phone number, just in case.
After I packed Robin’s three sweat suits, various accessories, and meager supply of toiletries, the three of us hit the highway.
Driving Robin’s vintage Porsche Speedster was a total blast for me, though not so much for Robin. I could actually hear her teeth grinding as I revved the engine on the straightaway out on Highway 37. I might’ve ground the gears once or twice, but it wasn’t my fault. The car was old. Yes, it was a classic, but let’s face it: The old thing wasn’t as fluid as it once might’ve been. But Robin acted as if I’d taken an ax to the engine just by shifting gears. I knew she was a little sensitive, so I didn’t take her swearing and cringing personally.
At one point along the highway, Derek flew by in his Bentley Continental GT. He passed on Robin’s side and she gazed over at him. When I glanced over, I saw Derek laughing uproariously. Was Robin making a face? Was I being mocked? I ignored them both. This was the sort of thing a true friend like myself had to endure once in a while.
An hour later we parked in my parents’ driveway, and I couldn’t stop smiling as Mom and Dad came out to greet us.
Mom wore a long-sleeved, full-length rainbow tie-dyed dress that floated and swung around her boots as she jogged down the stairs of the front porch. She’d dyed and sewn the dress herself from thick cotton knit that accentuated her tall, still-youthful figure.
Dad was dressed in the familiar faded Levi’s he’d always worn whenever he worked with the grapes in the fields. Today he wore another Mom original, a sage-colored tie-dyed henley shirt that looked almost new.
They were still in love, still adorable, and if you squinted just a little, you could picture them as two young Grateful Dead fans who first met at a Dead concert in Ventura County almost forty years ago.
After many hugs and outraged cries over Robin’s injuries, Mom touched Robin’s forehead, her third eye, where higher consciousness was centered, and chanted quietly, “Om shanti . . . shanti . . . shanti.”
My mother used this chant whenever anyone around her was distressed. Shanti is the Sanskrit word for “peace.” Repeating the word three times brought peace and protection from the three disturbances. The first of these disturbances was said to come from God, things like floods and earthquakes and hurricanes. The next came from the world around us, such as noisy neighbors, barking dogs, telephones ringing incessantly. The third came from within and was the one disturbance we could actually control. This included the negative emotions we tended to bring upon ourselves, such as jealousy, fear, anger, and sorrow.
All the pent-up tension seemed to melt from Robin’s shoulders and she smiled. “Thanks, Becky. I’m so glad I’m here.”