Sandcastle Beach--Includes a Bonus Novella

by Jenny Holiday

  “So what’s this I hear about y’all throwing flowers in the lake?” Miss Louisiana Teen USA asked, leaning over to direct the question to all three women.

  “It’s a town tradition,” Maya said. “When the moon is full, you throw a flower into the lake and make a wish, and legend has it your wish will come true.”

  “Does it work?”

  “It kind of does,” Eve said at the same time Maya said, “Not at all.”

  The women all cracked up. The tourist turned to Nora. “What do you think? It would seem you’re the deciding vote.”

  Nora made an apologetic face at Maya. “I have to say I’ve had a lot of good luck since I moved here, but the scientist in me has to point out that correlation is not causation.”

  “Damn. I could use some good luck right about now.”

  “Let’s go, then!” Maya said.

  “Is there a full moon tonight, though?” the tourist asked.

  Maya shrugged. “Close enough.”

  “You’re always saying that!” Eve said. “Maybe that’s why your wishes don’t work.”

  Maya shook her head affectionately at Eve. “Well, you don’t have to come.” She turned to Nora. “You, either. You already have your perfect lives.”

  It was true. Jake and Nora were newlyweds with a baby on the way, and Eve and Sawyer were all loved up at the Mermaid Inn. Things had changed a lot around here. But there had been a hint of wistfulness in Maya’s tone just then, which mystified Law. He hadn’t thought she wanted any of that domestic stuff. She’d never had a boyfriend in all the time he’d known her, and while she was always swiping through Tinder while she sat at his bar, it never seemed to manifest any real-life men.

  “Hang on.” Nora threw her head back and chugged her drink. “I’m coming.”

  “Me, too,” Eve said.

  “But where will we get flowers this late at night?” the tourist asked.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Maya said. “I have an in with the town florist.” She tilted her head and furrowed her brow—that was her thinking face. She pointed at Law. “Actually, you should sell wishing flowers here.”

  “What?”

  “You could get a mini-fridge and set it on the bar so everyone can see it. My dad stays open late on actual full-moon nights to sell flowers, but you know how you sometimes see people chucking flowers in the lake on random dates? You’re open late every night. I bet lots of drunk people would buy them.” She chuckled, staring into space like she was seeing a scene that was invisible to the rest of them—she did that. “You could totally price gouge them. If I didn’t have a key to my dad’s shop, you’d have made four sales right now.”

  “That—” Was actually a really good idea. He couldn’t quite make himself say it, though.

  And she didn’t seem to be waiting for any sort of response—not that she ever did. She hopped off her stool and looked down at herself. “Should I change first?”

  “Nah,” Eve said. “I feel like you are totally rocking the murderous 1980s prom queen thing.”

  Maya and her friends—old and new—started gathering their things when Maya’s phone chimed. “Hang on a sec.” She picked it up, and after a beat she winced and hung her head.

  When she looked back up, she was back to normal. Well, she was back to being pissed, which was pretty much the same thing. She leaned over the bar, resuming the position she’d been in earlier when she’d been glaring at him.

  He raised his eyebrows. She didn’t speak. Just did her laser-death-beams stare thing. “What?” he said snappishly.

  “Have you ever heard the term patron of the arts, Benjamin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well.” She leaned closer. “You’re whatever the opposite of that is. What’s the opposite of patron?”

  “Antipatron of the arts?” Eve suggested cheerfully.

  “No,” Maya said.

  “Enemy of the arts?” Nora said.

  “No.” Maya put both hands on the bar and leaned even closer, stopping about six inches from his face. “Destroyer. You, Benjamin, are a destroyer of the arts.” She lifted her hands suddenly, like the bar was a hot stove, and started walking backward. “But don’t worry. I will have my revenge.”

  It was a relief when Jake and Sawyer arrived a little later. Law had been watching for them. They had a tradition of hanging out at the bar on Friday nights, and he could use their advice this particular Friday.

  He started pulling their preferred pints as they approached.

