****
“Do you think I’m being silly, wondering if this raises a red flag?” Carley asked Aunt Helen and Sherry over finger sandwiches, quiche rounds, and raw vegetables left over from last night’s middle school faculty planning meeting.
“I wouldn’t say silly, Carley,” Sherry said, swirling a celery stick through ranch dressing. “But maybe you blew it out of proportion. It’s actually kind of funny.”
“He didn’t threaten either of you?” Aunt Helen asked.
Carley shook her head.
“And he confessed to doing it on purpose?”
“He was very repentant.”
“You have to understand men, Carley,” Sherry said. “No matter how old they get, they never completely leave the school yard. Oh, they may manage to squelch that part of themselves for years, even hide it under a coat and tie, but it’s still there.”
“Mom?” came from the den. A second later, Patrick stood in the doorway in T-shirt and shorts. “Where did Dad put that fake vomit he bought in Florida? I want to bring it to basketball camp.”
“Excuse me,” Sherry said, and left the kitchen.
Aunt Helen smiled and passed the tray. Carley smiled back and scooped up a quiche and two finger sandwiches.
“Courtship was much less complicated when I was young,” her aunt said. “All we cared about was if the fellow had good manners and a job.”
“What about looks?”
She smiled again. “If he was cute, that was a bonus. But looking back, we were too naïve. Romance, hearts, and flowers—that’s what was important. We didn’t give a thought to the friendship part—and that’s where you learn a person’s character.”
That made perfect sense, Carley thought. “I turned down his offer of a movie, though I wasn’t exactly sure why I was doing it. We should work on just being friends for now. There’s no hurry.”
“No hurry at all.”
“I wonder if I should have agreed to meet him for lunch tomorrow.”
“That’s something friends do.” She met Carley’s eyes, opened her mouth, and closed it.
“What is it?”
“Just that I hope Steve Underwood tries again. He’s a good Christian man, by all accounts, and…well…”
“You’re hoping he’ll lead me back into the fold.”
Aunt Helen sighed. “I don’t pressure you because that’s what you’ve asked. But my Christianity is part of who I am. It comes out in my conversations and interactions with other people all the time. I can’t squelch who I am just so you’ll be comfortable.”
They stared across the table at each other, Aunt Helen’s hazel eyes sad and yet firm.
She’s right, Carley realized. She had no right to walk around with a chip on her shoulder, especially among family who had accepted her without demanding that she change.
She reached across for Aunt Helen’s soft hand, and held it in her own. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s good to clear the air sometimes,” Aunt Helen said, squeezing back.
“Don’t stop praying for me, okay?”
She smiled. “As if I would.”
Chapter 21
The waitress, with Tiffany on her badge, was very pretty in spite of two inches of dark roots in her long blonde hair. Setting rolled napkins and glasses of ice water on the table under a battered washboard and aged poster of The Grand Ole Opry, she asked, “Who’s minding the jail today?”
Dale smiled up at her. “It’s Garland’s turn.”
“Oh well, his loss is our gain,” she said meaningfully, then took their drink orders and left.
In spite of her decision to concentrate on friendship with Dale, Carley felt a disturbing twinge of jealousy. So, that’s how he felt when Steve came over.
Only Steve had not batted adoring gray eyes, as Tiffany had.
“We rotate Sundays,” Dale was saying.
“Hmm?”
“Garland, Marti, and me.”
Carley nodded. “Garland was with a woman that time I saw you in Corner Diner….”
“Amy. She’s a sweetheart. She teaches their two daughters at home, so it’s rare that she gets to join him for lunch. Marti and I tell him he married above himself.”
“You don’t really.”
“Garland agrees. He’s a good sport.” Dale sobered. “In fact, he’s solid gold. He had twelve years on the force when I came here, but never once has he shown any resentment. I don’t know if I would have been so gracious if the roles were reversed.”
“I understand,” Carley said. “But the Board of Aldermen offered you the position. They must have had their reasons for passing him by.”
