“Maybe you’ll still hear from him?” Nora asked gently.
“I did hear from him.” Maya got out her phone and showed them the text where he said he was going to take a pass on the play.
“Dammit,” Eve said.
Maya stretched her neck, which ached all the time now. “What’s the matter with me? I gambled too much on the idea of him. I’m doing Much Ado about Nothing because I heard he wanted to do some Shakespeare and I thought the character of Benedick would be perfect for him. And now I’m stuck with a Shakespeare play instead of a musical.”
“You love Shakespeare, though,” Eve pointed out. “You always grumble about the summer musical.”
“That’s true. And hey, if I’m going to flame out, I might as well have my last show be one I like.” She performed a fake laugh.
“There’s got to be something we can do,” Nora said.
“I’m starting to think I should just call it,” Maya said. “A Rose by Any Other Name is mine for the taking. My brother doesn’t want it.”
“No, no,” Eve said quickly.
“I mean, I’m lucky. I’ve had this built-in safety net this whole time. All I have to do is…fall.”
“Okay, no,” said Nora. “That is not happening. We’re not letting that happen.”
Maya started crying again, this time because she was so relieved to have told her friends. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t done it earlier. She didn’t think it would change anything, not elementally, but it felt good to have the burden not be hers alone anymore.
“Give us a day or two to put our thinking caps on,” Eve said, “then we’ll get together and make a plan.”
“Okay,” Maya said weakly. They weren’t going to be able to think of anything she hadn’t already, but it wasn’t like she needed to decide anything right now. “But you guys won’t tell anyone, will you? Not even Sawyer and Jake?”
“Cross my heart,” Eve said.
“Same,” said Nora. “And I think right now, we should go get you some pizza.”
“Yes!” Nora was always Maya’s cover in her secret pizza operations.
“But I’m getting Hawaiian,” Nora added. “And you can only have half.”
Maya smiled through her tears. She loved the way her friends had taken in her news but weren’t treating her any differently than normal. “Deal.”
They went back to Lawson’s and Nora ordered “her” pizza. Carter had arrived since they’d left and was manning the bar, so possibly Maya could have ordered her own. She’d also been tempted, from time to time, to go around back and try to bribe Shane Calloway to sell her one directly from the oven. But she never felt like she could risk it.
As they waited, though, Maya wondered if she’d pushed the whole I-hate-your-pizza thing too far. If she didn’t have to eat it in secret, she could have it here. Finishing out the football season parked in front of the TV here had made her feel even more like Lawson’s Lager House was her living room away from home. But there was no changing course now.
“Does it really matter if Law finds out you’re eating his pizza?” Nora asked once they were back outside and had said goodbye to Eve.
“Are you kidding me? I didn’t testify at the town council against the zoning variance for that stupid oven to turn around and eat the pizza from it.” She dug in her pocket, extracted a ten-dollar bill, and extended it to Nora. She felt like she was doing a drug deal.
Nora ignored the money. “But you are eating it.”
“I made a PowerPoint that showed demonstrable damage to my business from all that smoke.” She dropped the cash in Nora’s purse.
“But you’re eating it,” Nora said again.
“Secretly. I am eating it secretly. I have my pride.” Maya looked around to make sure no one was watching, opened the box—her mouth watered at the smell of the pancetta—and ninja-ed the pizza in half.
“You want me to come up to your place to do the transfer?” Nora seemed like she was trying not to laugh.
“Nope.” Maya folded her half of the pizza over on itself. It was so hot she had to sort of bounce it around like a game of hot potato in order to avoid burning her hands. Nora seized the moment to fish the ten-dollar bill out of her purse and shove it in Maya’s jeans pocket. Maya, her hands full, couldn’t do anything about it. So she darted across the street, juggling her secret pizza.
“So glad to see you still have your pride!” Nora called after her.