  “Hey,” Sawyer said. “The girls are down at the lake. We thought we’d join them.” Law set a beer in front of him. “But I guess we’re having a drink instead.”

  Law motioned for them to huddle in. The bar wasn’t crowded, but you could never be too careful in this town. If Karl and Pearl and company got wind of his plans, they’d be all up in his face with recipes and contractors and oversight he did not need.

  “I got approved for the business loan,” he whispered.

  “Whoa!” Sawyer said, and, realizing he was being too loud, he grimaced and lowered his voice. “That’s great, man, congrats.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “What’s the matter?” Sawyer asked, probably picking up on the lack of enthusiasm in Law’s tone. “This is good news, isn’t it?”

  “It is.” It was. Everything was going according to plan. “I’m just…I guess it’s sinking in that it’s real now.” He was going to have to tell people besides Sawyer and Jake. But you couldn’t open a restaurant without telling people. So he didn’t know why he felt so unsettled.

  “You’re not getting cold feet, are you?” Sawyer asked. “It’s going to be great. You have a business plan and a loan—and great instincts for food and booze. The pizza here is a huge hit.”

  It was. The pizza was what had started this all. When Law had first started thinking about adding a limited menu to the taproom—which had been literally that, a taproom, in all the time his father and grandfather had run it—he’d done a ton of research and had decided to focus on one thing and to do it well. He’d settled on wood-fired Neapolitan-style pizza and built the oven out back. His father had been skeptical, but it had taken off dramatically, spreading through word of mouth and earning a spot in a recent Globe and Mail article on Ontario’s hidden culinary gems. Hence all the random Miss Louisiana Teen USA 1989 tourists.

  So after the pizza, he’d started noodling. Before he knew it, he was researching how to write a business plan and enrolling in an online college course. As he learned the business side of things, his idea started taking more concrete shape. A restaurant with a streamlined menu. The pizza he was already known for, and a couple pastas. One featured meaty dish and one vegetarian, changing depending on what was in season. Farm-to-table, but without using the phrase farm-to-table, because that was obnoxious. He even had a name: Lawson’s Lunch.

  But…“Maybe I should just expand the food offerings at the bar. I could easily start serving sandwiches here,” he said, aware that he was talking to himself as much as to his friends. He did sandwiches outside on a press during the town’s festivals, and they were always popular. Adding sandwiches to the bar permanently would be a logical next step.

  “Nah,” said Sawyer. “We’ve been over this. You don’t have the space to do sandwiches here unless you rip out a chunk of this beauty to expand the kitchen.” He stroked the polished cherrywood bar that had been Law’s grandpa’s pride and joy. “And that would be a crime.”

  It was true. Aside from the fact that there was no way Law was hacking into this bar, there was only so much he could do incrementally here. He’d thought about doing a more dramatic reno. He didn’t mind closing for a week or two, but for what he wanted to do, he’d have to shutter for a season. Lawson’s Lager House was a community institution that had provided an unbroken line of service spanning three generations. Closed only one day a year—Christmas Day. This was where people had gathered on September 11. Hell, his grandfather had held a V-Da
y celebration at Lawson’s Lager House. Law had been over this all. Why was he mentally rehashing it now?

  “And you got the loan,” Sawyer said. “Doesn’t that mean the bank thinks the idea is solid?”

  “I guess, though I’m not sure I would loan me money.”

  He’d been joking, but Jake scowled. “If you don’t want to do the restaurant, don’t do it. But don’t sell yourself short like that, man.”

  Jake’s calling him out was sobering. In addition to being the strong, silent type, Jake didn’t have a high threshold for bullshit.

