“Oh, you mean we’re going to ride together? Me and you? In the same car?”
“Well, it makes sense, don’t you think? There’s no reason for us to drive separate vehicles to the same destination. Besides, I still have to come back to get my flowers. We certainly wouldn’t want them in the car in this late-August Southern heat wilting . . . drooping . . . dying . . . while we sit in an air-conditioned place . . . eating away.”
“Yes . . . your flowers. You’re right. They’ll definitely fare better if we leave them here until you’re ready to take them home or back to work with you.”
“Actually, I’m off work now. Totally free. All yours, for the rest of the afternoon in fact.”
That’s when I should have given him his vase of flowers and politely escorted him right out of the front door.
I suppose that’s why people say hindsight is twenty-twenty.
Chapter 4
For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.
—Romans 7:14
It was near the end of August, after most of the teens (who would have likely packed the place) had returned to school following their summer vacation when Ethan and I unceremoniously strolled into Daisy Queen’s Deli. I concluded that was why the place was so empty, especially during this time of day. I loved Daisy Queen’s Deli, whose style was much like the popular deli franchises of the day without patrons having to go through a line to place their orders. The other big difference was Daisy Queen’s Deli’s bread wasn’t as thick as those franchises, making me feel better about eating a sandwich from there, knowing that I wasn’t consuming a bucketload of carbs.
Besides, Daisy and Queen were entrepreneurs much like me. Queen and her mother, Daisy, started their business some ten years earlier, originally serving their customers in what most referred to as “a hole in the wall.” It was a really tiny place. But Daisy had created a special sauce for her sandwiches and that secret sauce created its own buzz, quickly putting that hole in the wall on the map. Then there was that television show that traveled to towns in search of the best eating places. They’d heard about Daisy Queen’s Deli, came and featured it on the show, and the rest—as people like to say—is history. Daisy Queen’s Deli’s business boomed so much after that segment aired that Daisy and her mother had no other choice but to expand to a bigger place.
Of course like many businesses around that time, as soon as they moved to another area that seemed to be booming, the economic bust came roaring in like a lion. Businesses began closing their doors, slowly at first, like prey singularly and inconspicuously being picked off so you didn’t notice how much trouble many of the companies were in. There would be one empty space, then another, and before you knew it, an entire row of previously occupied buildings would be vacant with the exception of possibly one lone store trying desperately to hang in there. But people who shop don’t like vacant areas. They prefer shopping where some life still appears.
The owners of the vacant buildings tried doing various things to keep the strip and inside malls going until things picked back up again. Things like giving one year of free rent to any business that either chose to stay or chose to open a business there.
That’s how I was able to begin my lifelong dream of opening my own floral shop. It’s hard to start a business, but even more so when you’re black. It’s difficult to obtain the needed financing. And most of our ancestors didn’t have stashes of cash to be passed down to help sustain the next generations. So black people get financially creative. Just ask folks like Spike Lee and Robert Townsend. It’s not as easy as folks think to secure a business loan (small or otherwise).
Noting that there wasn’t anyone visibly working in the deli at the time, Ethan and I chose a table close to the window. I absolutely adore sunlight; I always have.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Ethan said as we sat there in silence at first.
I smiled. “A penny? A penny? Is that all my thoughts are going for these days? You do know things have gone up considerably, don’t you?”
He released a small chuckle. “Oh, believe me: I know how much things have gone up. All right. What’s the going rate for thoughts these days?”
I waved him off. “I’m just playing with you.” How silly was that! I can’t believe I even formed my mouth to say that.
He leaned in a little. I still couldn’t get over how handsome he continued to be at the age of forty-five. His skin was smooth, but a little more filled out than in his teen years. A touch of gray, just enough to appear strategically placed in one small area, gave him an air of distinction. I never thought I’d think gray could be so sexy, but it was. I wanted to touch it. Thank goodness I resisted the temptation.
“Whatever is on your mind must be pretty heavy,” he said with a lift to his voice.
“What?” I flashed him a “cat that ate the canary” smile, hoping to throw him off.
“I just asked you what you’re thinking and you’re just sitting there with a big beautiful smile on your face.”
“I was thinking . . . that we need to order.” I looked around for someone to come and take our order. Actually, I was just trying to break away from Ethan’s engaging eyes. His eyes were so hypnotizing, the last thing I needed was to get caught up in them. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
Ethan sat back against his chair. “Yeah, that’s right. You do have to get back.”
A young woman came in from the back room. I raised my hand and beckoned to her. She threw her hand up to let me know she would be over to us shortly.
“I’m sorry,” the young woman, who looked to be in her late teens or early twenties, said when she reached our table. “But we don’t take orders at the tables anymore. You have to go through the line now.” She gestured toward the area resembling other franchises’ setup. I hadn’t paid it much attention when we came in.
“You don’t? We do?” I said. “When did all of this happen?”