“Oh, shut up.” But she made kissy-lips at Nora and watched her head down the street. She was on her way home to Paradise Cove, where her hunky silent husband would be waiting for her. Which was fine. It wasn’t like Maya was jealous or anything.
She sighed. Okay, so she was a teeny bit jealous. She didn’t want a husband and kids at this point, but being perpetually single was lonely sometimes.
But it was what it was. At least she had her pizza.
“This is a fantastic idea,” Sawyer said as Jake unlocked the door to the little house at the far end of Main Street.
“What is this place?” Law asked as Jake flipped on the lights. Main Street in Moonflower Bay was mostly lined with nineteenth-century redbrick buildings ranging from one to three stories, but a little ways out of downtown proper were some old bungalows from the 1940s he supposed used to be actual homes for people. These days they had dentists and chiropractors and insurance brokers in them.
“This used to be Jason Sims’s place,” Jake said.
Right. The town lawyer used to live in the house and have his legal practice in the front. “You’re working on Jason Sims’s house?” Something had gone down regarding Jason Sims when Jake and Nora were getting together. Law didn’t know what, but it was safe to say Jake was not the president of the Jason Sims fan club.
Jake snorted derisively, but Sawyer said, “Jason asked us if we were free to do some work here, and as far as I can tell, Jake decided that taking the job was the surest way to get the dude out of town.”
“Out of town?”
“He built a new house on the lake outside Bayshore and is moving his practice,” Jake said with a smirk, unable to hide his satisfaction at the idea of Jason Sims moving away. “Says they’re more litigious than we are.”
“So he’s putting this place on the market.” Sawyer gestured toward a wall of rickety-looking built-in shelving. “He hired us to rip out these crappy 1970s built-ins and do something new.” Sawyer and Jake ran a carpentry business together, though Jake did most of the actual work since Sawyer was otherwise employed as the chief of police. “He’s getting it ready to list, but I bet he’d do a private sale.”
“I can’t buy anything,” Law said, even as he looked around. The place was a little worse for wear—some 1970s crimes against good taste had indeed been committed—but it had good bones. Original wood trim, a brick fireplace in the living room, hardwood floors.
“You could keep the separate rooms up front here,” Sawyer said, sticking his head into a small den off the living room. “It would create little nooks.”
“Buying is not in the budget,” Law said, though this could really work with the spirit of what he was imagining. A place that seemed unassuming but then surprised you with its great food. “And look at the kitchen.” He led the guys to the tiny kitchen at the rear of the place. “It’s too small to do restaurant-scale stuff.” So, there, this place was a no-go.
“There’s room to push out into the yard.” Sawyer opened the sliding glass door from the dining room, and they all peered out into an overgrown but sizable yard.
Jake nodded his agreement. “We can push the existing kitchen into the yard. Then we get rid of this wall”—he crossed back to the dining room and patted a wall that looked pretty load-bearing to Law, but he trusted his friends—“and that will open up this space into the hallway. You could open the bedrooms, too, or keep them as separate rooms. I like Sawyer’s idea of dining nooks.”
They weren’t listening to him. “I can’t buy a place,” he said agai
n.
“Why not?” Sawyer asked. “You buy a place, you own it outright eventually. Isn’t that better than paying rent forever?”
“I can’t buy a place without getting a loan against the bar, and then I won’t own the bar outright anymore.”
“So?” Sawyer said.
“I’ve got the biggest personal loan I qualify for, and that together with my savings is enough to float a reno of an existing commercial space and four months of the restaurant’s operations,” he said, reciting the gist of his business plan—which he was aware didn’t answer Sawyer’s question. “And my father…” He paused, not knowing how to explain his dilemma.
“But your dad passed the bar on to you, right?” Sawyer said. “He doesn’t have a stake in it anymore.”
