The doughnuts and cream-filled pastry guns were already in the car. On Fridays, I fry the doughnuts and put them in the car before I go to school. The creams I make the day before, and then Dad just throws them in a cooler on his way out to pick us up.

Mom and I split the old train station: The Doughnut Stop on one side and The Station House, her restaurant, on the other. When we moved to Petersville, the building was just sitting there, empty, and had been since the train decided it wasn’t worth its time to stop there anymore, so Jim, Petersville’s mayor, let us use the place rent-free. It’s a pretty good deal, especially because Mom does the mom stuff she does at home, like make sure the bathroom is stocked with toilet paper, which is definitely a plus. She doesn’t even charge us for it.

Since the station house is on the far end of Main Street with nothing else around, it helps both businesses because we’re not out there alone. People who come for the restaurant discover The Doughnut Stop, and the other way around. We’ve even done some co-branding.

In case you haven’t read Starting Your Own Business for Dummies, co-branding is where two businesses work together to sell stuff.

Dad takes care of the business side of the restaurant, but the whole thing was Mom’s idea, so I always think of it as hers. Hers and Walter’s. Walter is Mom’s best friend. Before I was born, he and Mom cooked together in restaurants back in the city. When Mom opened The Station House, Walter moved here to run it with her because he and his wife, Azalia, wanted their daughter, Larissa, to grow up in the country like they had back in El Salvador.

It was still cloudy when we got to town, and without some sun, Main Street looked even sadder than usual. Nine small buildings lined the street and half of them were boarded up with FOR SALE signs out front. Maybe they’d started out different colors, but they were all the same peeling gray now. The two exceptions were the library and Dr. Charney’s clinic. The library was the only building on Main Street made of brick, and though it wasn’t a bright red, at least it was a color. There were also some blue-checked curtains hanging in the windows on the second floor where Josh lived with his mother, the librarian. The clinic was painted Gatorade green with neon-pink trim, and it popped like it was 3-D. Everything else was flat.

Dr. C says colors can actually make us happy and that they make you really happy when they surprise you, so he repaints the clinic every few months—usually in the middle of the night, wearing one of those headlamps miners use. Besides being a doctor, Dr. C is a big-time painter and marathon runner. Before I met him, if someone had told me you could be all those things in one lifetime, I never would have believed them.