“No, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. Things changed about a month ago. You have to go through the line now and tell me what you want as I make your sandwich.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. Ethan quickly got up to assist me as I stood. That’s when it hit me how long it had been since I’d been out to eat with a man. And with him helping me up like that, just how long it had been since I’d been around a gentleman.
When it came to eating out (especially with my husband), that generally translated into one of us bringing food in. And as far as opening a door, helping me when I sat down, helping me up, that was something I read about in fairy tales or sweet romance novels; something that you happened to see when you saw other people out who were head-over-heels in love. My husband, Zeke, and I didn’t even walk side by side when we were together. In fact, if you didn’t know any better and you happened to see the two of us, you’d declare there was some rule that mandated me to walk so many paces behind him.
Of course, that wasn’t the case. Almost a foot taller than me, my husband’s stride just happened to be longer than mine. He walks slowly but can cover a lot more ground than I do with less of an effort. It looks like I’m trotting to keep up with him. And for whatever reason, he won’t make an effort to ensure we’re next to each other when we’re together. Even when he’s not taking long strides, he stays far enough away from being next to me that it would be hard for anyone to say we’re a couple.
“So why did y’all change this?” I asked the young woman who was now taking our orders at the glass-covered counter.
“You know how it is.” Her employee pin read FRANCESCA. “People are always trying to come up with ways to save money. This way, you don’t have to have as many people working. Instead of someone taking your order, filling it, and bringing it out to you, you cut out all of those middle people.”
“Are Daisy and Queen still running things?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Neither of them is here right now though. Queen is my mama and Daisy is my grandmama. You know them?”
&nb
sp; “I’ve met them both before.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Francesca said. She finished our order, placed our plain white tissue–wrapped sandwiches on a brown tray, handed us each a large cup to get our own drinks from the soda dispensing machine, then rang us up.
Ethan and I both got sweet tea. Daisy Queen’s Deli’s tea is the best around. In fact, one of the grocery chains reportedly tried getting her to package her tea to sell exclusively in their stores. I would definitely buy a gallon of Daisy Queen’s tea if it was available like that.
Ethan said grace for us. It was really nice having a man even mention grace before eating, let alone to take the lead in doing it. My husband certainly didn’t do that. And on the rare occasions when we had company and I asked him to, he merely looked at me and said, “You can do it.” So generally I’d been the one who prayed.
“This is so good!” Ethan said, bringing me back to the food before us. “Wow! I mean really good.” He bit into his turkey sandwich again before he’d finished the previous bite.
“I told you they have great food here.” I bit into my tuna melt sandwich.
“Indeed you did. It’s just: not everyone’s taste is the same. How was I to know you would be so incredibly right?” He spoke with food still in his mouth.
“See, you should stop underestimating me.”
“You would think I would have learned after all of these years.” He grinned.
I was about to take another bite. I stopped and held my sandwich in midair. I knew what he was hinting about. When we were teens, he thought because he was from the city and I was from the country that I was some country girl who didn’t know anything. He got burned more than a few times from that assumption.
“Are you thinking about the first time I came to see you?” he asked, scrunching down slightly as though he was trying to read my thoughts.
I smiled. “Not exactly,” I said. Although that first time was in the bundle of times he’d grossly underestimated me. “But since you brought it up, that’s yet a perfect example of another time you should have listened to and believed me.”
“Yeah.” He snickered. “I thought for sure I was going to get with you that day, if you know what I mean. But you shut a homeboy down quick! Just like a virus in a computer shuts down the whole operating system, you shut me down.”
I laughed. “What do you know about computers and operating software?”
He primped his mouth, then simultaneously smoothed down each side of his perfectly trimmed mustache with his thumb and index finger. “Okay, you got me. I confess: I know nothing about computers, except that they’re beginning to be heavily implemented at the plant where I work.”
“And where exactly do you work? What do you do? Besides the well-publicized work we all have heard that you do.”
“I work at a place called A&D. I’ve been there since I graduated from high school. Well, actually, I graduated high school, attended our local junior college here for one semester, decided that I really needed to make money as opposed to funneling it out. So I put in an application at the A&D plant and I’ve been there ever since, a little over twenty-two years now.” He took a sip of his tea. “I’m like a supervisor, only not in management. I’m also a union steward. Upper management wants to promote me into management, but some of the folks in management are treated horribly. They don’t get paid overtime most of the time because they are salaried. And should they end up getting fired, many times they’re just gone without any recourse, other than filing a lawsuit. At least if one of us is unjustly fired, we have the union to back us up. So . . . what were you doing prior to owning your own business?” He bit into his sandwich and chewed as he focused a laser-beam gaze on me.
“I worked for the Social Security Administration. I was with them for almost twenty years. Then an opportunity came along that allowed me the chance to follow my dreams. I left my job, started my floral shop, and haven’t looked back, too much, anyway.” I pretended to laugh.
He nodded. “So, did you take an early retirement or something?”
