Tenisha decided to kill two birds with one stone. She could stop at the Blue Coyote for a peach smoothie, which she had a huge craving for, and pick up a Valentine’s Day card for her Grandma Emmaline. They always had nifty custom seasonal cards at Blue Coyote, heavy stock and genuine sentiments and bows or buttons or safety pins sewed on, besides the usual fuzz and glitter. Stuff Grandma Emmaline would get a kick out of. Tenisha remembered one of the Valentine’s Day cards she got from her grandma. She didn’t remember the card exactly, it might have been before Tenisha could read, but she remembered it had a big red heart covered with fuzzy velvet that felt wonderful to touch, and she touched it and touched it until it was worn completely smooth.

As it turned out, though, there were no cards at the Blue Coyote, seasonal or otherwise. Sipping on her peach smoothie, Tenisha asked the woman behind the counter how come they didn’t have cards anymore, and the woman related the sad story. It seems they hadn’t had cards for months. The woman who made them had died. Not only that, her body had not been discovered for several weeks. “She lived way out, and when she didn’t return our phone calls we got worried. Then the calls went straight to voicemail, and then we called the police. A few days later the police called back. They asked what our relationship to the woman was, and we said we sold her cards here and hadn’t heard from her in a while. That’s when they told us she was dead. They’d found the body in her house. She’d been dead about three weeks. She had puppies, and they were dead too.”