The Waffle House on the Pier: A gorgeous feel-good romantic comedy

by Tilly Tennant

  Shaking herself, she searched for the claret-coloured phone book that Gammy had told her was in there. After a minute of rummaging through out-of-date directories, recipe books, unused stationery and yet more unopened packets of sweets, she found it and flicked to the page she needed. As she’d suspected, there was nothing more than a phone number in there, the name of a contact, and an address. She could do an internet search for the company and there ought to be an email contact on there; she only hoped that they’d modernised a bit more than Gammy and Gampy had and actually had a website.

  As she pulled out her phone to search, she could hear the muffled sounds of April in the kitchen. Half paying attention to her task and half listening to the clinks of spoons on china, she hoped and prayed that April’s lapses of concentration this morning were only a temporary thing. They were, she tried to tell herself, making her inner voice as confident and certain as she could, though that confidence was starting to feel like a desert mirage that might dissipate if Sadie allowed herself to remember for one second that she was still in the desert and that the oasis was still a long way off.

  After establishing that Timpson’s did have a website and emailing them, Sadie flicked through the rest of the address book to see if there was anyone else she might need to contact. She’d have to check with Gammy, of course, but there might be some names she’d recognise instantly. They’d need to contact anyone they used on a regular basis anyway, just to let them know that the waffle house was now open again and to check what their customer status was in light of its recent period of closure. Was their credit still good? Could they still get the same service and discounts they’d enjoyed in the past? Had stocks or supply chains altered in any way that might affect what the waffle house was able to buy?

  There were a few names she recognised, but many she didn’t, so she decided to take the book through to the dining room. They had a little time, so it might be a good plan to sit with Gammy and go through it with her.

  April was already sitting at a table when Sadie went back into the dining room. The smell of strong, bitter coffee was in the air, just the thing to wake Sadie up. But as she approached the table to sit with her grandma, she felt that cold dread settle in her stomach again. On the table in front of a smiling April sat three mugs.

  ‘Gammy… who’s the other one for?’

  ‘Why, you know who it’s for, silly…’

  But then April paused, her smile dying, suddenly looking confused and distressed. ‘Oh… I guess I made too many, didn’t I?’

  Sadie swallowed the tears that would have fallen if she’d been alone and tried to look calm and unconcerned. ‘It’s OK. Habit, I expect. And I’m gasping for a drink anyway so I reckon I could drink two cups no problem.’

  ‘Oh, that’s alright then,’ April said, sounding far from convinced but happy to let it go at that.

  Sadie sat at the table and put the address book down to take a sip of her coffee, all the while her eyes never leaving her grandmother.

  ‘What’s the book for?’ April asked.

  ‘I thought we could go through it. I need to know who these people are so I thought you could give me a bit of background about what they do for us. Then I thought we might contact the ones we use the most or we might need soonest to let them know we’ve reopened. Is that OK?’

  ‘Sure, darlin’.’ April nodded and reached for her mug. Neither of them looked at the spare, as if it was dangerous and they’d turn to salt if they did. Sadie beat down the misgivings that were beginning to scare her. What was going on? Had Gammy made that other drink thinking Gampy was close? Or had she really made one for him simply out of habit?

  Whatever the reason, the fact that she had made it did nothing to settle Sadie’s nerves. She’d pushed to reopen the waffle house against the advice of everyone else in her family. Had they known something like this would happen? Had they known something about Gammy’s state of mind that they hadn’t seen fit to share with Sadie? They’d often treated her as the baby of the family and she couldn’t argue with that, because she was, but she couldn’t believe they’d keep something this important from her, not given the steps she’d taken to be here today. And so she quickly dismissed the notion.

  Which left what explanation? Was it simply that they’d all come to the conclusion that Gammy had reached a natural crossroads in her life with the death of Gampy, a sign that it was time to start winding down? Sadie had to admit that the conversations that had taken place were along those lines, but she hadn’t been listening. The truth was, she hadn’t wanted to listen. Who were they opening this place up for? Was it really for Gammy, or was it for Sadie, who already felt as if she’d lost so much that was precious to her, so much that had given her life meaning and context, that she didn’t want to lose the waffle house too?

  Or maybe she’d simply been looking for a convenient escape route for the real big mistake she’d made – her teacher training. Because now that she looked at it from the outside, she realised that she’d never really been suited to that profession. She’d said as much when she’d been into the office only a couple of days before to tell her mentor that she was leaving the course, and though she’d felt like an abject failure, she couldn’t deny that she also felt a sense of relief that she’d never again have to step into a classroom.

  So where did that leave Sadie now? Could she still make this work, regardless of the obstacles that she could now see strewn along the path? What if her family were right? What if she’d messed up again?