“Well, maybe,” he conceded.
Tiffany brought two glasses of tea and took their orders. “Ya’ll go ahead and help yourselves to the salad bar,” she said to Dale.
But as soon as the waitress walked away, Carley rested her hand on his sleeve. “Wait, Dale. Are you questioning your ability? Because everyone says what a good job you’re doing.”
His blue eyes narrowed playfully. “Who?”
“I can’t name names on the spot,” Carley said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay…Loretta Malone. She spoke very highly of you my first day here.”
“So that explains it,” he said, nodding.
“What?”
“Ever since you moved back from California, she’s been singing your praises to me.”
“Now, why am I not surprised?” Carley said.
He grinned. “I’ll have to send her some flowers and a thank-you note.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Well then, let’s get our salads before the Baptists get here.” He got to his feet and came around to pull out her chair.
At the salad bar, Carley piled everything but green olives and red onions on her lettuce, spooning honey dijon dressing over the mix. Dale passed up the cheese, croutons, bacon bits and chopped eggs, and poured on oil and vinegar from separate cruets. Tables were beginning to fill. Carley recognized some of Aunt Helen and Uncle Rory’s church friends from the birthday party, but she already knew that none of her family planned to come here today.
“Do you mind if I ask why you don’t go to church?” Dale said, unfolding his napkin. “You’re not an atheist, are you?”
“Not at all.” Carley cut a tomato wedge into more manageable pieces. “But church is something I keep putting off—a holdover from childhood. I guess I’m afraid I’ll ultimately be disappointed again. What about you? Why are you agnostic?”
Sprinkling salt onto his salad, he said, “My family just wasn’t religious. Dad worked weekends, so Mom usually took us to visit my grandparents in Perry.”
He raised his eyes to her face as if considering whether to say more.
“What?” Carley asked eventually.
“While I’m not arrogant enough to say God doesn’t exist, I sort of hope that’s the case. Have you ever felt that way?”
“Um…I don’t think so. Why would you not want him to exist?”
“Oh, different reasons.” Brows denting, he gave her a thoughtful look. “How did we get on that track?”
She speared a cucumber slice. “I believe you led us there.”
“Then, let’s go somewhere else. Tell me, do you miss California?”
“Some things about it.”
“Like what?”
“Well, the climate. Buying fresh dates at the supermarket. Chinese restaurants on every corner. Symphonies and theatre.” She thought for another second. “And rocks.”
“We have rocks.”
“Gravel, maybe. Not big enough to climb on.”
He ceased chewing. “Are you, maybe, regretting your decision to move here?”
The worry in his expression made her smile. “Not at all. Even after having to pay the Realtor fee on my own property.”
“Ouch.”
“Well, you did too, didn’t you?”
The blue eyes narrowed playfully. “Has Kay Chap
man been bad-mouthing me?”
Carley shook her head. “She never mentioned your name. Just warned me about the penalty fee and mentioned someone else paying one. Since you took your land off the market, I just assumed…”
“Well, you assumed right. So, double ouch.” He looked into her eyes and smiled. “And I don’t regret deciding to stay either.”
****
On Tuesday morning the attic fan pulled in the fragrance of hay from fields skirting the town. Mrs. Templeton, feeding her birds and squirrels, said that farmers were probably cutting and bailing before tomorrow’s predicted rain.
Uncle Rory brought his rechargeable drill and attached two hooks to the inside of the café picture window. At three o’clock, an electrician Stanley Malone had recommended installed a sound system and ceiling speakers.
Wednesday’s gray clouds made 10:00 in the morning seem more like 7:00 in the evening. Carley held the door for Matt Lockwood of Green Thumb Nursery as he made six trips carrying in a Boston fern, peace lily, two dieffenbachia, two Ficus benjamina, and two hanging baskets of English ivy for the window.