  All right. Law huffed out a breath. Apparently he was doing this. “The next big thing is location. I’m going to ask Eiko about the newspaper building.” His business plan had factored in the cost of renting and renovating the ground floor of one of the buildings on Main Street, and the Moonflower Bay Monitor building next door would be ideal. “She keeps talking about retiring, and even if the paper carries on beyond her, I don’t think they need that much space anymore. I was thinking maybe I could get her to move the newsroom upstairs, and I could take over the main floor.” The building had housed the town newspaper since the late nineteenth century, when it had been typeset and printed on-site. Today, Eiko was the newspaper, along with a part-time reporter, and the Monitor was designed digitally and printed off-site. “The pizza oven out back could do double duty.”

  “Oh no, no, no. Do not tell Eiko,” Sawyer said. Jake conveyed the same sentiment by shaking his head vigorously. “Not if you want the plan to stay under wraps.”

  Law did want to keep things quiet as long as possible. Not that any of the old folks in town were going to be anything less than delighted with the new place, but they also wouldn’t be able to resist sticking their noses in everything. He’d thought, though, that maybe there was a way to approach Eiko alone. “I was thinking about how Eiko’s a journalist, right? Doesn’t she have to follow a code of ethics about protecting sources?”

  “Sources who are breaking news stories,” Sawyer said. “Not ‘sources’ who want to open new restaurants in town. You tell her, and that’s it: the whole town will know. Anyway, I think her journalistic ethics are probably more situational than fixed.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” He’d been foolish to consider it. “I’ll have to find someplace else. Anyway, I don’t need the hassle of being next door to the theater.” Maya already gave him enough trouble with a building between them as a buffer.

  “What about that vacant place out on Oak Road?” Jake asked. “The old laundromat that went out?”

  “In the strip mall with Sadie’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No way. Sadie’s is fantastic. I don’t want to compete that directly with her.”

  “Yeah, don’t do that,” Sawyer said. “You set up shop there, and before you know it you’ll be in a rom-com directed by the old folks, and you and Sadie will have pancake wars, but then you’ll end up married.”

  Jake snort-laughed, but that was exactly what Law had meant about the old folks getting up in everyone’s business.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with Sadie,” Sawyer added. “You could do a hell of a lot worse.”

  “Except he’s already at war with Maya,” Jake said. “And really, how many wars that might end in marriage can one man have going at a time?”

  “It’s not a war.” War implied a massive marshaling of resources, required a near obsession with one’s enemy. “She’s just always on my case about parking and the smoke from the oven and, you know, the fact that I exist in this world.” But his bickering with Maya wasn’t a war. It was more like…a hobby.

  His friends looked at him like they were trying not to laugh.

  “And even if it was a war,” he went on, “which it’s not, it would never be the kind of war that would end in marriage.”

  Sawyer smirked. “You know what they say.”

  “No, I do not know what they say. Please enlighten me.”

  “All’s fair in love and war.”

  He wasn’t in a damn war. But if he protested too much, they would interpret it as evidence in support of their take on things. So he went with evasive maneuvers. “I actually dated Sadie briefly.”

  “You did?” Sawyer’s jaw literally dropped.

  Law chuckled. Evasive technique: successful. “For less than a month, maybe twelve years ago. If you blinked, you missed it.”

  Law was a bit older than Jake and Sawyer, and though they’d always known each other, it had only been in passing until they’d gotten older and evolved into their Friday-night hangouts. Jake and Sawyer would have been teenagers during his brief flirtation with Sadie.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Sawyer said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. We had some fun.” He smiled, thinking back to that weekend in Toronto.

  “How come you never told us?”

  Law shrugged. “It was years ago. Nothing came of it.”

  “That’s your answer every time you’ve hooked up with anyone in the time I’ve known you,” Sawyer said.

  “Oh, so since you two are all settled and besotted now, I have to be, too?” Law was happy for his buddies, he really was, but he sometimes missed the days when they were all contentedly single.

  “No,” Sawyer said. “I just wonder why nothing ever sticks. What happened to that woman who was here last summer?”

  Sawyer was talking about a tourist who’d been in town for a month. She’d hung out at the bar a lot and eventually asked him to go on a hike. She’d been friendly and pretty and smart, so he’d made himself accept her invitation. They’d had some fun. But when she left pledging to keep in touch, he’d known he wouldn’t keep up his end of the bargain.

