by Naomi Niles
“What would you do if someone gave you that much money?” asked Brian, stirring his latte.
“I don’t know,” said Alvin between bites. “I like to think I would give it away, but who’s to say what I would really do if that happened? Sometimes the temptation to splurge is too great.”
“What about you, Lori?”
I had to think about it for a minute. “I’d probably sink it into expanding the business. I know that’s not very altruistic, sorry. But on Saturday, several people told me they wished we would start a chain or move into a bigger facility that could accommodate more customers. I mean, look at us now: there’s barely enough room for the people who are here. Twenty-five hundred wouldn’t cover all of that, but it would be more than what we’ve got now.”
“Imagine having the leg room to walk around when you went into the dining area,” said Sam, clutching her mug in both hands. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
“It’s really all I want in the world,” I replied. “That and a house in Scotland with a room full of books.”
All this while Brian continued to stare thoughtfully down into his mug. “I’d like to meet the man who could give away twenty-five hundred dollars as if it was nothing. I have a feeling that man would have something to teach all of us.”
“Well, now’s your chance,” said Sam, motioning to the doorway with her spatula. “He’s standing right outside the door.”
All eyes turned to face Marshall, who was just walking in. He paused in mid-stride and stared nervously around at all of us, as though half-suspecting that we had been talking about him three seconds before.
“Why’s everybody so quiet?” he asked as he reached the counter. “Did you finally get that silencing spell to work?”
“Haven’t you heard the news?” asked Sam. “Over the weekend, someone gave away a huge sum of money and became a local hero.”
“Oh, that?” Marshall smiled and rolled his eyes. “Joe, I can’t believe you told everybody!”
Joe shrugged as if to say, “What did you expect me to do?”
“Anyway,” said Sam, “what can we get you? Whatever you want, it’s on the house.”
“Really?” Marshall’s eyes glinted ominously. “You’ll let me have whatever I want?”
Sam nodded, though I discerned a flicker of hesitation in her voice. “Anything on that menu up there.”
“Shame!” Marshall snapped his fingers loudly and turned toward me. “I was going to ask for your number.”
“What? Me?” I said in surprise. “Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
But Marshall was undaunted. “You ran off before I had the chance to ask you on Saturday, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to let it go until I asked you.”
I was conscious of the fact that every eye in the shop was on us. “It’s funny, because I don’t remember the conversation happening that way. I seem to remember you asking if we wanted help with our pies, and I said no, and then you asked for my number, and I ran off.”
“Yeah, why did you do that?” asked Marshall. His persistence was impressive, if a little alarming. “It’s almost like you were scared of me.”
“I just don’t want anybody having my personal number. The only people who have it are my best friends and my sister, and you were someone I had just met ten minutes ago.”
“That’s not entirely fair. I came in here last week!”
“And yet you apparently left no impression,” I said with a smile.
Somehow, my flagrant refusal seemed to have only emboldened him. “Tell you what,” he said, speaking in a voice loud enough that it carried through the room. “If you won’t give it to me today, then I’ll just have to try again tomorrow. And if that doesn’t work, then I’ll come back the next day, and the day after that.”
“As long as you purchase something, I don’t have a problem with that.”
Marshall was on his way out, but he stopped midway through the door. “Oh, I’ll be ordering every day. And I’ll get that number in the end—not from your sister, not from anybody else, but from you.”
He bought an apple fritter, then turned and left. The rest of the shop turned to me as if to see my reaction.
“Boys, right?” I said with a shrug. “I suppose he thinks this is some sort of romantic gesture that will inevitably melt my cold heart.”
“Seriously, Lori?” asked Sam in a tone of disgust. “How long do you think this is going to last?”
“As long as it takes for him to leave me alone.”
“You know he’s going to be coming in here every day, right? He’s not going to let it go until he gets what he wants.”
“Well, in that case,” I replied, “I’m afraid he’s going to be very disappointed.”
Chapter Nine
Marshall
“Still no luck?” asked Sean.
It was Wednesday afternoon, and we were sitting in a booth at the Celtic Knot Pub waiting for our orders. I had gone by the bakery the day before and this morning on my way to the lumberyard, but Lori was still adamant.
I shook my head. “No, but she had a drink ready for me this morning when I came in, a chai latte. She seems to have accepted the fact that I’ll be stepping in every day from now on, so that’s progress of a sort. I wasn’t expecting her to break down and give me her number on the first day, or even the second. I’m playing the long game.”
“Ah.” Sean took a sip of his iced water. Although he did not lack for money either, he hated paying for drinks when we went out. “Well, you’re fortunate that she hasn’t yet decided to call the police. If I were her, I would think you were stalking me. I’d think twice before walking alone to my car.”
“I’m not stalking her,” I said in frustration. I was already tired of having to answer this accusation—Sean’s grandfather had brought it up that morning when I drove out to the lumberyard. “No matter what you or your gramps thinks, I am not a stalker.”
“Sure, sure, said every stalker ever.” He waited a beat before adding, “I think Gramps is more concerned that you haven’t found yourself a job yet. It puzzles him that you’re still able to afford food when you haven’t worked in…how long?”
