“You all must not work for the same boss I have,” he said. “She never mentioned I could quit and put up my feet.”
“We rebelled and took her captive,” Emily explained. “And as soon as any of us can move, we’re going to take her home.”
“What about dinner?” he asked. “Did you grab something to eat here, because with the power out for so long at the house, you shouldn’t risk eating anything left in the refrigerator.”
“I never thought of that,” Gabi said with a groan, “and I’m starving.”
Jerry emerged from the kitchen just in time to overhear her. “Then isn’t it a good thing that I just made up a pot of crab soup. I could throw some burgers on the grill, too. With the generator here running, we didn’t suffer any spoilage.”
“And French fries?” B.J. asked excitedly. “Can I have a burger and fries?” He wrinkled his nose. “No soup, though. Yuck!”
“I’m with B.J.,” Samantha said. “I’ll take a burger and fries. No soup.”
Cora Jane shook her head. “How did you come from around these parts and have such an aversion to seafood?”
Samantha shrugged. “I just know I never liked the smell, the taste or the texture.”
“Or maybe it’s because you had a big-time nasty reaction every time you tried it,” Emily said. “You’re allergic to it, you idiot.”
“Don’t call your sister an idiot,” Cora Jane scolded automatically. “Are you sure it’s an allergy?”
“Swear to God,” Emily said. “Gabi, don’t you remember the time Mother insisted Samantha at least taste a crab cake and the next thing we knew we were traipsing off to the emergency room? She could barely breathe.”
Samantha looked momentarily taken aback. “I’d blocked that, but you’re right. I was scared to death. After that even the thought of seafood turned my stomach.”
“Well, I’ll take the soup, the burger and the fries,” Boone said. “Jerry, why don’t I help with those burgers?”
Emily frowned. “I guess that means we all should be back on our feet helping out. Grandmother, you stay put. We can handle everything. B.J., can you find silverware and napkins? Do you know where they are?”
He beamed at her. “Sure. I’ve helped with setups before. Want me to show you?”
Emily grinned at his eagerness. “That would be great.”
“I’ll get the drinks,” Gabi volunteered. “Are you all sticking with sweet tea? Do you want to switch to beer? Sodas?”
“I’d love a beer,” Samantha said, “but tired as I am, that would knock me right out. I’ll have a soda.”
“Make that two,” Emily said.
As soon as all the orders were in, they went about their respective assignments, working together as smoothly as if they’d been a team for years.
When two tables had been pushed together and set, drinks had been served and Boone came around with the bowls of soup, Cora Jane regarded them all with approval.
“I don’t ever want to hear any of you say you couldn’t take over this place in a heartbeat,” she said. “As long as it’s been since you were last here, you still remember everything I taught you.”
“Don’t go getting any ideas,” Gabi warned her. “Running a restaurant takes skill, business savvy and passion. Boone obviously has it, but I sure don’t.”
“Me, either,” Samantha declared. “Sadly I’ve kept up some of my skills working in restaurants between acting gigs, but it is not my calling.”
“And apparently you’ve forgotten my tendency to lose patience with difficult customers,” Emily reminded her. “I believe you were forced to pay several cleaning bills my last summer here after I accidentally dropped a few things into people’s laps.”
Cora Jane chuckled. “A few of them would have tested my patience, too,” she admitted.
“And I came close to dousing a few drunks with ice water after I heard about the unwanted passes they were making at you girls,” Jerry chimed in. “Only thing that stopped me was that you took care of them yourselves.”
“Actually Gabi and I didn’t,” Samantha said, grinning. “We turned ’em over to Emily. She really enjoyed retaliating.”
“I did take a certain amount of pleasure in it,” she agreed. When she noticed B.J. listening, wide-eyed, she leaned close. “What I did was not appropriate, though. Do not follow my example.”
“Thank you for that,” Boone said wryly. “After listening to you all, I’m probably going to have to completely deprogram him before I ever let him near a customer in any of my restaurants. We pride ourselves on impeccable, friendly service.”
“Well, fortunately, the lunch crowd rarely gets that rowdy,” Cora Jane said. “It’s one of the reasons I’m happy we close by midafternoon and that beer’s the strongest thing we have on the menu. Let the other places deal with the out-of-control drinking, loud music and such. This place is meant for families. It’s rare that the real party folks wander over from the beach in the middle of the day.”
“You’ve definitely made Castle’s into something unique,” Boone said. “It’s a real institution in town. I hope my restaurants last even half as long.”
“You run a good kitchen and have great service,” Jerry told him. “Last time Cora Jane and I came by, we were both impressed. I had a conversation with your chef, and he clearly knows his stuff. He’s got the whole Cajun influence going on, and you know I can appreciate that.”
Emily listened to the praise with growing surprise. Coming from Jerry, those were high marks, indeed. He might be working for a seaside diner, but his own credentials in the kitchen were pretty impeccable, and his standards were high. She recalled when her grandfather had recruited him from a restaurant in Louisiana.
