by Mary McNear
“Look, Caroline,” John said, rubbing his temples. “I know this is hard for you to hear. It’s hard for me to say. But you’re not without options.”
“Options?”
“Well, yes,” he said, and for the first time in this conversation, he looked uncomfortable. “You could borrow the money to pay us back. Borrow it privately, I mean—from a friend.”
Caroline shook her head. “My friends don’t have that kind of money.”
He shifted in his seat. “Then you could sell the building. And Pearl’s, of course. That should cover the loan.”
“And then what?” she asked, shaking her head in disbelief.
“And then . . . well, obviously, that would be up to you. But I’m not worried about you, Caroline.”
“Why’s that, John?” she asked, not bothering to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.
He drained the last of his coffee, then leaned back in his chair. “I’m not worried because I remember what my father used to say about you, Caroline. He said you were, bar none, the smartest person in this town.”
“Well, a lot of good it’s done me, if I can’t even keep a business afloat.”
“That wasn’t you, Caroline. That was the recession.”
She sighed. Because what difference did it make, really, at the end of the day, if the outcome was the same? Still, she didn’t feel angry or upset right now. Just . . . just numb, she decided.
“Can I get you another cup of coffee, John?” she asked, suddenly wanting their meeting to be over.
“That’d be great,” he said, with an attempt at a smile. “And, Caroline?” he added, as he pulled on his suit jacket. “I wish I could have done more. I really do.”
“I know,” Caroline nodded, standing up. “Let me get you that coffee.”
“Are you all right?” Frankie asked when she came to get the coffeepot. “You look a little pale.”
“No, I’m fine.” She knew he didn’t believe her. “Frankie,” she said, “I’m going to pour John another cup of coffee, and then I’m going to head upstairs. I’ll send Daisy down, though, to take care of the rest of the lunchtime stragglers.”
“Sure,” he said, and the worried expression on his face told her that no matter how hard she tried to keep this all from him, he’d still figured most of it out for himself anyway.
As Will was entering Pearl’s, another man was leaving it. Will stepped back to let him pass. “Excuse me,” he said, and Will nodded, taking note of the man’s suit. You didn’t see too many of those around here, especially in this hot weather. He walked into the coffee shop and looked around. He’d tried to time his arrival for after the lunch rush, but there were still several customers sitting at the counter and at tables scattered around the room. He glanced at his watch. Two thirty. And these people hadn’t eaten lunch yet? Then again, he thought, he hadn’t eaten lunch yet either.
He walked over to one of the red leather booths in the front window and slid into it. There was no sign of Daisy, he saw, as he scanned the room. The only person behind the counter right now was a gargantuan man working the grill. Will had seen him before, he realized, playing pool at the Mosquito Inn. He was rumored to have killed a man once, with his bare hands, and looking at him now, it wasn’t that hard to believe.
The cook saw Will looking at him and nodded at him, almost imperceptibly. It wasn’t a friendly nod, though. It was more of a warning nod. A “you better not be giving us any trouble” nod. Will nodded back and looked away. The food must be good here, he decided, if people were willing to stare that man down for the privilege of eating some eggs.
Will took a menu out of the menu holder on the table and tried to read it, but he couldn’t concentrate. It hadn’t occurred to him that Daisy might not be here, and now that she wasn’t, he had no backup plan. But when he glanced toward the counter again, a few minutes later, he saw her coming into the coffee shop through a back door, and, as she did, her eyes met his across the room. She looked first surprised, and then flustered, but she didn’t look angry, so Will relaxed a little. She wavered there for a moment, unsure of what to do, and then she turned and said something to the cook. He turned around and looked at Will again, and Will felt himself tense involuntarily. Had she told the guy to throw him out? he wondered. But the cook made no move toward him. Instead, he turned back to Daisy, nodded, and put something on the grill. Will exhaled slowly. He wasn’t a coward, not when it came to a fight, but he wasn’t stupid, either.
After Daisy spoke to the cook, though, she ignored Will, and he watched as she went back to work, refilling customers’ water glasses, taking a party of four their check, and clearing away plates from an empty booth in the back. He sighed, fiddling with the menu. Here was another contingency he hadn’t planned for. It had occurred to him that Daisy might still be angry at him, but it hadn’t occurred to him that she wouldn’t even speak to him. He’d thought if he came here as a paying customer, the least she would do was take his order. But he couldn’t force her to wait on him. If she was enjoying his banishment to this booth, there was nothing to stop her from leaving him there until closing time.
Just when Will had decided this was her game plan, Daisy poured a soda from the soda dispenser, picked up an order from the grill, and headed directly for him.
“Hi,” she said, with a neutral smile, setting a Coke and a sandwich with fries down on the table in front of him.
“Hi,” he said. “I didn’t order anything yet.”
“I know,” she said. “I brought you the hamburger club. It’s on special today. If you can wait while I do a few more things, I can come back and talk for a minute.”