“Right, but this isn’t about him.” Well, it was, in a way. It was about his dad and his grandfather. It was about the family legacy the bar represented. Law might own the bar, but he didn’t own that legacy. He merely stewarded it. Hell, his dad jokingly referred to the bar as his second child. His parents had just about killed themselves keeping it open in the economic downturn of the 1990s. He remembered the day he and his mom had come down before opening to find his dad sitting at the bar crying. Dad hadn’t heard them come in, and Mom had looked at Law with such sadness in her eyes, laid a finger against her lips to signal quiet, and led him back up to their apartment. Law had been too young to understand the wider economic context at that point, but he’d understood stress. He’d understood pain.
So he wasn’t going to risk Lawson’s Lager House on what was, ultimately, a whim. He had a sound business plan, and he believed in his idea, but restaurants failed all the time for lots of reasons. “I just can’t have a mortgage.”
“I don’t understand what the problem is,” Sawyer said. “Normal people have mortgages. It’s not unusual.”
“You don’t,” Law pointed out. “Eve doesn’t.” Eve had inherited the Mermaid Inn from her great-aunt, and Sawyer had sold his house in town when he’d moved into the inn.
“Yeah, but Sawyer’s not normal,” Jake pointed out, and Law had to laugh at that, not least because Jake so rarely made jokes.
“Your cottage is paid for!” Sawyer protested.
“Yeah,” Jake said, “but we have payments on the loan we took out to buy Nora’s practice, and the building itself has a mortgage on it.” Nora had bought the medical practice from the previous town doctor, and the pair of them had recently decided to purchase the building that housed it, too. “The two are rolled into one pretty hefty payment.”
“See?” Sawyer said. “Not that I’d ever call Jake normal, but you get the point.” He turned to Law. “So what’s the problem?”
“The newspaper building is a blank box. Once you get the desks out, it would be easy to drop in restaurant infrastructure. That’s what I planned on. Reno and rent.”
“This place would actually be a pretty easy reno,” Jake said, looking around.
“Too bad you don’t know any contractors who can fit you in,” Sawyer said.
“You guys aren’t contractors.” They made it a point to limit their business to fine carpentry—custom shelves and furniture and canoes.
Sawyer shrugged. “I did the inn with Eve. And Jake did all that work on Nora’s old house.”
“Yeah, and you ended up married to those girls.” Law snorted. “I somehow think they were the exception.” He took their point, though. They were more than capable. But of course that wasn’t what was holding him back.
“Sawyer’s not married yet,” Jake said drily. “So he could still throw Eve over and marry you, if that’s what you want.”
Sawyer rolled his eyes. “I told you, Eve and I are taking an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it attitude toward the whole marriage-and-kids thing right now.”
“Yeah, not everyone is as much of an overachiever on that front as you, dude,” Law said to Jake, whose romance with Nora and subsequent “shotgun marriage”—that was Nora’s joking phrase—had been conducted with whirlwind speed.
“The point is,” Sawyer said, “we’ll help you if you want us to. With this place or any other. Just say the word.”
Jake grunted in assent, and a rush of gratitude filled Law’s chest. Sawyer’s sister Clara was always teasing the three of them about having a “three-way bromance,” but it was kind of true. He wasn’t really sure how it had happened, but somehow, over the years, these two guys had become family. He would do anything for them.
So he wasn’t sure why he was so surprised the sentiment ran in the other direction, too. He also wasn’t sure why he was afraid to tell them the truth. It made him sound like a sentimental dork, but so what? He had been through a lot with these guys. They might give him shit, but they weren’t actually going to judge him. He blew out a breath. “So here’s the thing. I have this block about mortgaging the bar. My grandfather opened it in 1943. It’s been through wars, recessions, you name it. My parents almost had to close it in the nineties. I grew up there. I just can’t risk it. I won’t risk it.”
“Ah,” Sawyer said.
“You think I’m being stupid.” Maybe he was. Jason’s house was pretty damn ideal.
“Not stupid,” Jake said. “Realistic about your limits.”
“We’ll figure something else out,” Sawyer said.
“Thanks.” Law had to clear his throat. “I should get back. I don’t like leaving Carter alone for too long.”
