I got off my bike at the traffic light, even though there wasn’t any actual traffic, car or people. Petersville was as dead as County Road 21B had been, so dead the place didn’t even look real. It was more like one of those pretend towns they build for movies, and in this movie, something really bad had happened, and everybody had moved away.
The first three buildings in town were boarded up with plywood and had FOR SALE signs out front. Though Renny’s Gas Mart, a convenience store with two filling stations, showed signs of life, I crossed the street to check out some place called Turnby’s, hoping to find something better there than packaged coffee cake that had probably been sitting on a shelf since before Zoe was born.
Unfortunately, Turnby’s wasn’t a market or a bagel place or a bakery. I’m still not sure exactly what Turnby’s is. Here’s what was in the window that day: wool camping blankets, Silly Putty, fishing rods, socks, electric nose-hair clippers, a space heater, pipe cleaners, and candy necklaces. It was as if Mr. Turnby woke up one morning and said, “I’m going to open a store, and I’m going to sell whatever I feel like.”
Next to Turnby’s was the General Store, and the first and only thing I noticed about it was the large, handwritten sign in the window:
Yes, we do have chocolate cream doughnuts!
Those have to be the best seven words you can read when you’re starving and you’ve just moved to a town that it’s pretty clear anyone who can has moved away from. Don’t get me wrong. The strangeness of the sign wasn’t lost on me. I mean, was that all they had? And if so, what about the store was general? But I was willing to focus on the positive: chocolate cream doughnuts!
All I had to do was wait till the store opened.
The General Store was the last building on that side of Main Street so I crossed back over to check out the largest building in town, a two-story brick house with a bright red door.
“Petersville Free Library,” I read sadly on the sign over the door.
Books are okay, but you can’t eat them.
Next to the library were two houses that must have been identical at one point but now looked like Before and After in one of those TV shows where people get strangers to come fix up their house. Before was covered in peeling, dirty paint and had broken windows and a mud pit front yard. Beside it, After exploded in blinding yellow with electric blue trim. A Gatorade-green lawn rolled out in front of the house, and a sign on the porch read: DR. CHARNEY, FAMILY CLINIC. After looked like it had been dropped on Main Street from another world, a happier, better world. Like me.
The last building in town—that’s right, that was it!—was all by itself, far from the others, and if the General Store windows hadn’t still been dark, I wouldn’t have gone to see it.
Just past the clinic, the train tracks popped up again, and like last time, they and I were headed to the same place, the one-story cottage with wavy trim like Mom puts on gingerbread houses.
When we got there, the tracks set off for the back of the building, and I stopped out front. A Petersville sign hung over the front door, and long benches lined the wide porch. I leaned my bike against the porch steps and looked through one of the broken windows.
Inside were a barred ticket window, more benches, and a tree about my size growing out of a crack in the middle of the floor. Soda cans, candy wrappers, and paper bags filled the corners of the room.
It didn’t surprise me that the train didn’t stop in Petersville anymore. Why would it bother? Who wanted to come here? Besides, you wouldn’t want to make it too easy for the few people left to leave.
When I turned around, a light had come on in the General Store, so even though it was raining again, I hopped back on my bike.
I was soaked by the time I reached the store, but who cared about a little water when there were chocolate cream doughnuts to be had.
“I’ll take a dozen!” I called out, barely through the door.
“Eggs are in the cooler,” said a small, wrinkled woman sitting at a counter at the back of the store. She had long, yellow-white hair and was studying a book of sudoku puzzles.
“Not eggs. Chocolate cream doughnuts.” I pointed to the sign. Just saying the words made my stomach rumble so loudly the woman’s head shot up, eyebrows raised.
After giving me a quick once-over, she went back to her puzzles. “No doughnuts.”
“Are they not ready yet? I can wait.”
“We don’t make doughnuts anymore.”
“Not ever?” The disappointment was crushing.
“Not ever.”
“But the sign?” I pointed at it again with both hands.
The woman sighed, then closed her book. “Yeah, well, most people know better than to ask. Besides, I like ’em to remember,” she said and grinned showing a mouthful of teeth that perfectly matched the color of her hair.
Now I knew why everyone had moved away. It was this woman. She was evil. First, she had taken away the town’s doughnuts. Now she was shoving the memory of them down everybody’s throat with that sign.
“I don’t understand. Were they bad?”
“Were they bad?” She snorted and pointed to a frame on the counter.
I picked it up and wiped the glass. There was a newspaper clipping in it with the headline, “Small Town Store Hits It Big with Chocolate Cream Heaven.”
This was just cruel. “So if