“Nope. Just left. No retirement, no nothing. Two years ago, I realized I was living for everyone except me. I married pretty early—”
“Yeah, I know. Not exactly my favorite memory.”
I smiled. “What?”
“When you got married.” He placed both arms up on the table and leaned in toward me. “I asked you not to get married. I asked you not to marry him.”
I sat back against my padded seat. “You asked me not to marry him while you were still with your girlfriend. Yeah, that’s right. You know: the girlfriend you ended up marrying yourself. The girlfriend you’ve been with since the first day I met you.”
“What else did you expect for me to do after you up and married . . . what’s his name again?”
“His name is Zeke.”
He smiled. “Good old Zeke. Lucky man. I hope he knows how blessed he is to have snagged you.”
“Apparently you didn’t think I was such a prize. You had a chance . . .” I stopped. “You know what? It really doesn’t matter. You married what’s her face and I married Zeke.”
He started laughing. “What’s her face? That’s cute.”
“I don’t know her name. I just know you must have loved her a lot. A lot.”
“Don’t you even go there. If you hadn’t gotten married to what’s his name, you and I probably would be together today.”
“Don’t even try it,” I said. “We both know that you really didn’t want to be with me.”
“Why do you keep saying that? I told you the last time you said it that it wasn’t true.”
“You need to stop,” I said.
“Stop what? I asked you not to marry him, did I not?” Ethan leaned in closer. “Did I not ask you to not marry him? Tell the truth.”
“You asked me a few days before my wedding date.”
“And you married him anyway.” He flopped back against his seat.
I leaned in. “I married him anyway because I figured that you didn’t want me enough to be with me totally, but you also didn’t want me to have anyone of my own. Just how long did you think I was supposed to wait on you?”
“See,” he said. “There you go again. If you hadn’t gotten married, you and I would have married. I honestly and truly believe that.”
I let out a loud sigh and sat back against the seat.
“What’s the sigh for?”
“It’s for you saying stuff like this now. I really loved you. But I didn’t want to be talking to someone else’s guy. I wanted my own. If you wanted me, you should have chosen me. Instead, you wanted both of us.”
He laughed. “I don’t know why you keep saying stuff like that. I told you, I couldn’t break up with her. She hadn’t done anything for me to justify breaking up with her.”
“So what was I supposed to be? Your backup, ‘just in case’? Someone there ready and waiting when you and she did finally call it quits?” I shook my head. “Look, it doesn’t matter now. You stayed with her, and I ended up marrying someone else. It’s done now.”
He leaned in, set both elbows on the table, and propped his chin on his fists as he looked at me for a few seconds. He then sat back straight. “I guess we messed up,” he said. “You and I would be together right now if you hadn’t married good old Zeke.”
“Well, you know what? I didn’t want to be number two with you when I could be number one with someone else.”
“Will you stop saying that,” he said. “You were not number two. You know how I felt about you.”
“I know that I need to finish eating so I can get back to the shop. That much, I do know.”
He nodded, then took the last bite of his sandwich.
Chapter 5
For I would that ye knew what great conflict I have for you, and for them at Laodicea, and for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh.
—Colossians 2:1
Ethan jumped out of the car to open the door for me when we arrive
d back at my shop. I started to open the door before he could get there, but I didn’t want him to think I was pouting or retaliating for the discussion we’d had while eating.
As far as I was concerned, it was a settled matter. It was settled when I realized he was likely never going to stop going with the girl who was his girlfriend, long before I came on the scene. Not counting when I learned he’d also tried talking to another girl around the same time he was trying to talk to me. Admittedly, the other girl he was trying to talk to didn’t bother me as much as his already having a steady girlfriend. It just wasn’t my style to be with someone who had someone already. And fighting over a man was not something I ever cared about doing either. Not ever.
And that included my dear husband Zeke.
Ethan still needed to pick up the flowers he’d ordered, so he came along with me. I unlocked the front door to the shop and turned the alarm off. I then turned the notice on the door to indicate I was back and open for business.
“Let me get your flowers,” I said, then promptly went to the back room to retrieve them.
I came back with the flowers, pleased with how this arrangement had turned out, and set the vase down on the counter before him.
“Nice,” he said. “Very nice.”
“Thank you. I think so. But then, what else would you expect me to say.” I flashed him a satisfied smile.
“May I have a card for it?”
“Sure,” I said. “You didn’t tell me what to put on one, so I didn’t fix one. I’ll be glad to prepare the card for you.”
“Oh, I got it. All I need is a blank card so I can write what I want.”
I pulled out the various cards for him to choose the design he wanted.
“Butterflies,” he said as he picked up one of my two favorites. “Perfect.” He purred the word. “So . . . how much is my damage?” he asked, referring to what he owed for the flowers. I gave him his bill. He pulled out a one-hundred-dollar bill and handed it to me. He laughed a little as I held it a few seconds. “Oh, and you can check to make sure it’s not counterfeit. I won’t be offended.”
Forever Soul Ties Page 2