As they walked back down Main, Law thought about how he had never actually left Carter alone in the building. There were times Carter worked the bar on his own, but Law was always upstairs. He had never come to trust Carter the way he had Amber. “I need to hire some people—for both places.”
“You sure do,” Sawyer agreed. “It’s funny. When you think of the stereotype of a workaholic, it’s usually an office type. Not a bar owner.”
“I’m not a workaholic. I live upstairs, so it just seems like I’m there a lot.” Law wasn’t sure why he was disputing Sawyer’s take. He would never ask anyone else to work as much as he did. But it wasn’t really workaholism so much as a question of what else he was going to do. He wasn’t handy like these guys, so no canoe making on the side for him. He didn’t really follow any sports. Well…almost none.
“I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it,” Sawyer said. “Just noting that you work a lot. And if you’re going to be splitting your time between two places, you’re going to have to be smart about it.”
“I know. And not only will I need servers for the restaurant, I’ll need a chef. That’s not something just anyone can do.” Law had all this factored into his plan, but like the loan, it was an example of the restaurant starting to feel unnervingly real.
“This is it for me,” Sawyer said as they approached the Mermaid Inn. He was smiling at his phone, no doubt reading a text from Eve.
“It’s not even eleven,” Law said. Historically the three of them had spent Friday nights at the bar—Jake and Sawyer sitting at it and Law working behind it. They still observed the Friday-night tradition, but the other two were ducking out earlier these days.
“The girls are done at the lake.” Sawyer glanced at Jake. “Nora said to tell you she went home.”
One corner of Jake’s mouth turned up, which for him was the equivalent of a swoon. “I’m out, then, too.”
All right, so his friends were getting all domestic. It was what it was. The nice thing about being a “workaholic” was he had work to do.
Speaking of employees, when Law got back to the bar, Carter waved at him from across the room. “Hey.”
The jukebox started playing the Spice Girls, startling Law. He thought Maya had left. He surveyed the room. She wasn’t at her usual spot at the bar. She wasn’t at the jukebox. A couple of thirtysomething women he didn’t know were bopping around next to it. Okay, false alarm.
Maya was always saying she wasn’t the only person in town who liked the Spice Girls. He hated it when the
re was evidence that she was right. But he also sort of loved it. He smiled despite himself.
“What’s up?” he said to Carter when he reached the bar.
“It’s quieting down. Mind if I take off early?”
He started to agree but thought better of it. Carter was scheduled to close. This would be good practice for the new regime, when Law wouldn’t be around to pick up the slack all the time. “Sorry, man. I have some stuff I have to do upstairs.”
Carter looked surprised but didn’t object. Law actually did have a lot to do. He was behind on ordering. And he needed to think about that hiring. He’d always relied on word of mouth, or placed ads in the Moonflower Bay Monitor, but maybe this time he should take a more methodical approach. What did that mean? LinkedIn?
He didn’t turn on the lights as he walked through his apartment to his living room, moved the curtain aside, and looked out.
It was a habit that had begun when she’d come home from college five years ago and moved into an apartment across the street. He wasn’t sure why he continued to do it.
Maya’s light was on.
She never left her curtains open at night, so it wasn’t like he could see in. It wasn’t like he wanted to see in.
He just…wanted to know that she was there.
Chapter Five
A few days later, Maya came in and plunked herself down at the bar. When Law set a wineglass in front of her, she shocked him by looking around furtively and whispering, “Truce?”
He wasn’t prepared for a truce. The last time he’d seen her, she’d left literally vowing revenge, aka the opposite of a truce.
After that night last December, she had taken to watching matches in the bar. But they had also developed a habit whereby, every once in a while, when there was an extra-important match, she would discreetly whisper, “Truce?” He would agree, and they would meet back at the bar later and sneak up to his apartment to watch.
Sandcastle Beach--Includes a Bonus Novella Page 6