“Wow! This looks nothing like Old Rogers! That’s what it used to be, you know. Hasn’t been touched in like three years. I never thought anyone would do anything with this space.”
“Probably because you had to rent the residential space as well.” Not many people wanted to play subletter to someone who could only access their door inside the café. Elaine had carefully designed the space to keep those who wanted to sit up on the terrace away from her apartment’s entrance. The little one bedroom couldn’t hold more than one person if it tried, but it suited her fine. She was only one woman in that town, anyway.
“How lovely of you to take over this building! Who is renting it out, hm?” Karen waved her hand before her face. “Oh, never mind. That’s neither here nor there. What’s important is what you’ve done with the place! I seriously can’t recognize it. How about you, Christina? We used to eat dinner here sometimes when you were a kid. Remember those dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets they made for kids here?”
“Mom,” the surly teenager muttered. “You’re embarrassing me.”
Karen was still laughing. “What teenager wants to be reminded that they were a little kid only five years ago, huh? Oh, it’s fine, dear. I just wanted to bring you by and introduce you to Elaine. Hadley, yes?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Elaine rubbed her hands on her trousers and extended one to shake Christina’s. “So nice to finally meet you, Christina. Your mother has been saying much about you since we met a couple months ago.”
Christine’s eyes widened. “What are you telling her, huh?” she asked her mother.
“Nothing scandalous, honey. Of course not. I’ve only told Ms. Hadley that you’re a young woman looking to expand your résumé a bit.” To Elaine, she continued, “Christina really has too much time on her hands. A part-time job on the weekends and sometimes after school will go far in helping round-out her character. Ahem.”
Elaine politely nodded. I barely know what’s going on, but that’s okay. I only need to know she’s trustworthy with money and won’t drive most of my customers out of the store. She had heard rumors about Christina’s ex-boyfriend being involved with some crime. Was that what this was about? Oh, well, as long as Christina wasn’t personally involved. Elaine was willing to hire someone who had some gumption, but she drew the line at pissing off her customers because they didn’t trust the mayor’s daughter. You have to really screw up if your mom’s the mayor and nobody trusts you…
“I would love to have Christina come in this Saturday to help me with my grand opening,” Elaine said. “If she has time tomorrow and Friday after school, I could get her started with some light training. There won’t be too much to do around here at first. Just manning the register, some cleaning, and maybe occasionally brewing tea and heating up pastries. I’ll be doing most of the kitchen work myself.”
“A hands-on woman. I love it. Oh!” Karen smacked both hands together. “That reminds me. I don’t have the paper on me at the moment, but I also came by to formerly invite you to the monthly Chamber of Commerce meeting next week. It will be a quick little induction ceremony, and after that we go on about our usual order of business.”
“The Chamber of Commerce…” Elaine could hardly stop from grinning. “Already! I’ve barely opened my doors!”
“As of this weekend, you’re officially a small-business proprietor in this town, so it’s only right. I simply didn’t want you to miss on next week’s meeting because you didn’t know about it. You’ll be able to network with a lot of people who can give you advice about marketing and retaining the locals for your business.”
“Sounds great! At the American Legion Hall, right?”
“Yes, yes. I will make sure you get all the details in the mail. Now, as for Christina…” Karen put a hand on her daughter’s head. “She’ll be here right after school tomorrow. I’m assuming there will be a dress code as of opening day? This is her mother speaking, by the way. I want to make sure she’s dressed appropriately for her first job since camp counselor.”
“What she’s wearing now would be fine.” Clean jeans and a decent sweater went far in a café. “As long as there’s nothing offensive written on her clothing and she’s respectably covered for working around food… oh, she does have her food handler’s license, yes?”
“We are way ahead of you. I suppose I should let Christina tell you herself, though.”
The girl let out a dramatic sigh and said, “Yes, ma’am. I got my food handler’s license a few weeks ago. My mom’s made it clear I’m to get some kind of job around here.”
“Working in a café is a great way to get some work experience. Thank you both so much for coming by. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow, Christina. Should I give you both a tour right now?”
They were the first to take her personal tour of Tea & Thyme, from the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the terrace. Karen was absolutely in love with the design choices, although she could have been gassing Elaine up to make her feel more welcomed in town and confident about her business taking off. I know it will be hard. That’s okay. Elaine adopted the healthiest attitude she could. She’d need to work hard – but also smart. It wasn’t enough to put in the elbow grease if the grease was bad. That’s why she had a failsafe. She had a career she could go back to in the city if this didn’t pan out. She had braced herself for potential failure. If that moment came, she would be devastated, but how did the saying go? Better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all.
There were only two dreams in her life. The first one was about to come true.
The other? That one was kinda out of her hands. Finding true love was the stuff of fairy tales, although she continued to believe.
Yet that was one of the reasons she had moved to a place like Paradise Valley. Maybe she would find love here. Because Elaine knew what it was like to fall in love. She also knew what it was like to be rejected, to live with that one-sided love that played with her head and hurt her heart.
This was a woman currently in love with an unattainable woman on the internet. One she barely knew outside of sparse details fed to her over the years. Years.