  * * *

  It was ten o’clock by the time they were ready to open up, but Sadie wasn’t too worried that they’d missed a good chunk of the breakfast rush. They’d been closed for over a month and they hadn’t exactly announced their reopening – not least because they hadn’t been certain themselves if it was actually going to happen. Besides, Sadie, for one, would be glad of a slow start. She was nervous enough, and a delay of the big moment wasn’t entirely unwelcome. In fact, if her grandmother had suddenly announced that she wanted nothing more to do with Sea Salt Bay Waffle House and wanted to close it down for good immediately then Sadie thought she might be just a little relieved to hear it and might not offer all that much in the way of argument. It was one thing to help her grandma and granddad out occasionally on a Saturday afternoon, or to hear them talk about the business over dinner, but another thing entirely to suddenly find yourself running the place. Because, despite Gammy’s presence, Sadie was beginning to realise that running the place was exactly what she’d end up doing.

  Despite all the doubts and nerves, they did open the doors. The day started quietly, the only real activity neighbouring traders or local residents coming in to express surprise and pleasure that the waffle house was open again and sorrow for Kenneth’s passing. Sadie found some of those visits hard and she could only imagine how much harder April found them. She watched each conversation closely for a reaction which would have meant little to anyone else but which would set alarm bells off for her. But Gammy only put on a brave smile and thanked them for their kind thoughts and words of condolence – lovely, warm and dignified, as she’d always been, the woman Sadie had always been proud to call grandmother even when she’d been unable to say so. They didn’t sell much apart from the odd hot drink and some crepes to take out for a hungry family with northern accents.

  By midday things had started to pick up as day trippers and holidaymakers turned their thoughts to lunch. It wasn’t exactly a return to the mad rushes of the waffle house’s heyday but it was busier than Sadie would have liked for her first day as a significantly important member of staff. As a teenager, when things got busy, Gammy or Gampy would step in and take the heat off her so she never felt the stress of a full dining room. But that wasn’t going to happen today. If they were overwhelmed now, Sadie would have to step in to take the heat off April, just as she would once have done for her granddaughter.

  The difference was, Sadie felt as if she didn’t have the first clue what she was
doing. Back then she’d ably assisted (so she’d thought) but now she was in charge, whether she liked it or not and whether she knew how to do that or not. April was on hand with all her years of knowledge and experience, of course, but while she could tell Sadie how this thing switched on, or how long that dish took to cook, or the codes for the till, or a million other little things, it was clear that she wasn’t a hundred per cent present. Often Sadie found her slack-jawed and absent in the kitchen as she went through with a new order, or to find out whether a previous one was ready, and it was abundantly clear that all the real drive and impetus to keep things ticking over would have to come from her. And seeing how her grandmother was operating now, she had to wonder for the first time whether this had been the case for longer than anyone had realised. Had this been happening while Gampy had been alive? Had he been the one keeping things running smoothly? Had he been keeping Gammy on task, allowing her to function, making sure she was safe? Had he been doing all this because he was afraid to share that she might no longer be the vital, fiery, turbo-charged woman she’d once been?

  Grief was a funny thing, and there was no doubt that April had been affected deeply by hers. In fact, it was hard to deny that she was still grieving, and probably would be for many months to come. But there seemed to be more than that at play – at least Sadie thought so. She was seventy-eight after all, so she could be forgiven for slowing down a little. Maybe she’d been slowing down for a while now but nobody had noticed. Perhaps they hadn’t wanted to notice, or perhaps Gampy had hidden it well. Now that it was there in plain view, impossible to ignore, acceptance of that fact was more problematic, especially where April herself was concerned. Sadie was beginning to see that even though she’d already felt out of her depth simply opening the doors to customers today, things might be about to get a whole lot worse.

  * * *

  It was around twelve thirty. Sadie was chatting to a family with four young children about her brother’s dive school while they waited for their banana and hazelnut chocolate waffles and strawberry and cream waffles. They’d been asking for recommendations for fun things to do in the area – they didn’t want the usual sitting around on the beach or strolling the pier suggestions (though they had no objections to those things, they said they wanted a little more to make the holiday more memorable). And while they’d asked specifically for ideas a little out of the ordinary, the parents seemed doubtful about the prospect of diving, or of snorkelling. Sadie explained that Ewan always took children out to a little cove where the water was never above three feet deep, where it was clear and warm and there were no currents, a place that was teeming with underwater life and where, if you really wanted to believe you were diving in the Mediterranean, it wouldn’t take all that much effort. The longer she spoke about it, the more excited the older children (who looked to be perhaps ten and eight or thereabouts) got, while the younger two (maybe around five or six, who looked like a twin boy and girl to Sadie’s untrained eye) simply got swept up in their older siblings’ enthusiasm.

  When she’d first taken the order, Sadie had worried that it was quite a big one and a lot for Gammy to remember – there were six of them after all – but she reasoned that it was nothing Gammy hadn’t done before, and in all honesty, if this business was going to continue trading then she was going to have to cope with this and much bigger orders. Sometimes, you just had to throw someone in and force them to swim, and April wouldn’t have appreciated Sadie’s doubts about her abilities, even if Sadie had been able or willing to articulate them.

  But then one of the older boys at the table wrinkled his nose. He looked at his mother.

  ‘Can you smell something?’

  The mother looked at Sadie, and Sadie could see that she’d quickly come to the same conclusion as she had.