“Thanks,” Boone said. “I paid close attention to everything you and Cora Jane taught me. If I’m succeeding, it’s because I had the best possible teachers.”
He stood up. “Now, let me bus these tables, help with cleanup and get B.J. home. You ladies should probably take off now. It’ll be dark soon, and you still need to be cautious on the road. Most of the debris has been cleared from the highway, but there’s bound to be some piled up on the side roads.”
“Boone, you went by the house,” Cora Jane said. “Anything we need to watch out for there?”
“There are a lot of branches in the yard, but the driveway’s clear. Just watch your step going inside. I flipped on the outside light, just in case the power came back on. I called your neighbors earlier and they say the power did come on over there. You should be okay. I didn’t spot any leaks in the house, but you might want to take a closer look.”
Cora Jane gave him a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem. Are you still planning to open here tomorrow?”
“Just with deck seating,” Emily told him. She gave a pointed look at Cora Jane. “We compromised.”
“Then I’ll be back here early in case you need help,” he promised. “What time?”
“Grandmother scheduled the bakery delivery for five-thirty,” Emily said dryly.
Boone laughed. “Of course she did. And that is why I run a restaurant that serves only dinner. I also postponed our reopening till the weekend. I wanted my employees to have time to get their own situations under control, deal with insurance issues or whatever they needed to do.”
“Can we come help you out, instead?” Samantha pleaded.
“Traitors,” Cora Jane said. “Family comes first, and don’t you forget it. We’ll all be here at five-fifteen with smiles on our faces.”
Jerry chuckled at their groans. “Well, at least you and I will be, Cora Jane.”
“Oh, we’ll be here,” Emily said. “But the smiles might be expecting too much.”
Fully clothed might be the best they could promise.
5
“Bad news, boss,” Pete Sanchez announced when Boone called him to check in after finally getting home from Castle’s and getting an exhausted B.J. into a bath and then to bed.
Pete was Boone’s manager of restaurant operations. Though Pete was a year younger than Boone, he’d come to him with ten years of solid experience. Single and eager to be on the go, he spent most of his time overseeing the restaurants in Norfolk and Charlotte, taking the burden of travel off of Boone. Even so, he’d come straight back to North Carolina the minute residents and business owners had been allowed back on the barrier islands.
“Tell me,” Boone said. If the usually low-key Pete thought the news was bad, it probably rose to the level of disaster.
“Looks like the restaurant’s been flooded one too many times, and the last repairs must have been made with poor quality materials. When we pulled up the carpets, we found sections of rotting floorboards all over the place.”
“Blast it!” Boone muttered.
“It gets worse,” Pete disclosed direly. “We discovered mold behind some of the drywall on the side closest to the bay, where the water stayed high the longest. A lot of mold. It’s pretty pervasive.”
“You have to be kidding me,” Boone said, thoroughly frustrated. If there was extensive mold now, even as quickly as it could appear after a flooding incident, this definitely hadn’t happened overnight. Nor had those sections of floor rotted since this last hurricane blew through. These were most likely things his inspectors should have caught before he bought the property.
Exhaling a sigh, he concluded he’d just have to consider this a lesson well-learned. Next time, he’d hire an actual contractor to go over any potential real estate purchase to assure that the inspection wasn’t superficial or in the seller’s favor.
“Why didn’t you call me on my cell?” he asked Pete when he had his temper under control. “I could have gotten Tommy over there today to take a look.”
“I tried, but I guess the service is still spotty,” Pete responded. “One of the cell towers blew down or something. I did get through once and tried to leave a message, but it cut me off before I could explain what was going on.”
Boone pulled his cell phone from his pocket and noted the call logged in early in the afternoon. It must have come in while he’d had the noisy chain saw going. “Sorry. I was tied up over at Castle’s.”
“I knew that, so I didn’t want to make a big deal out of something that could just as easily be handled tomorrow. I thought about calling Tommy myself, but I figured he was there with you. You’d told me you wanted him to get Cora Jane’s roof fixed. I know how you feel about making that a priority.”
“It’s okay, Pete. None of this is your fault. I’ll call Tommy now. We’ll both come by first thing in the morning so he can assess the damage and give me a timetable for the repairs.”
“You talking daylight?”
“Or thereabouts,” Boone confirmed.
“You want me there?”
“No, give yourself a break,” he told the night owl. “I’ll handle this one. How about meeting me there around nine and we’ll come up with an action plan. Looks like I’ll need you to stick around here longer than we originally talked about. Is there anything you need to get back to right away in Norfolk or Charlotte?”
“No, both restaurants are good,” Pete assured him. “You have excellent management teams in place.”
Boone chuckled. “You pretty much have to say that. You hired most of them.”
“Doesn’t make me biased, though. If they screw up, that’s on me, too.” He hesitated, then said, “I’ve been thinking we could probably start looking for that fourth location you talked about once things around here settle down.”
“You getting bored, Pete?”
“Maybe just a little,” he acknowledged. “You know I love doing the start-ups.”
“Well, we’ll get serious about the next one soon,” Boone assured him. “Start compiling the market research for me, okay?”