At least one dream would come true. Soon.
Chapter 3
FRANKIE
Closing up shop in the late afternoon took more effort than Frankie was used to, and that was with Dominic’s help. I don’t know what’s got me going so slow. Must have been the weather. Fall had come hard and fast in the past few weeks. Gone were the long days of warm weather and bright sunshine. Almost overnight, Frankie woke up to a bleak, gray world of rain and wind. Depending which way it blew in from, the town looked at either signs falling off their posts or morning chills so bad that winter coats hobbled down the street.
Such a change in air pressure often left Frankie a bit ragged. Didn’t help she dealt with early mornings, rain or shine. There was no staying in bed when meats had to be received and prepped for the day. Breakfast time was the second highest-paying time of the day after lunch. Many of the day laborers working outside of town stopped by the deli to order their meals for later. It helped that Frankie served food meant to be consumed cold.
But that meant by the time three rolled around, she was ready to pass out. At the very least, she was a ready for a long, hot bath.
She didn’t get home until well after six, when the sun was set and her eyes were heavy. Nevertheless, she stumbled into the kitchen to throw together some dinner while Dominic yawned in front of his gaming laptop. The familiar sounds of a fan whirring to life and ominous fantasy game music lulled Frankie into a false sense of security as she heated up spaghetti sauce and boiled noodles. If Dominic wanted vegetables, he could throw some raw baby carrots into his dish. Frankie was finished.
She could have asked him to help her make dinner, but in truth, Dominic had made dinner the past two nights. He does so much around here without complaining. I don’t give him a hard time for taking the occasional evening off. Few people understood that he was her little b
rother and not her son. Don’t have to tell me twice how old I look. Never mind she was more than old enough to be her own brother’s mother. Yet that’s what happened when Frankie’s parents had her in their teens and “oopsie’d” another baby twenty years down the line. Frankie and Dominic’s mother joked that she had forgotten her birth control on the second honeymoon through no fault but her own. “I was so drunk for like three days straight, honey!” Yvette told her daughter when Frankie was too shocked to speak after the pregnancy announcement. “When they say you get unlimited mimosas for brunch on that cruise, they aren’t kidding!”
Frankie’s family may have been unconventional in its own way, but nobody expected her to take her brother in when he announced he was fed up with the bullying going on at his high school in Olympia. Yvette had been about to put him into alternative online schooling to save his sanity when Frankie glibly suggested he come live with her in Paradise Valley and try a much smaller school, where the social hierarchy was much looser thanks to a dearth of students. Dominic had been hesitant at first, since he dealt with enough crap as a black kid in bigger high schools, but his trial semester at Clark High had seen him walk away with two best friends and a grander shot at honor roll. I don’t think about how things may or may not go. If he wanted out of there after a week, I would have pulled him out, no questions asked. Instead, Dominic was still living with her after graduation, taking community college classes remotely and once or twice a week at a local branch a couple towns over. He did online design gigs to pay for what the grants lacked in support, but otherwise, he spent most of his days online, either designing in Photoshop or studying. The boy was a permanent fixture in the local coffee shops and library. He said he liked to keep home and study spaces separate, weather permitting.
Soon, they would see less friendly weather. If it snowed again that year, Dominic would probably wrap himself up in his bed and refuse to come out again. He was the reason Frankie had invested in a sun lamp. That boy needs his vitamin D. Hell, the whole town did! Bunch of moody grumpy grumps who liked to pretend they moved to Paradise Valley because they looooved the rain, and not because, uh, they wanted lesbian dates.
Am I really any better?
Frankie pulled out her own laptop while dinner cooked on the stove. She propped open her cheap machine on the dining table, a cup of hot, decaf tea promising to keep her warm if it couldn’t keep her awake. The smell of salami and roast beef lingered on her hands. Hands she had washed all day, yet the smell never went away.
Yup. Women totally want these meaty hands all over their bodies. Frankie had to laugh. It was either that or resign herself to a life of singledom, not that she was convinced such a thing was bad.
“Aw, come on,” Dominic cried behind her. “I haven’t been online two minutes and our tank is already wiping.” Lest Frankie think he was talking to her, he continued, probably into his headset, “If he’s expecting a rez after dying twice on the first easy boss, well… seriously, man, vote to kick. Rather recruit someone from the guild than deal with this pug crap tonight.”
Frankie kept her eyes on her monitor. She didn’t pretend to understand half of what her brother said when he was playing his games. She found it amazing enough that he was comfortable talking to strangers on a headset, for Frankie still wasn’t convinced that some of those pixels on the screen were people he knew in real life.
He might as well be my son. Frankie focused on the sounds of dinner instead of whatever her brother was talking about. Her eyes locked on her monitor as she attempted to make sense of her email and the scant social media she followed.
This was a woman who didn’t have much use for the internet. Not outside of her business, anyway. She appreciated the tech that allowed her to streamline her business and make her register an eighth of its original size. Few people paid with cash anymore. She no longer needed a separate phone line to run those cards and get paid. The internet allowed her to order more stock without killing half a forest’s worth of tress. Don’t get her started on the streaming services! Killing her cable bill was a blessing and a half. Streaming was the way to go. Dominic had showed her how to find free entertainment on YouTube, so between that and Prime with Netflix, she was set.