  ‘Oh!’ Sadie exclaimed without meaning to. Immediately she smoothed the look of panic from her face. ‘Please excuse me, I need to…’

  Without finishing her sentence she hurried to the kitchen to see her grandmother staring at the waffle iron as smoke poured out of it.

  ‘Gammy!’ Sadie cried, rushing to unlock the contraption. Inside was a black mess that had once been pristine batter, and then briefly transformed into a perfect waffle, before it had continued on its journey to complete incineration. It was now something that would even offend the bin.

  ‘Oh…’ April said, looking blankly at Sadie. ‘That’s been in too long. The setting must have been real high. I wonder how that happened…’

  ‘No idea,’ Sadie replied briskly, trying to scrape out the mess as quickly as she could and burning her hand in the process. She cried out, the pain all the worse for the fact that it was red-hot sugar sticking to her skin, but there was no time to worry about it now. She had to get this stinking mess out of the restaurant and get some windows open so the smell wouldn’t infect the entire building and put everyone off their food. And she had to get a replacement order on the go for the customers who were waiting. The burnt food wasn’t coming off the waffle iron though, and it was going to take time to clean – more time than she had. ‘Is there another…?’

  Sadie’s gaze fell on an unused iron on a nearby counter top. She rushed over to get it and turned it on before going to fetch an already prepared jug of batter.

  ‘You’d better throw that mess away,’ April said, looking at the burnt offering in the other iron. ‘We can’t serve that.’

  ‘I’m going to. Gammy… do you think you’ll be OK to do some fresh ones? Only I really need to be at the counter…’

  ‘Of course!’ her grandmother said, looking a little bemused and a little irritated too. ‘Why else do you think I’m standing here? I don’t know why you came back here interfering anyway.’

  Sadie offered a tight smile. ‘Thanks, Gammy. I’ll get back to the dining room, then. Call me if you need me.’

  ‘I won’t,’ April called after her as Sadie left her to it. Sadie’s stomach dropped and her hand throbbed where she’d burnt it, but she took a deep breath and started to make her way to the table she’d just left to apologise that their food was going to be delayed. She’d have to give it five minutes, she decided, and then she’d sneak back into the kitchen on pretence of needing something from there to check if everything was under control.

  ‘I’m so sorry…’ Sadie began as she got back to the family. ‘Your order will be out just as soon as we can get it remade.’

  The father smiled and waved away the apology and none of them seemed particularly concerned or upset that they would have to wait for their food. They were obviously nice people, and Sadie felt she and April had got off lightly on this occasion. But next time they might not be so lucky.

  Chapter Nine

  April and Kenneth had always closed up at 4 p.m. They’d never seen the point in staying open later; they’d always felt it was around the time of day that most people turned their thoughts to the evening meal and didn’t want to fill up on sugary snacks. Waffles and pancakes, they’d said, were a sweet treat for the young and young at heart and, as such, reserved for the time of day when youngsters were out and about. There was a logic in this that was hard to argue with, but it also left the waffle house closed for a large chunk of every day. Sadie had always felt sure that there would be trade to be had in the evenings – though it had never been her place to say so.

  Certainly, on this, April’s first day back at work, Sadie had no desire to address it, and even if she’d wanted to she was too tired. Her grandma didn’t look much better and so Sadie was grateful to switch the sign on the door from open to closed and lock up for the night. Not only was she tired, but Sadie had been subjected to more than her fair share of worries and stresses during the day, from the incidents with Gammy that ranged from not knowing what day it was (frequently), to making cups of coffee for a man who’d never drink them, to actually almost setting fire to the restaurant, and a million other little things in between. And those were on top of the stress of trying to do a job that
she’d thought she’d known how to do but, once there, realised that she hadn’t known all that much about at all. She’d heard of learning on the job, the old saying that there was no substitute for experience, but the people who said that had never had to learn at a million miles an hour with a shop full of hungry people and an unpredictable situation in the kitchen.

  Sadie had to believe that things were going to get better than this, otherwise, why was she here? She could easily turn to Gammy now and tell her this wasn’t going to work out, that she couldn’t do it, and she could make up more than enough compelling reasons why. But she didn’t want to, and so that had to mean something. And, despite the exhaustion clear on Gammy’s face, despite all the narrow misses and lapses throughout the day, her grandmother had looked happier and more purposeful than Sadie had seen her for a long time. If nothing else positive came from this day there was that.

  Sadie could drive, but Sea Salt Bay was so small that she tended to walk when she could and they’d both walked to work that morning. It wasn’t exactly a long trek home, but there were steep roads and Sadie really didn’t fancy it now that they’d done a full and surprisingly hectic day at the waffle house. Gammy certainly didn’t look up to it and so Sadie suggested that they go down to the harbour to see if Ewan or Kat were free to run them home. Sadie’s brother and his wife carried so much equipment everywhere and their home was a little further out than Sadie’s so they always went to work in their station wagon. It was a safe bet that they’d have it parked up now in the space outside their little harbour headquarters.