The Fortune Cafe (A Tangerine Street Romance)

by Wright, Julie

  “Do I dare ask why she’s in custody?” Emma asked.

  “She tried to jump off the pier on Seashell Beach. Witnesses stopped her and called us.”

  Emma nodded in response, but said nothing.

  “Miss Armstrong?”

  “I’m here. I’ll be there to get her soon.”

  She hung up the phone but continued to sit, unable to make her feet and legs shift to bear the weight of this new burden settling over her shoulders. She’d lied when she told Harrison she “had” this. She hadn’t known she’d been lying, but not knowing didn’t change the lie. She didn’t have anything at all.

  Her mom had found her way to Seashell Beach. The pier was a stone’s throw from the restaurant Emma just left. The location was not an accident. It was one of her mom’s lessons— her way of saying, “See? I control you. You don’t control me.”

  After several minutes of shallow breathing, Emma forced herself to her feet. She closed the windows in the house, turned off the lights she’d turned on, and shut the front door behind her after locking it. “Yes, Mom, I see.”

  Emma paced the small pathway in her apartment between the boxes of books that went all the way to the ceiling. She blew her hair out of her eyes in exasperation as she shifted the phone to her other ear. “You weren’t there, Rosalee. You have no idea what it was like.” She no longer tried to hide her own irritation. If her sister insisted on being obtuse, then she at least had the right to be annoyed by it.

  “I don’t ever ask for anything!” Emma shouted at her sister. “Not once since Daddy died have I asked for you to help me with this, but she’s your mother too! I only need one weekend.” The evil horrible part of her chanted how she should’ve left her mother in the psych ward for three days.

  Rosalee whined and hedged and claimed to be busy even though Emma knew darn good and well that Rosalee didn’t have anything actually going on. Rosalee didn’t work a job because her husband was some fancy CEO of a soup company. She had two kids, but also had a nanny who took the brunt of the issues with child rearing. And she had a housekeeper who also cooked the family dinners. She had no hobbies, didn’t read, didn’t have any artistic endeavors, didn’t make anything or fix anything or solve anything. Emma honestly didn’t know what her sister did with her time, which was why Emma felt no guilt in not backing down from asking this favor.

  “She’s suicidal, Rosalee! She tried jumping off a pier at sunset. She can’t be left alone right now because she won’t take her medications unless someone is there to force it down her throat, and because the police made me sign a statement saying she would be watched over. If anything happens to her, I’ll go to jail for neglect or something. And I can’t be there this weekend. I have been there when she vomited all over herself in an effort to purge the medicine I made her take. I’ve been the one to clean that up. I’ve been there when she was sad and wanted to cry and cry and cry. I’m the one who had to go to the police station to pick her up. It is totally your turn!”

  The fight over the phone took another twenty-eight minutes before Rosalee finally gave in and agreed to fly down for the weekend. She hadn’t been down from Seattle even once since their dad’s funeral. It was about time she visited her mom anyway.

  With that taken care of, Emma glanced into her bedroom to check where her mom slept. The shallow breathing of sleep assured her that her mom hadn’t overheard the fight. Emma didn’t know if that made her happy or not. It might be a good thing for her mom to understand that Rosalee wasn’t the sweet angel their mother believed her to be.

  But her mom slept soundly. Which was just as well. Emma had a lot of books to sign and stuff in her preaddressed envelopes. Finally something to smile about. She was about to sign her very first book.

  She went to work.

  Harrison paced his parents’ house, not quite knowing what to do. He felt like he’d been pacing for days. She’d hung up on him, and her voice had that haunted sound he remembered from back in high school. He knew it had something to do with her mom. He’d read the personal essays, the poems, and the short stories that hinted at something deeper and darker.

  Emma told him not to call back. The task of not calling back required superhuman strength. He’d kept her wishes for thirty-seven hours. He wanted to show her that he respected her. But how far did he have to take that respect? He wanted to help. He wanted to smooth the worry from Emma’s voice. He wanted to erase the tired wariness from her eyes.

  He pressed her number on his phone’s screen and held his breath to see if he’d waited long enough. She didn’t answer. So he must not have waited long enough. Or maybe she didn’t answer because she was at work. It was ten in the morning. Surely the café had a breakfast menu.

  That made sense.

  He grabbed his keys and went to The Fortune Café. Maybe her boss would let him wash the windows so that he had an excuse to hang out with her.

  “She’s not here,” Jen, one of the other waitresses, said. “She hasn’t been here since the other day when you were here before.”

  “Is everything okay?” he asked, thinking about how she had sounded before she’d hung up on him.

  Jen lifted her thin shoulders in a shrug. “Doubt it. Her mom’s a piece of work. Emma’s a slave to that woman. It’s really sad actually. Emma needs to get a life of her own.”

  “What’s wrong with her mom?” he asked, feeling bad for shaking down Emma’s coworkers for personal information.

  “Crazy. More than the usual crazy. Even more crazy than your date from the other night. Emma puts up with a lot of abuse from that woman.”

  “Thanks for the information,” Harrison said, mentally forgiving her for bringing up his crazy date. He headed to Emma’s apartment. If she wasn’t there, then he planned on camping out on her doorstep. At her apartment, he knocked on the door and waited. He heard noise inside and felt immediate relief. She was home.

  She answered the door wearing black yoga pants and a red t-shirt with Chinese characters splattered over the front. A ponytail holder kept her dark hair up off her shoulders revealing the long lines of her neck and the narrow slope of her cheekbones. She was so beautiful.

