Michelle Toal’s business almost went up in smoke last summer. “The restaurant next door to us had a grease fire,” she says. “It got out of control, and it sent their restaurant up in flames, and we ended up filling up with nice, thick, black smoke.” The restaurant was Sheesh on North Main, and her business is Edible Arrangements, a fresh fruit bouquet franchise. Sheesh never reopened (the owner was unavailable for comment), but things worked out pretty well for Toal, whose lease was up at the end of the month anyway.

“I was looking to get out of downtown as it was,” she laughs. “It was kind of good timing, actually.” She’d been scouting for a new location with on-site parking for customers, employees, and her two delivery vans, which kept getting blocked in by other vehicles in the alley behind the store, sometimes for hours. “I couldn’t get out to start my day’s deliveries,” she says, which is a pretty big problem when deliveries are the bulk of your business.

She found a perfect space with plenty of parking on Washtenaw across from Arborland and expected to be operating out of there by mid-November. And despite being smoked out of her downtown location she never had to shut down, because she’d opened a second location in Lansing a year ago: “We’re making all of our orders out of our Lansing store and delivering throughout Ann Arbor,” she says. “It’s an hour away, we have to pay a lot of money in gas, it’s been a huge headache. But we’ve managed to survive.”

Edible Arrangements, 3386 Washtenaw, 929-0200, Mon.-Fri. 8 a.m.-7 p.m., Sat. 8 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. 8 a.m.-1 p.m.