  Dating had always felt like a diversion to Law. A pleasant enough way to pass the time when presented with the opportunity, but not important enough to keep him from other stuff. And since he’d gotten going on restaurant planning, “other stuff” was expanding to fill all the time he had. He shrugged and answered Sawyer’s question. “Nothing came of it.”

  “I rest my case,” Sawyer said.

  “I don’t have time for women right now. I work here way more than full-time, and if all goes well, I’m about to open a second place. The only woman I care about at the moment is Shirley Kenner, who’s supposed to be delivering a cord of firewood for the oven.” He wanted to see if, hypothetically, he could double his order. If he wasn’t getting the building next door for the restaurant, he’d need a second oven at the new site.

  “I actually have an idea for you for a location,” Jake said.

  “Yeah?”

  Jake looked around, his gaze settling on Carter. “Can you take off for a bit?”

  “Sure.” Law wiped his hands on a bar towel. “Give me five minutes.”

  “I gotta talk to you guys,” Maya said after the girls had thrown their flowers into the lake—she had wished for a financial miracle—and said goodbye to their southern friend.

  “Ooh, this sounds serious,” Eve joked as they started walking back downtown.

  “It is.” Maya knew they weren’t used to this from her—she was the fun-loving, lighthearted friend. But she’d decided she needed some moral support. She’d been carrying this burden around for the better part of a year, and she just couldn’t do it on her own anymore.

  “Okay.” Eve dropped the joking tone. “You want to go back to the inn?”

  “No, I don’t want to risk anyone overhearing.” Maya pointed to the gazebo in the town square. “Let’s hide in there.” But what was she afraid of? That her best friends would think she was a bad businesswoman? Maybe. Ha. It was just she hated coming off as weak.

  “What’s up?” Nora asked when they were all seated on the benches that lined the perimeter of the gazebo.

  “I think I’m going to have to close the theater,” Maya said, and promptly burst into tears, shocking herself as much as her friends.

  They showered her with hugs and expressions of surprise and sympa
thy. When she calmed down, she told them the story of the money trap of a building and the grant she hadn’t gotten. “It’s like a perfect storm, basically. An imperfect storm.”

  “And I get the feeling the nonprofit arts sector is hard at the best of times,” Nora said sympathetically.

  “I guess, but honestly, when I started this, I had visions of scaling up by now. Of making the theater a regional destination. But not only am I still small potatoes, I can only make payroll through the end of September.”

  “Are you paying yourself?” Eve asked gently.

  “No.” She swallowed her shame even as she told herself there wasn’t any reason to feel shame. “About ten months ago, when I found out about the grant, I cut my own living expenses as much as I could and reduced my salary. But I haven’t paid myself anything since May.”

  “So that’s a month with no income,” Nora said. “What are you doing for money?”

  She brushed her tears away and cleared her throat. “I still have enough to operate through the end of September, but only if I don’t pay myself, so my own living expenses for the past month have gone on credit cards. I’m trying to avoid having to lay off Marjorie and Richard.”

  Both women were silent for a moment. She supposed it was a lot to take in. She had hidden her struggle well.

  “So you need a loan,” Nora finally said, shifting into brisk efficiency mode.

  “But do I? How would that do anything other than postpone the inevitable?”

  “You need a loan and a plan,” Nora amended.

  “Right. And I had one. Holden Hampshire.”

  “Oh, now I get it!” Eve said. “I wondered why you were so fixated on him.”

  “He was my Hail Mary. I’ve been doing all this stuff around the edges to try to increase revenue: selling wine at intermission, delaying repairs, reusing costumes. But I thought if I could get a big name in for the summer, I could sell out the run—and do a longer run, and shamelessly jack up ticket prices. I was planning to do that and then use some of the resulting cash to finally fix all the problems with the building. If the building isn’t sucking up all my money, and if the next round of granting goes better, then maybe I could get back on an even footing.”