“I’m not even worried about it,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “If I really wanted a job, I wouldn’t have any trouble finding one. Besides, if I win the invitational, I may never have to work again.”
Sean sat back in his seat looking agitated. “Yeah, but you can’t count on that,” he said sternly. In Vegas, you’re going to be up against the best poker players in the country. I don’t care how good you are; there’s always going to be somebody there who’s better than you. It won’t be like the festival where your only real competition is an old man in a shabby sweater. They are going to bring the knives out.”
I sat sipping my soda in silence for a moment. For as long as I had known Sean, he had been encouraging me to follow my dreams and never doubt that with enough practice I could be the best in my field. Only recently had it become clear to me that he was trying to encourage himself as much as he was me. “I think this may be the first time you’ve ever advised me to be practical.”
“Well, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately,” said Sean. “Growing up, I think we were spoon-fed a lot of rubbish about how you can be anything you want to be. And I used to really believe that. Only as I’ve gotten older have I come face to face with my own limitations. You may be able to achieve a certain degree of excellence in your field, but that’s really the best you can hope for. Ninety-nine percent of the human race won’t even achieve that—and they’ll try, believe me. Everybody’s got a dream in their heart; everybody wants to be a rock star. But most of those dreams end in disappointment. I mean, look at Annie.”
So this was what had been bothering him all weekend. “I wouldn’t let Annie discourage me if I were you,” I said. “Nobody in their right mind ever thought she had a real chance at stardom. I’m not even sure Annie thought that. She just likes the sound of h
er own voice.”
“Maybe,” said Sean, though he didn’t sound reassured. “I just—I just hope that’s not how I sound when I talk to you about my dreams for myself.”
“Not remotely. I’ve never heard you brag that you were going to be ‘bigger than John Lennon.’ All you wanted was to achieve some level of success as a musician, and regardless of whether that pans out or not, it’s not an unrealistic dream. I don’t feel the urge to have you committed when you talk about it. Besides which,” I added, “you’re a pretty damned decent guitar player.”
“Thanks,” said Sean quietly. “Hopefully someday I’ll be better than decent.”
At that point, the conversation was interrupted by the arrival of our lunch. Sean had ordered a Scottish salmon and served with a side of broccoli while I ordered a Killians burger topped with Irish whiskey cheese and a side of onion rings. Sean made the mistake of stealing an onion ring off my plate and biting into it without checking to see if it was cool, nearly destroying his taste buds in the process.
“Oww!” he yelled, raising a hand to his mouth and spitting it out onto his plate. “You should’ve warned me first.”
“That’ll teach you to steal from my plate,” I replied as I bit into my burger. “Mmmm. I can’t believe how good this is.”
Sean eyed his plate in anticipation. “Let’s promise ourselves that no matter where we end up, we’ll always have enough money to enjoy meals like this. That’s all I really want out of life.”
“You don’t want to get married, be a rock star?” I asked in a quizzical tone.
“Hopefully one day all of that will happen, but even if it doesn’t, we’re here at this table, and we’re happy, and we’re eating salmon smothered in creamy avocado and yogurt sauce. A million dollars couldn’t make me this happy. Now if we can just keep this up for a few decades…”
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” I said. “As long as you hold a steady job—and I don’t get murdered by a hit squad after winning a hundred thousand in a poker tournament…”
Sean laughed. “Do you remember at Clemson, the fight we got into because the guys in the Pike house thought you had cheated them out of five hundred dollars? They ended up getting suspended from school for a whole semester.”
“They should’ve been suspended forever,” I said in a tone of annoyance. Somehow being accused of cheating had angered me more than being beat up.
Sean cut into his salmon. “They probably shouldn’t have been so quick to jump to conclusions. I think what triggered it was that you had been practicing card tricks and they saw you doing sleight-of-hand before the game. When you cleaned up during the tournament, the logical assumption was that you had cheated them.”
By now, the onion rings were cool enough to eat. Grabbing a handful, I sat thinking for a moment in silence. Sean didn’t realize it, but he may have just given me the key to getting Lori’s number.
Chapter Ten
Lori
“I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve been looking unusually good lately,” said Sam as I examined my reflection on the back of a teaspoon.
I set the spoon down with an anxious feeling in my belly. “Do I not always look good?”
“I wasn’t saying that. I just mean you’ve looked particularly good in the last couple days. You’ve been curling your hair in the morning before you leave the house, and your face is a bit brighter.” She fixed me with a shrewd look. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think there was something going on with you.”
“You mean like a boy?” I laughed nervously. “Right now, the only man in my life is Mr. Neil Gaiman.”
“If you say so,” said Sam, as she returned to her dusting. “But you ought to know better than to think you can hide things from your own sister.”
She was right about that. Marshall had come into the store every morning for the past four days, and every morning I had sent him away without my number. By now, I ought to have been getting exasperated, but instead, I found myself studying my reflection in the mirror with an attention I didn’t usually give it. If Marshall was a few minutes later than usual, my eyes drifted to the clock on the back wall, wondering if he would be coming in at all or if he had missed our appointment.