After his truck drove away, she loaded Twenty Years of Beautiful Music by 101 Strings into the sound system and moved plants about, trying to determine the best locations. She was singing to the instrumental track—“Don’t cry for me, Ar-gen-tin-a”—when someone tapped on the window. It was Brooke, standing beside her bicycle. A lumpy, pillowcase-wrapped bundle bulged in the basket, secured with four strands of cord.
“Looks good!” she mouthed, pointing up to an ivy basket.
Carley went to the door and stuck her head out. “Thanks, Brooke. But you’d better get home. It’s going to rain soon. Or how about if I drive you?”
“No thanks. I’ll make it.”
“But can you manage all that laundry?”
Brooke patted the bundle. “They stay put pretty good when they’re wet. Our washin’ machine’s broken. But the dryer still works.”
Fortunately, the clouds held on to their rain for a couple of hours more.
“Why doesn’t her father ever drive her anywhere?” she asked Dale when he stopped by at noon, hinting for a glass of iced tea to go with his peanut butter sandwich.
“Because he knows I’ll give him a sobriety test if he so much as swerves an inch. He’s had four drunk-driving convictions and would be in prison if Judge McGray wasn’t such a wrist slapper. He chewed, swallowed. “Did you know some people have a phobia about peanut butter sticking to the roofs of their mouths? It even has a name…arachibutyrophobia.”
“Isn’t that the fear of spiders?”
“No. You’re thinking about arachnophobia.” When she gave him a bemused look, he shrugged. “Thanks to the Internet, I’m a treasure trove of useless trivia. But what I can’t understand is, why Mildred Tanner doesn’t drive her.”
“She watches soaps all the time, according to Brooke.”
“That doesn’t stop her from going to the beauty parlor every Monday.”
“Are you sure it’s her? Brooke says she has…hygiene issues.”
“Well, yeah,” Dale said. “And frankly, if it weren’t for the direction the truck was pointing, I wouldn’t know whether she was coming or going.”
Carley covered a smile. “You’re horrible.”
“And you’re not? Hygiene issues?”
“Okay, maybe we’re a bad influence on each other.”
“Maybe so.” He took a bite of sandwich, chewed, and grinned at her. “Arachibutyrophobia. Look it up.”
Friday evening, the Kemps gave a farewell party for Conner, who was returning to school in Alabama in the morning. Mosquitoes made barbecuing on the patio out of the question, and so the guests helped themselves from trays of finger foods, including Carley’s ham-and-colby sandwiches on potato buns from the Mennonite bakery. Most guests were Conner’s former schoolmates. Their energy and banter made them fun to watch, and they were not timid about taking turns with a karaoke machine.
“Desperado…why don’t you come to your senses,” a pretty girl belted out through braces.
“Patrick’s new girlfriend, Tara,” Aunt Helen leaned close to murmur.
“Uh-oh,” Carley murmured back. They shared the love seat, with plates perched upon their knees. “If they marry, they’d better pass up the honeymoon and start saving for their children’s orthodontia bills.”
Her aunt laughed and patted her arm.
One of the kids talked Blake into taking the microphone. He sang a surprisingly good rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds.” He took a deep bow to the applause and, even more surprising, declined singing another one.
“How about a turn, Conner?” said one of his male friends.
“Not in a million years,” he said, smiling, and walked over to crouch in front of Carley. “I just upgraded my computer for school, but my old Dell’s still good. Mom says you don’t have one at home.”
“How much are you selling it for?” she asked. Not once did she assume he was offering to give it to her. After all, he was Blake’s son. That did not lower her opinion of him. He didn’t owe her anything.
“A hundred and fifty?” he asked hesitantly. “But you should have a look at it first.”
“That sounds good.” When he moved on, Carley asked Aunt Helen how business was going.
“Very well. I sold the cranberry-glass punch set in the front case to a collector in New York this morning.”
“But how?”
“His sister from Mobile came in with a group, took a digital picture with her cell phone, and e-mailed it to him. The man called about an hour later and paid with his credit card. Pam boxed it up and brought it to the post office, and that was that.”
