The Fortune Cafe (A Tangerine Street Romance)

by Wright, Julie

  “Let’s go,” he said, turning on his skates as easily as if they were his regular Adidas. “Let’s return these before I deposit you back at the Lucy cave.”

  She clunked after him, relieved that he hadn’t put up a fight.

  Right?

  For the millionth time, she reached up to rub her jade and flinched when she found empty space. Carter’s gentle urging aside, it was time to call Spyglass again and see when it would be done. She needed all the help she could get to put her life back on track. Play time was done.

  First thing at work the next morning, Lucy went through her wedding to-do list one more time to make sure everything was actually canceled. The call about the dress had been a lot like finding a fly in her morning juice, and she could do without those kind of karmic ripples on a regular basis.

  It looked good until she got to the dates for the Mariposa Hotel. She’d canceled the reservation weeks ago, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to take the vacation request off the Duchess calendar. She hated the symbolism of it. What should have been a week of celebrating with friends and enjoying her new husband would officially become another week in the office.

  She closed the to-do list. Soon. She would delete the time off request soon. Just not today.

  Today was about pulling work out of a downward skid. It was about working smart and seeing problems before they could arise. It was about working so hard that it compensated for her missing luck. It was about making it happen. And with a final deep breath, she dove right in to fill some of the gaps that had opened on the Duchess event schedule.

  That night and every night for the next two weeks she fell into bed like she’d been wrung out of energy and dropped there to dry. Some nights she dragged herself out to the balcony to see if Carter was around. She only saw him twice. Based on their conversations, he was winning life.

  She rattled off a long list of new events they’d booked, new hires she’d made, new problems she’d solved.

  He described some ridiculous thing he did that day that sounded more fun than anything she’d done all year, minus the weeks of the Rampage with him.

  She refused to let it distract her. The progress at work had been clear and steady, but setbacks kept cropping up— a flower vendor who had decided on an unreasonable rate hike or an event liaison who was more interested in booking personal dates with tech guys than booking events for the hotel.

  At the end of her first week of Operation Break the Slump, it had all come pouring out during her nightly call to her mom. “I don’t get it,” she complained, hating that she sounded like one of her mom’s honors students whining about a B. “I’m giving this my full time and attention, and I’m running into problems like I never have before. When is this stupid bad luck streak going to snap? Because I will, if it doesn’t soon. I’m going to lose my mind.”

  Her mom had sighed. “You’re still convinced this is all going to be better when you get your necklace back, hm?”

  “I know it will.”

  “Sweetie, you’re having the same luck you always had. It’s just that before you always expected things to work out, and they did. Now you’re expecting things to go wrong, and they do. The truth is nothing’s changed. You have the same amount of things going right as you do wrong, but your perception is different because of your expectations.”

  “But Carter’s luck has definitely improved. It’s not my imagination. Everything used to go wrong for him, and now it all goes right.”

  “Ask Carter about his luck some time. See if he agrees with your assessment.”

  She’d had to wander out on to her balcony four nights in a row before she’d had the chance. What had happened to the days when he’d hang out here waiting for a glimpse of her? It would have been a lot more convenient if he’d kept that up. She was smiling at the inner three-year-old that seemed to be controlling all her emotions when Carter’s door slid open, and he settled into the deck chair on his side.

  “It’s good to see you smiling,” he said. “Let me in on the joke?”

  She shook her head. “I was just being lame.”

  “Not possible.”

  “I have a random question for you. Do you feel like you’re having a run of good luck right now?”

  He shrugged. “No more than usual.”

  “But didn’t you feel like you were having a ton of bad luck last year?”

  “Nah. I was having a lot of bad days, and now I don’t. But that’s what happens after a tough breakup. It’s hard to see anything as going your way for a while. Doesn’t mean the rest of the stuff in your life is better or worse, but when the biggest thing in it becomes a total wreck, sometimes it’s hard to realize that the rest of it is the same as it always was.”

  She straightened and fixed him with the unwavering stare her mom had always used to pry secrets out of her when she was a kid. “Has my mom been coaching you on the phone?”

  That startled a quick head shake out of him. “What are you talking about? I haven’t seen her since she left after... you know.”

  She eased back into her chair. “You can say ‘breakup.’ I’m not fragile.”

  “Okay. So what made you ask if I talked to your mom? I promise to tell you if she’s trying to check up on you.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It wouldn’t bother if me she did.”

  He stood and walked over to lean on his rail. If she did the same thing, they’d be face to face. Her cheeks heated. Stupid. This is what came of not having a fiancé around to kiss regularly.

  She cleared her throat and stood up. “I’m sure she won’t call you. Have a good night, Carter,” she said, slipping through her door.

  She closed it on his soft “Wait, Lucy-Lou” because she didn’t need to stay outside any longer and wonder how soft his hair felt or if his biceps were as hard as his chest had been. She climbed into bed and fired up her laptop, determined to get a jump on the next day. Her mom was right; if she expected glitches to happen, they wouldn’t surprise her, and if she expected them to work out, they would. Now she just had to figure out all the possible glitches, and since she couldn’t think about them and Carter’s hair, she pushed Carter out of her head.