Our appointment. That’s how I was beginning to think of it. As if they were meetings we had planned in advance, rather than the unwelcome intrusions they were.
I hated admitting that I had begun looking forward to these meetings because it seemed like such a girly thing to do, and unlike me. Boys were rude and smelly and not worth the effort. Especially not around here where it seemed all the boys played football and drove pickups and went line-dancing on Friday nights. There was a meme going around on Twitter making fun of boys who drink tea and wear nice pajamas, but I would have honestly preferred that kind of boy to the ones we knew here.
“Why do so many boys think they have to be stereotypically masculine?” I asked Sam as we cleaned the ice machine. “Just once I would like to meet a man who’s brave enough to say, ‘I read a lot and don’t go out much, I don’t really care for sports, and I couldn’t care less if you’re stronger than me.’”
“Here, here!” said Sam with a smile. “I know I keep bringing up Jamal—I’m sorry, I just really love him, and if it gets to be too much, you can tell me to stop—but he’s never felt the need to flaunt his masculinity in front of me. He’s so at home in his own skin. I’ve gotten some really—well, vicious remarks from other girls…”
“Oh? What do they say?”
“Just calling him limp-wristed, and a pansy, and saying he wouldn’t be able to rescue me in the event of a fire. But you know what? That’s fine. If I was planning on being rescued from fires, I’d have dated a fireman. The fact that he’s willing to sit down for six hours or however long and watch Brideshead or Pride and Prejudice, even though he doesn’t particularly care for Jane Austen, means so much more to me. When I ask him to watch a costume drama, he doesn’t take it as a threat to his manhood.”
“He isn’t restricted by traditional male stereotypes.”
Sam turned and pointed the sponge at me, her eyes bright. “Exactly! He isn’t affected by all the social pressure to do ‘manly’ things to prove you’re a manly man. He’s just himself, and if he does something, it’s because he enjoys doing it. He doesn’t care whether it’s a boy thing or a girl thing. Living here, I honestly didn’t think I was going to find a guy like that. I feel very lucky.”
“You should.” I wasn’t going to say it aloud, but I sometimes worried she had found the only one. Every other boy who came into the store was either a redneck or a jock or a religious fanatic—sometimes all three. It had taken me years to realize the sort of boy I wanted to marry: cultured, intelligent, considerate, thoughtful. I had known a few boys like that in college, but not many here. I was in the wrong place to be looking for the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
But it was a curious thing that as the morning wore on, I kept scanning the parking lot for any sign of Marshall’s car.
“Still no sign of him,” said Sam at around ten. “You think maybe he gave up?”
“No idea who you’re talking about.”
Sam laughed. “Well, anyway, I’d hate to lose him. He was always good for a laugh, and he had a habit of buying the most expensive drinks on the menu. I really hoped you could keep holding out on him indefinitely.”
Cheryl, who was busily gnawing the corner of a cheese Danish, looked up eagerly. “Is that man still bothering you? When he came in here on Monday morning, I knew there was something off about him. He had one of the darkest auras I’ve ever seen outside of a big city.”
“Is that so?” said Sam. “I seem to recall you liking him quite a bit.”
“He did give Joe that enormous sum of money,” I reminded her, somewhat defensively. “Nobody who’s that generous can be entirely bad.”
But Cheryl shook her head. “Sometimes evil wears a handsome face and comes preaching go
od news.”
Brian, who had been sitting quietly beside her finishing a glazed muffin, glanced up in annoyance. “If that remark was directed at me or the Church, I take offense. Religious people have been a tremendous force for good in this world. Did you know that regular church-goers are overwhelmingly more likely—”
“I don’t deny it,” said Cheryl quickly. “Whatever our differences, we both share a belief in a world outside the mundane, a world beyond what we can see and hear. Materialists whose minds are clouded by this reality, who deny the world of the spirit, they are the true enemy.”
Sam gave a loud and contemptuous snort, to which Cheryl responded with a look of indignation, and an argument would likely have broken out if Marshall hadn’t entered the room at that moment.
He was wearing a white and blue seersucker suit with a checkered tie and an odd smile on his face. Seating himself at the bar next to Cheryl, he ordered a venti iced Americano and an egg muffin to go.
“You mean you’re not going to stick around today?” asked Sam in a teasing voice. “Shame.”
“No, I don’t plan to stay long,” he replied, his eyes fixed on me. “I don’t think I need to.”
This wasn’t the same Marshall who had slunk away in defeat the day before. There was something different about him; he was confident and self-possessed in a way he hadn’t been previously. It made me nervous, like he knew something I didn’t. I felt a shiver of foreboding as I turned and began mixing his drink, aware that his eyes were still on me.
“So, what’s the game plan?” asked Sam. “Are you going to tie her up in a sack and take her home until she gives you her number?”
I turned to Sam, looking offended. “You’d try to stop him, wouldn’t you?”
Sam shrugged. “I’d do what I can.”
But Marshall, it transpired, had other plans. “No, I want to make a deal with you,” he said in a level voice. “And I think if you listen, you’ll be very interested in what I’m about to propose.”