“Will do,” Pete said eagerly. “In the meantime, should I cancel the ads announcing the reopening for this weekend?”
“We’ll decide that after I’ve been through the place with Tommy. Maybe it’s not as bad as you thought at first glance.”
“This is bad,” Pete warned him. “If that mold has spread beyond what I saw, we’re talking major renovations.”
Boone thought of the compromise Cora Jane had reached to get Castle’s reopened. “Is the kitchen operational?”
“Good to go and spotless,” Pete confirmed.
“And we know the deck is solid,” Boone said thoughtfully.
“What are you thinking?”
“That we could serve on a limited basis out there temporarily. We’re at the end of the season. Tourists will be pouring in here again by the weekend, based on what I heard from the local officials earlier today. I’d hate for the wait staff to lose out on the kind of tips they get this time of year.”
“You’d want to keep them all on, even with limited seating?”
“Dividing the tips more ways would be better than laying ’em all off, don’t you think?”
“And you’re not worried about our reputation if we can’t handle the usual crowds and can only serve a couple of specialties, rather than our full menu?”
Boone chuckled. “If anyone’s in a rush or out here to review the food, I imagine we can put a good public relations spin on keeping our kitchen open, our food selections limited but high quality, and our people working, despite being damaged by a hurricane.” He thought of Gabi. “I know just the person to draft a press release, in fact. I imagine she can make us sound like benevolent angels.”
Pete laughed. “If she can pull that off for a couple of guys like you and me, she’s a magician. Get that done and I’ll have it distributed. Might as well do a preemptive strike and generate some good buzz.”
“Now you’re getting into the spirit of this,” Boone said. “Put that press release on the list of things we need to finalize when I see you in the morning.”
Pete chuckled. “You are such a glass-half-full man,” he praised. “I don’t know how you do it. Even after Jenny, well, let’s just say it’s one of the reasons I love working for you. I know this was lousy news, yet you’ve turned it around, come up with a plan and are ready for action.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” Boone joked, thinking of how often he’d gotten by on practically nothing just to keep the first restaurant afloat in the early days. “And making sure the action really happens on schedule is why I pay you the big bucks. See you in the morning, Pete.”
As soon as he’d disconnected that call, he punched in the numbers for Gabi’s cell phone. Other than Cora Jane’s, hers was the one Castle number he’d memorized. She’d be the closest if he ever saw a need for a family member to get here in a hurry. He’d last used it just before the storm to make sure that someone was coming to get Cora Jane away from the danger zone. He’d known she’d never choose to go on her own. If she ever found out he was behind Sam Castle’s appearance on her doorstep, she’d be furious, but he was willing to take the heat to keep her safe.
Now Gabi answered, her voice sleepy. “Boone? What’s up?”
“Sorry, did I wake you?” he asked.
“No, just settling down.”
“I promise not to keep you long.” He explained about the crisis. “Any chance I could hire you to draft a press release for me on short notice? Pete’s worried people will be disappointed if we’re not operating at full capacity.”
“And you want them to see that you’re open at all just for the benefit of your employees and your customers, even though the situation isn’t optimal,” she summarized.
“Exactly. Can you do something with that?”
“Of
course I can. Leave it to me. Is the fax machine at the restaurant operating? Or do you want me to email you the document?”
“Send it by email. That’ll be more efficient for distribution, I think.”
“Perfect. What time’s your meeting with Pete?”
“Nine.”
“You’ll have it well before that. And if anything about your plan changes, just give me a call and I can do a new draft on my iPad and get it right back over to you.”
“You’re an angel, Gabi.”
“Seems to me your halo’s pretty shiny, too,” she teased. “Want me to spread the word about that to anyone in particular?”
“I don’t need you to talk me up to Emily,” he said, grasping exactly what she was getting at.
“Why not? It couldn’t hurt.”
“Stick to PR, not meddling, please. Don’t make me regret calling you.”
“Okay, since you asked so nicely, I’ll focus on the task assigned for now.”
“Will you let Cora Jane know why Tommy and I are running late?”
“Don’t worry about that. You did more than your share to help out today. We’ll see you when you get there.”
“Thanks, Gabi.”
He hung up wondering what the odds were she’d keep her nose out of his personal business. Given her genetic makeup, probably not all that good.
* * *
Emily’s gaze kept drifting toward the parking lot. It was midmorning, and there’d been no sign of Boone. Castle’s had been swamped from the minute they’d opened the doors at six. Word seemed to have spread quickly among the locals that they were open for business, at least with deck seating. After an initial trickle, there in time to see a glorious golden sunrise, there hadn’t been a vacant table the rest of the morning.
No one had complained about the limited menu, either. The coffee was strong. The eggs, bacon, toast and grits were plentiful. Everyone seemed thoroughly happy with the limited selection. The baskets of free mini-pastries Cora Jane insisted on putting at each table were a huge hit, too. And the long-time regulars had been delighted to see Emily, Gabi and Samantha working side by side with Cora Jane again.
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