  The new approach helped the second week. Every time something went wrong, she tried to think of it as a problem that would solve itself, no biggie. And even though sometimes those problems did in fact turn into biggies, or none of them solved themselves, they did get solved. Eventually. After she finally managed to replace the conference that had canceled for September with a different event that grossed almost as much on the food and beverage service, the general manager stopped by her office to compliment her.

  By the third week, she’d hit a groove. Her job didn’t have the same feel of lighthearted fun like it had before her necklace had broken, but she was starting to crave the feeling she got when she finally worked through a particularly knotty problem. It was like a huge post-workout stretch, but inside her brain.

  None of it helped in the fourth week. June 2 stared back at her from her work calendar in red, highlighted as urgent. It wasn’t like she was going to forget when that should have happened, but she had forgotten to delete her time off request.

  She went into the scheduling function and deleted Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. But the closer she got to Friday, her chest tightened. That was supposed to be the day where everything in her life changed for the better, when she took a permanent step into a new life. It deserved more mourning than a deletion from her calendar.

  Instead of erasing it, she scooped up her cell phone and texted Ally, formerly her maid of honor. Going to head down to Seashell Beach next Thurs/Fri & do something either symbolic or crazy. Probably both. You in?

  The answer came back in seconds. Totally. Seashell Beach back on my calendar.

  Lucy didn’t need a ten-day block off from work anymore, but those two days... Those two days would be spent reconciling her new path with where it had split with the old one, and proving to herself t
hat she was truly okay.

  Her alarm was set early for Thursday so she and Ally could beat the worst of the traffic before hopping on the coast highway to cruise down to Seashell Beach. But her phone rang even earlier than that.

  “Hello?” she mumbled while squinting at the time display.

  “Lucy? Bad news,” she heard Ally say at a tinny distance until she fumbled the phone back up to her ear.

  “What’s going on?” She sat up and blinked sleep from her eyes.

  “Food poisoning, I think. I feel like I’m going to die. There’s no way I can make the drive this morning. I’m so sorry.”

  Lucy sighed. Ally sounded like death had reanimated her to use her voice box. “Don’t worry about it. Hydrate and sleep.”

  “But I feel so bad.”

  “Don’t. Maybe my mom can drive up and meet me. Or maybe I need to go down there and do this alone, so I can prove I’m strong enough. But whatever I do, you need to go back to sleep.” She cut off another croak and ordered Ally back to sleep for the third time before hanging up.

  She lay there for an hour, long enough for the sun to brighten her room, debating what to do. Her mom could drive up after school and get there by dinner. But she didn’t want the weight of her mom’s worry on her.

  She could do this alone. She’d use the time to reflect, to come back from the weekend that should have been her wedding recentered and refocused.

  She got up and changed into the cute sundress she’d pulled out the night before, trying not to think about how taking Ally’s convertible would have been way more fun. She’d just keep her windows down and her radio high and it would be fine.

  An hour later she’d polished off a grapefruit and some yogurt and had her bag in the car when her phone rang again. This time it was Stella at Spyglass.

  “Lucy! I know your necklace took longer than you would have liked, but I promised it would be worth it, and it is! It looks as good as new. I can send it out to you today, if you like.”

  Lucy leaned against her car. It was done? And today of all days. It felt eerily full circle. “I’m heading down that way. I’ll come in and pick it up.” She ended the call and plopped down behind the wheel where she slumped and rested her head on her hands. It was the weakness of relief mixed with an emotion she didn’t expect. Six weeks ago she’d been down in Seashell Beach without the faintest idea that everything was about to fall apart. And while she grew more sure each day that it had exploded only for her to rebuild something better, the reality of how hard this weekend might end up being for her sunk in.

  Anger roiled in her stomach and chest as she thought about the box she’d forced herself into to fit with Blake. It was anger at him, but anger at herself too.

  Prickles traveled up her chest and lodged on the inside of her eyelids, threatening tears. She sniffed and started the car, then pulled the key from the ignition again. She needed to go, to prove she was strong enough, but she wasn’t at all sure she was strong enough by herself. So she called the person she knew could make her stronger.

  “Carter? Are you busy for the next two days?”

  Her mom checked in at lunch time. “You doing okay? Is it strange being there?”

  Lucy glanced up at the redwood towering over her. She couldn’t even see its leaves. “Uh, didn’t actually get there yet.”

  “Traffic?” her mom said, sympathetic the way only an Angeleno can be.

  “No, actually. Um, Ally got sick so I invited Carter along for the ride, but he keeps tricking me into detours. We’re in a redwood forest right now, and I guess when we’re done here,” she pulled the phone down and called over to Carter, who was sniffing ferns, “What are we doing next?”

  “The Giant Dipper.”

  “We’re riding a roller coaster in Santa Cruz,” she reported to her mom.

  “Carter’s with you?” her mom said, sounding way too delighted.

  “Yep, he reported for friend duty this morning, but he’s turning this four-hour drive into about twice that, so I don’t know how much help he’s being,” Lucy said with a laugh when he turned to roll his eyes at her.

  “I won’t bother you anymore. Call me when you get there.” Her mom hung up before Lucy could finish saying good-bye.