“All right,” he said, and she walked away. God, she was even prettier than he’d remembered her being, even in a big white apron that covered her slender frame, and even with her hair pulled back in a rather severe ponytail. He flashed, for an instant, on an image of her bare white shoulders and bare white thighs. But he shook his head impatiently, putting the image out of his mind, and reached instead for the hamburger club. It was good, really good. And he must have been hungrier than he realized, because by the time Daisy came back five minutes later, it was gone, and so were half of the french fries. Eating here, he decided, was definitely worth facing down the potentially homicidal cook.
“Hi,” she said again, a little uncertainly, as she slid in across from him.
“Hi.” He smiled. “The special’s great, by the way,” he said, indicating his almost empty plate.
“I’ll tell Frankie you said so.”
“Frankie? Is that his name?”
She nodded.
“Is it true . . .” Will leaned in closer. “Is it true he killed a man once?”
“Oh, that again,” Daisy said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t believe everything you hear, Will. But you didn’t come here to talk about Frankie, did you?”
“No,” he said, shifting in the booth, and wishing he was better with words. “I came here to . . .”
“To apologize?” Daisy suggested, raising her eyebrows.
“That’s part of the reason I came.”
“Well, I’ll save you the trouble,” Daisy said, leaning forward, elbows on the table. “You don’t owe me an apology.”
“I think I do,” Will disagreed. “I’m not . . . um, proud of the way I acted the other night. You didn’t do anything wrong, Daisy. There’s nothing wrong, either, with your being a, you know . . .”
“A virgin?” Daisy supplied, her mouth lifting at the corners.
“Yeah, okay,” Will said, glancing around to make sure that no one had heard her. But Daisy, he saw, was amused. “Anyway,” he continued, “what I meant to say is, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. If I made you feel that way, I’m sorry.” He stopped, disoriented. Were they really sitting here, in public, in broad daylight, discussing her virginity? He got a feeling then that he’d stepped off the edge of something, and that there was nothing underneath his feet.
“Will, look, it’s okay. I’
m not angry anymore,” Daisy was saying, when his brain caught up with conversation again. “I was on the drive back, but after I got home, I calmed down. I was even able to see a little humor in the situation,” she said, emphasizing the words a little. “I know that my, um, situation is a little unusual. I mean, how many twenty-one-year-old virgins have you met before me?”
Not many, Will thought. Maybe not any. But to Daisy he said, “I don’t know.”
She took a french fry off his plate and nibbled on it “Well, I’ll tell you something, Will. We’re a very select group of people, sort of like a club that no one wants to be a member of. Sometimes, even I don’t know if I want to be a member of it anymore.”
He frowned. “But, I mean, I thought the whole point was that people like you were proud of what you were doing. Don’t you take some kind of vow? And wear some kind of ring? A promise ring?” He looked reflexively at her hands. He didn’t know what a promise ring looked like, but she wasn’t wearing any rings.
“Is that what you think, Will?” Daisy asked, surprised. “That I’m saving myself for marriage?”
He nodded. Since she’d told him she was a virgin, it had never occurred to him that there might be any other reason for it.
But she shook her head. “There’s no promise ring. I didn’t plan it this way, Will. It just sort of happened.”
“But how?” he asked, and then, added, quickly, “I mean, you’ve had boyfriends before, obviously.”
“I’ve had boyfriends,” she agreed. “One or two of them were even serious. Or could have been serious. But I have this annoying habit of overthinking my life, to the point where it’s hard to be spontaneous and hard to do something that feels big, or important, without worrying that I’ll regret it later. Do you know what I mean?”
“About overthinking things?”
She nodded.
“Not really,” he admitted. “I’m more of an underthinker myself.”
“Well, maybe that’s better sometimes,” she said musingly. “Overthinking definitely has its drawbacks. But that’s probably not the only reason I’m . . .”
“A virgin?” Will said, getting the hang of it. “Why, what’s the other reason?”
She smiled, then paused. “Well, what it comes down to, I guess, is expectations. Because either mine are too high, or most men’s are too low.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, take our date, for instance,” she said, picking up another one of his french fries and taking a bite of it. “I mean, was that the whole plan, Will? The beer, the backseat, the . . .”
He sighed inwardly, but he decided to go with honesty. It was the simplest, if not always the best, policy. “Yeah, that was more or less the plan.”
“And you thought that was enough for a first date?”
I’ve never had any complaints before, Will almost said. But he caught himself. His plan was not to antagonize her; his plan, in fact, was to do the opposite. So he raised his shoulders, noncommittally, in an answer that was no answer at all.
Again, Daisy saw through it. “Huh,” she said thoughtfully. “I mean, no offense, Will. It just seems that today, in the twenty-first century, you might offer a woman a little more than that.”
“Well, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Will said, without thinking, and he was instantly annoyed with himself. He watched warily as the surprise registered on her face, and he waited for that surprise to turn into annoyance. Or anger. But after a moment, she laughed. “You may have a point there, Will,” she said. Then she glanced over at Frankie, still standing at the grill, and some wordless communication passed between them.
“Look, I’ve got to get back to work,” she said. “But, Will? Thank you for stopping by. And, um, apology accepted.” She smiled then, a smile that was so pretty and unaffected that it immediately reminded him of the other reason he’d come here.