“The world is moving too fast,” Carley sighed.
“Isn’t it? What about you? Did the napkins come in?”
“Yesterday.” Carley reached down over the love seat arm for her purse. The soft, thick natural-colored paper, was folded to show the paprika red letters saying Annabel Lee Café and the figure of the woman.
“I could only afford the one ink color,” Carley said as her aunt held it.
“But it’s very nice. You made a wise decision. You won’t have time to wash and fold cloth ones every day.”
That prompted a thought that had hovered in the back of Carley’s mind for three days.
“What would you think of my asking Brooke Kimball if she’d like to move into one of my extra rooms? She wouldn’t have to ride that bike back and forth. What’s going to happen when winter comes, and it starts getting dark earlier?”
“Carley, please don’t.”
Carley studied her face. “But why? I thought you, of all people, would love the idea.”
“Because I’m Christian, you mean.”
“Well, yes.”
“Christianity and naiveté aren’t the same thing, dear. I’m glad you have a tender heart, but you hardly know her.”
Warmed by the compliment, Carley nonetheless persisted, “What if I made her understand that she either goes by my rules or moves out again?”
“Then what will you do if she smokes in the house or breaks some other rule, but turns out to be an excellent employee? You’ll still have to see her every day, and how will that affect your work relationship? It’s better to go into something slowly, than to move too quickly and have to try to undo what you’ve done later. That’s when people get hurt.”
That made sense. “Then you’re not saying I shouldn’t ever ask her.”
“Of course not.” Her aunt leaned closer to brush a crumb from Carley’s collar. “Just that you should wait until you’re one hundred percent sure. And you’re not there now, or you wouldn’t have needed to ask my opinion.”
****
“It’s no secret that I have no experience in running a café,” Carley said to the six people in the café dining room on Monday, August eighteenth. “But what you may not know is that my livelihood is invested. We’re not a chain; I paid for every
teaspoon and salt shaker myself. If we don’t make a profit, I’ll not borrow money and risk going deep into debt. We’ll simply have to close down.”
She had stayed up until two in the morning, preparing many of the menu items to serve double-duty as snacks and visual aids. They were spread out on two tables pushed together, with herself seated at the head. It was after careful deliberation that she decided to be candid before training began.
And yet, she was aware that confessing that her personal finances were tied up was not motivation enough. These people’s planets did not revolve around her star, and there were other jobs, some even in Tallulah.
“I’m asking you to make this café as important to you as it is to me. And so I decided you need a higher stake in it. Misters Malone and Laird, the attorney and CPA working with us, have helped me draw up a profit-sharing plan.”
There were exchanged glances, nods, and smiles.
“But we can’t make a profit without patrons who want to come back often. They’ll do that if we make dining here a good experience for them, and if we have the attitude that it’s a privilege to serve them.”
“Miss Reed?”
The speaker was Paula Reilly, age thirty-eight, with short brown hair and bangs. Married to a sawmill worker and the mother of three school-aged children, she had given notice in the hardware department at Wal-Mart to work closer to home.
“Carley, please,” Carley corrected.
One bit of Stanley Malone’s advice she could not follow, was having her employees address her as “Miss Reed.” It went too much against her West Coast grain. She understood that she could not become their friend right away, for what if she had to let one go in a month’s time? But surely she could maintain their respect by staying organized, having a plan for every day, leaving her personal life at home, and treating everyone professionally.
Paula nodded. “Carley. At Wal-Mart I told myself every time I waited on a customer that I might be givin’ him the only smile he gets that day.”
“I like that philosophy, Paula.”
Danyell Weathers, the other full-time waitress, nodded. She was tall, with skin like toffee-colored satin and ebony hair pulled into a ponytail with a scarf. Mother of a three-year-old boy, she had moved to Tallulah to live with her parents while her Marine sergeant husband was stationed in Iraq.
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