“Dad.”
“I’m just saying.”
“And I’m just saying ‘relax.’”
“It happens, Sarah.”
“Yeah, I know. But I’d never cheat on Boone. I wouldn’t. If I weren’t happy, I’d tell him. I’d leave first. Trust me on that.”
* * *
It was two thirty on a Sunday afternoon and Mama’s Café was empty save for one woman at a corner booth drinking coffee and eating a slice of cake while working on her computer.
Lauren wandered aimlessly around the restaurant, unusually agitated. It was slow. She was tired. And she was bored.
Why was she working every day?
And why, when she worked, was she putting in these excruciatingly long days? If she owned the café and was making a bigger percentage of the profit, great, but right now she was doing all this work on a salary, with just tiny bonuses every week for good revenue return.
It was time that either Mimi agreed to sell or Lauren scaled back her hours, her commitment, and her personal investment in the place.
It’d been a fantastic challenge when she started in September, taking over running a floundering café that had charm and potential but not much else.
Now the café was doing a steady business, and the mornings and early afternoons were both really strong. Dinners were still unpredictable and the late afternoon tended to be dead slow, but that wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Lauren had someone else to babysit the café.
She had no one to blame but herself. She was the one who’d drawn up the schedule. She was the one who’d wanted all the hours, but enough. She’d had enough. It was time to take a break. Time to mix things up. Maybe, just maybe, it was time to start living a little . . . movies, shopping, lunches with friends.
Not that she had friends here. But she did in Napa. She had Lisa. She missed Lisa, too. Missed working with her, shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen, talking and laughing as they made bread, or cakes, or whatever else they were baking.
Was she ready to return to Napa? To Summer Bakery & Café? A wave of nostalgia hit her, nostalgia for the way it’d once been.
The memory of working in Grandma’s big kitchen with Lisa teasing her, and she could smell the raw yeast of rising bread and the warm cinnamon wafting from the oven, and for a moment she thought it was time to go back, time—
But if she returned, it wasn’t going to be to Grandma’s kitchen. She’d return for that big, shiny marble restaurant downtown, the one with walls with nine-foot-tall windows and twenty-foot plaster ceilings . . . all beautiful, but not her.
And Grandma’s house wasn’t Lisa anymore. No, both sisters had moved on, moved elsewhere.
Lauren’s chest felt tight and tender as she checked on her customer with the coffee and computer. The customer put her hand over her cup, not wanting another refill, so Lauren removed the dessert plate, left the bill, and, after dispensing with the dirty dishes, glanced at her phone, knowing she needed to get back to her parents about Wednesday.
They wanted her to come home since it was the one-year anniversary of Blake’s death, but she was dreading it.
Her parents wanted to go to the cemetery. Place flowers on Blake’s grave. Share memories while they all stood there together. But cemeteries weren’t for her, and there were a hundred ways Lauren would rather remember her son than by laying flowers next to a gravestone.
The cake and coffee customer paid and left, and with the café empty, Lauren seized the moment to call home. Her dad was in front of the TV watching the San Francisco Giants game. “Is this a bad time?” she asked, hearing the TV noise in the background.
“The Giants are losing,” he said gruffly.
Her dad was a true San Francisco sports teams’ fan, which meant he actively disliked the Oakland Athletics and despised the Raiders and wouldn’t tolerate any disrespect to his teams, in his house. So no one had ever shown any. But then one day, many years ago, toddler Blake, just three, announced to his grandfather that he didn’t like San Francisco. No, he liked Oakland Athletics, and loved the Raiders.
Everyone had spluttered with muffled laughter.
Dad got red in the face.
Everyone was sure that in a few weeks Blake would forget all about his favorite teams. But he didn’t. He fully embraced all the Oakland teams in preschool and never turned his back on them, collecting all sports memorabilia he could for the A’s, the Raiders, and the Golden State Warriors.
And while Dad, who’d been the one to introduce Blake to sports, would huff and puff about disrespectful kids whenever Blake flaunted his black-and-white football jersey, or his favorite green-and-yellow baseball jersey, their sports rivalry and banter actually bonded them. Sports bonded them. And if Blake were alive today, he’d probably be sitting with his grandfather right now, watching the game and making fun of Dad’s beloved Giants.