Yet when it came to personally interacting with the internet, she was lost. She knew how to check her email and take a gander at the news. What flummoxed her was talking to people. Chatrooms had turned into groups. Forums had turned into social media apps. Everyone used their real name now, but their names were so small that she needed her glasses to read them. No pictures. Not even a flower or a dog. The more people used their real names on the internet, the more anonymous it became. Somehow.
Before she became a bit of a technophobe, however, she had been on a few dating sites. (Did those still exist? Everyone prompted her to download apps on her phone now.) One serious relationship (with the Army woman) had come out of it, but she had made some non-romantic friends, too. One of them was Z, the woman she had been talking to for years.
Strange, wasn’t it? Almost nobody, including Dominic, knew that his sister had online friends. Yet whenever she looked at her phone or booted up her computer, she was really checking her Google Hangouts and Facebook Messenger. Occasionally, perhaps three or four times a week, she had a decent conversation with someone she met via a “type matching” site. Maybe there was something to those old algorithms.
How else would she have ever met Z, the woman who slowly became the best friend she never actually met?
Perhaps that was the strange thing. Five years of talking, and they never exchanged real names. That’s not true. She told me her real name once. Really unique one. I call her Z because I can never remember it. If there was one thing Frankie took away from internet education, it was protecting her privacy, and that included giving Z a nickname that nobody actually called dear Francis. Fran. She thinks my name is Fran. Sure, it was short for Francis – kinda – but it wasn’t Frankie, and that was the most identifying thing. Maybe I should go by Frankenstein. That would tell people they’re not getting the real me. Frankie always felt so smug when she had those ideas.
“How is the business opening going?” Frankie messaged Z, who was in the midst of opening her new shop in a new town. They didn’t get into details beyond that.
“Good!!! SOOOO tired, though! Got the sign hung up today and it looks amazing! I might have to send you pictures sometime. Oh, and the mayor came by today to introduce me to her daughter. She’ll be working at the shop for a little while, until I get more on my feet and realize how many part-timers I might need in the future. Will really depend on how many people regularly come by, you know?”
Frankie wanted to tell Z that she should have thought of that ahead of time, but now wasn’t the moment. She’s already committed. She’ll figure it out quickly enough. Baby’s first small business was already an adventure.
“Good luck. Keep your expectations tempered that first month. You’ll either have a huge rush of people in the beginning and they’ll peter out to your new normal, or they’ll have conveniently missed all your advertisements and not realize you exist until word of mouth slowly gets out. Don’t get too discouraged, and don’t get too big for your britches!”
“Yes, ma’am!”
Frankie had to refrain from rolling her eyes at her computer monitor. She wasn’t sure exactly how old Z was, but if Frankie had to guess, it was definitely north of thirty. Old enough to know what “yes, ma’am!” sounded like. How old does she think I am? Am I her cool aunt now? Jesus, when did that happen? Frankie knew that all of her unsolicited advice would come back to bite her in the ass. Z must have thought she was fifty-five!
The timer dinged on the stove. Frankie needed to get up and check the noodles. Yet not before firing off one more message to her old friend.
“If you need anything, let me know.”
That was her open-ended way of saying, “I desperately need human companionship and need more reasons to talk to you, person whose n
ame I don’t really know.” Frankie wasn’t good at messaging people with small talk. She needed a reason. A topic. Something that didn’t make her sound desperate.
Although she was. Desperate enough that she turned away from the stove and stared at her computer, wondering if it would be too much to tell Z that she was a badass and had this new business in the bag.
Chapter 4
ELAINE
Opening day launched without a hitch on Saturday, November 9th, a date Elaine would never forget .
Well, almost without a hitch. She’d remember it for reasons she’d never want to acknowledge again.
Curiosity was a natural drug to lure in prospective new customers. Elaine had spared no expense putting out ads in the weekly paper, posting up fliers around town, tapping into the nearest radio station, and buffing up her website’s SEO so she would show up in tourists’ results for Paradise Valley Coffee Shop. Fran had told her to mind her expectations, which was God-send advice when Elaine threw open her doors on Saturday morning and invited all of Paradise Valley to come sample her wares.
Christina told her that there was some buzz around town. People asking what was going into the old restaurant spot that hadn’t been leased in years. Problem was, even with a plethora of advertisements around town, people simply didn’t pay attention anymore. Elaine could go on NextDoor and post about the upcoming opening, but only three people saw it – because only three people were on NextDoor in Paradise Valley. (And, for some reason, people were split between the north side of town and the south. Basically, whichever side of Main Street you lived on was your “neighborhood,” not that it meant anything to Elaine.
So it didn’t matter how many notices she put up around town. Her fliers covered Paradise Valley from the library to the post office, from both banks to three of the churches that allowed her to put something up on the bulletin board. Nobody read them. Those who did merely cocked their heads, shrugged, and said, “Wonder what’s going in that old spot over there,” when they saw the contractors and sign guys over the past few weeks.
November Rains (A Year in Paradise Book 11) Page 2