  “What’s after the roller coaster?” She used her annoyed tone of voice, but the truth was, these ridiculous detours were the exact reason she’d called Carter. Work had straightened itself out beautifully, but she couldn’t remember feeling so bored. Having the wedding to look forward to had taken up a lot of her non-work time, and then Carter had stepped in to soak up that time when Blake dumped her. But once she’d scaled back time with Carter, she’d begun to realize she had phased out an awful lot of non-Blake interests in her life when he came along.

  Carter shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out when we’re done with the roller coaster.”

  “Uh-huh. Do you figure on us actually getting to the hotel at any point?”

  “Dinnerish.”

  “And when are we done with the redwoods?”

  “When enough people get here to calculate out how many of us it would take to hold hands and wrap around that tree.” He pointed at the hugest tree they’d seen so far, about a hundred yards off.

  “We’re literally going to be tree huggers? What if it takes forever for enough people to get here? That’s a huge tree.”

  “Then it takes forever.” He studied her face like it was the GPS display of her car. “You’re getting twitchy. Look, you’re doing me a favor if you do this. I can turn this into a word problem that’s going to be great in my app.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You just made that up.”

  “Yes. But it was true the moment I said it. I need to stay until we can do this big group hug.”

  It took an hour and a half before he pulled it off. A busload of little old English ladies thought it was a “delightfully daffy” thing to do and helped them out. When Lucy and Carter climbed back into the car, he wore a satisfied smile. The answer had been seventeen senior citizens plus the two of them. “I can turn this into so many problems with variables. What if it was all adults or all kids? They’ll have to find average arm spans by age and extrapolate. This is awesome.”

  Lucy shook her head and got them back to Highway 1. In Santa Cruz, Carter tried to chicken out of the roller coaster, but Lucy shamed him into riding it with his hands up the whole time.

  He insisted they stop in Monterey to visit the aquarium and narrated the action in the tanks as if they were eavesdropping on high school girls.

  He wanted to stop at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, but Lucy pleaded exhaustion. He did convince her to pull over and gawk at a beach covered in seals. “That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said, watching a baby nestle with its mother for a while. “Makes me miss my mom.”

  He grinned at her. “Yeah, I can kind of see that. She’s pretty protective of you.”

  “She hasn’t been bothering you, has she?” Lucy closed her eyes and turning her face up to catch the rays of the setting sun.

  “Not bothering me, no.”

  Something about the way he inflected the word “bothering” snapped her eyes open. “Wait, she still calls you?”

  “Yeah. Just to make sure you’re telling the truth about how things are going, I guess.”

  She straightened and turned to face him, her knees caught up to her chest. “And am I?”

  “I always tell her I don’t really know. I haven’t seen you much the last couple of weeks.”

  “Well, if she’s checking to see if I’m adapting to life just fine after my breakup, the answer is yes, I’m telling the truth.”

  “Good.” He flicked a glance at her. “Does it bother you that she calls me?”

  “No.” It surprised her. Her mom had never called Blake, but Lucy didn’t tell Carter that. If it made her mom stress less to get an independent report, and Carter didn’t mind the calls, Lucy was okay with it.

  He cleared his thro
at. “So really? You’re happy as is?”

  She glanced over at him. He stared out at the horizon like he was studying it for the secret of life, but it was empty. “Sure, I’m happy.”

  “Happy like this-is-what-you-want-the-rest-of-your-life-to-be-like happy?”

  “No,” she said, drawing the word out like it had acquired ten extras vowels. “But it doesn’t have to be that right now. I’m in transition. It’ll take time to get back to that kind of happiness.”

  “So you’ve had it before.”

  “Yeah.” She frowned. “No. I guess I’ve been happy in moments, but not ones where I want the rest of my life to be that and only that. Have you?”

  He held her gaze for several heartbeats before he looked back out at the horizon. “I’ve had moments I wanted to freeze forever. But I think maybe being really happy is when you get to the end of a day and you never want it to end, but you also can’t wait for it to be over because then you’re that much closer to the next day, and you know it’s going to be even better because that’s how your days are going— each one is even better than the last.”

  She thought about how that would feel. Had that been what it was like for him with his ex before they fell apart? A sad pang echoed through her before she blinked and shoved one of his arms hard enough to knock him flat on the sand.

  He sat up, laughing. “What was that for?”

  “I’m supposed to be on a road trip. We’re late getting to the hotel. What kind of Sherpa are you?”

  “Sherpas are in the Himalayas.”

  “Then what am I supposed to call you? My cabana boy? My bellhop?”

  He rose to his feet and held out a hand to pull her up, his easy smile in place. “You can call me your friend. Come on, Lucy-Lou. Let’s get you down to Sad Town.”

  He turned back toward the scenic overlook they’d hiked down from and kept her hand in his as he towed her along the sand.

  “I don’t think it’s Sad Town,” she said. “It’s more like What Might Have Been Town. And Put Things to Rest Town.” Carter said nothing but squeezed her hand. She decided not to tell him that the rocks on the beach weren’t big enough for her to need his help navigating them and left her hand where it was.