“Yeah, about that,” he said, quickly, as she started to slide out of the booth. “There was something else, too.”
She hesitated.
He took a swig of his Coke, plagued by an unfamiliar feeling—nervousness. “I wanted to know, Daisy, if you’d like to go out with me again.”
She raised her eyebrows. “On another date?” she asked skeptically.
“Yeah, but not like the first one. We could go out for dinner or—”
But she interrupted him. “Will, don’t. Really. It’s not necessary. You apologized. You don’t need to take me on some pity date now.”
“Pity date?” he repeated. “I don’t know what that is.”
“You know, a second date to make up for the lousy first date. So when you never see me again after the second date, you can have a clear conscience.”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t mean a pity date. That’s not what I had in mind. I wanted to take you out again on a real date.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Why?” he said, caught off guard by her again. She was such an odd combination of shyness and directness. “Well, because . . .” But he struggled a little here, unsure of how to put this. She was waiting, though, so he said, “I want to take you out again because I like you, Daisy. And because I’ve been thinking about you. I’ve been thinking about you a lot.” To the exclusion, it turned out, of almost everything else in his life.
He watched now while she blushed, her cheeks a lovely mingling of creamy white and soft pink. “Well, I’ve been trying not to think about you,” she said softly. “But I’ve been doing it anyway.”
“Good,” he said, and he wanted to lean over and kiss her, right here and right now, but he sensed the cook was still watching him. “So what do you say? Could we try that again?”
She studied him thoughtfully. “We could, but . . . I’m not going back to the beach with you, Will.”
He smiled at her double meaning. “No, we won’t go back to the beach,” he said. “In fact, let’s take that whole subject off the table. But I have to warn you, though. What you said about dating, and about our expectations being different? Part of it, Daisy, is that I don’t have any expectations. I’ve never really dated anybody before.”
“No?” she said, surprised. But then something occurred to her. “So this is one area where I have more experience than you?” she asked, a smile playing around her lips.
“Definitely.”
“All right, then. Yes, I’ll go out with you again, Will—on one condition.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“You let me plan what we do on our date.”
He thought about that. “Yeah, okay,” he said. Why not? It wasn’t like he had anything in mind anyway, other than just being with her.
“Good.” She smiled. “When should we go out?”
“Tomorrow,” he said, without hesitation.
“Okay,” she said, and she seemed suddenly shy again. “Do you want to come here around eight o’clock?”
He nodded.
“I’ll see you then,” she said, starting to slide out of the booth again.
“Oh, wait,” he said, reaching for his wallet. “Let me give you some money for my lunch.”
“No, that’s okay. It’s on the house.”
He shook his head and took some bills out. But when he put them on the table, Daisy pushed them back. “Will,” she said, “I wish I could say that giving away the occasional free meal was one of the perks of working here, but the truth is, it’s the only perk of working here.” She smiled again, and then she was gone. And Will was left there, eating a cold french fry and thinking about the fact that, for the first time in a long time, he had no idea what he was doing.
CHAPTER 6
Storm’s coming,” Jason said, later that afternoon, leaning against a car in the service bay.
Oh, a storm is definitely coming, Will thought, looking up from the engine he was working on. It had been hot and overcast all day. But since he’d gotten back from Pearl’s a few hours ago, it had gotten even hotter and the sky had gotten even darker. And
now the air was so heavy and still, so full of the hum and taste of electricity, it had you almost praying that the rain would start and break the tension. Will put his wrench down, pulled off his gloves, and, sliding his cell phone out of his back pocket, checked the latest text from Christy. I’ll be there in five minutes. He sighed. It was going to be one hell of a storm.
“Jason,” he said, wishing now more than ever that Jason actually worked during his workday. “Isn’t there something you could be doing in the office?”
“Probably,” Jason said, “but you’re better company than the radio in there.”
“Yeah, that’s great,” Will said, coming over to him. “But Christy’s going to be here soon, and we’ll need some privacy. To talk,” he added pointedly.
“Oh, right. Because you two spend so much time talking,” Jason said with a smirk.
“Out,” Will said, exasperated, pointing in the direction of the service bay door.
“All right, all right,” Jason said, holding his hands up in surrender. “As it turns out, I do have some work to do. I need to read some new video-game reviews.”
“Knock yourself out,” Will said, searching for a bottled water in the cooler and wishing Jason would leave.
But when he left, Will wished he would come back, if only to take his mind off the conversation he was about to have with Christy. He was nervous again, for the second time that day, and nervousness was an unfamiliar feeling for Will, who rarely left his comfort zone.
He walked over to the door to the service bay now and looked out at the ominous sky. In the distance, he saw a first flash of lightning, followed several seconds later by a low rumble of thunder. And, as if on cue, Christy’s silver Mustang sped into view and turned, a little too fast, into the service station driveway. It was a beautiful car, Will thought, watching her park, but judging from the faint rattle he heard coming from the engine, there was a loose heat shield in the exhaust system. He wondered if he should offer to tighten it up for her while they talked, but he decided against it. Given that he’d never worked on her car before, now was probably not the time to start.