  Her brown eyes widened in what could only be called an expression of horror at seeing him. She glanced behind her and stepped out to join him on the front porch, making sure to shut the door behind her.

  She stared at him and appeared to be waiting for him to say something. His eyes trailed back to the closed door. What was she hiding? “Are you okay?”

  She started to nod, then shrugged and let out a sigh. “I’m just really tired.” She eyed him. “Why are you here?”

  “I came to help,” he said after a moment of her watching him.

  She opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “Harrison...”

  “You have a book launch, and I know that has to entail a lot of work. I plan on doing work. Give me directions. I mean, you might as well because free labor is so hard to find these days.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking.” She looked exhausted, emotionally beaten.

  “I think I might understand if you’d let me in.” He meant the words on several levels.

  She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes and inhaled deeply before lowering her hands and giving him a tired, sad look. “Okay. Just be warned, though, my mom’s inside and she’s not...”

  “Well?”

  “No. She’s not nice. My mom is not a nice person. I mean, she’s not well either, but she’s not a nice person. If you go inside, you will have to listen to things that are uncomfortable— things that are... really awful.” Her voice trembled. “Do you still want to help?” Her red rimmed eyes grew glossy with tears.

  He couldn’t stop himself. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her, pressing her into him as if somehow he could press his energy into her through a simple embrace. What had she been going through? And why had he waited so long to make contact when she obviously needed someone?

&
nbsp; At first, she remained stiff and uncertain, maybe even afraid of his touch. But she melted slowly into him until her arms were around him too, clinging to him as if he was the rope keeping her clear of the alligators and spikes at the bottom of a ravine.

  She fit against him so well, like she belonged there. Her tears soaked through his shirt, and he tightened his arms just a little. “You’re okay, Emma. I’m here. It’s all going to be okay.”

  Not nice. She’d called her mother not nice. But Harrison remembered the hurt layered under words in her assignments. If he remembered correctly, not nice was a very mild way of putting it.

  But he determined that his hero from the first day of high school deserved a little payback. Today, he would be her hero. He would protect her from the cruelty of another person. Today, he would save her. He’d save her every day for as long as she would let him.

  He pulled back from her enough to gaze into her brown eyes glossy with her tears. “Hey. We got this. Let’s get it all done.”

  She sniffed but opened the door.

  She let him in.

  He stood facing the wall of boxes and books and envelopes, but he stepped forward. He was right to think she had an overwhelming task in front of her.

  “My sister is supposed to be here already,” Emma whispered. “Her plane arrived four hours ago. But she’d not answering her phone at all, so it’s been hard to get work done while—”

  “What are you whispering about in there?” A voice came from the other room. “I hear you talking about me. Is Rosie here? It’s about time I get to spend time with someone competent. Listening to you nag has worn down my nerves to their bare roots. Rosie?”

  “Rosalee isn’t here yet, Mom.” Emma’s face had darkened with the blush of shame. “Told you,” she whispered to him. “And it’ll only get worse.”

  “Then who’s here?” The woman’s voice demanded to know. “Who are you whispering to? Or are you talking to your dragons again?” A hissing sort of laughter sounded. “It’s ironic that you have me seeing a psychiatrist when you’re the one talking to dragons, don’t you think?”

  “I have a friend here to help me, Mom. Please...” But Emma didn’t add anything further. It seemed a world of unsaid requests hinged on that one word please.

  Noise, shuffling, and rustling came from the other room as someone stumped toward Emma and Harrison. An older woman appeared in the doorway. The severe bun pulled her hair so tight that her eyes slanted a little. Makeup and jewelry dripped off of her in a way that made it difficult to tell what she really looked like underneath it all. He hadn’t expected someone who looked tidy and made up. He’d expected snarled hair and missing teeth. He’d expected wildly shifting eyes instead of an imperiously cold and level gaze. “Who are you?” the woman said with a suspicion that made Harrison take an actual step back.

  “I’m Harrison Archer, Emma’s friend.”

  A slow, deliberate show of disbelief formed in the arch of her eyebrow. “Emma doesn’t have friends.”

  He worked hard to keep his features smooth as anger welled up inside him. “Not to argue, but you’re wrong about that. I am definitely Emma’s friend.” Harrison assured the woman. “I’m here to help her with her work.”

  “Work? You mean her scribbles that she put into a book? I told her she might as well make furniture out of all those books because no one wants to buy her scratches. Dragons! What a waste of time.”

  He truly understood why Emma chose to draw dragons after meeting this fire-breathing sort of person. How had Emma grown up so Emma with someone like this woman?

  “I’m actually really impressed with her web comic. She’s created quite a franchise. She’s likely to be as successful as Calvin and Hobbes.”

  Emma put her hand on his arm and murmured, “Don’t bother. It’s not worth it.”

  The woman narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth as if about to speak, but a knock came at the door before anything more could be said. Emma looked like she might collapse with relief at the interruption. Her sister had finally arrived.

  Harrison was surprised at how much older her sister appeared. He hadn’t known there was such an age gap between the two sisters. She seemed to be working hard to hang onto youth, but the platinum blonde hair and the perfectly tweezed eyebrows looked unnatural and forced.

  Her mom practically tripped over her feet to throw her arms around Emma’s sister, proclaiming herself to be rescued and begging to be taken out of Emma’s matchbox-sized apartment immediately so she could finally breathe.

  “Where’ve you been?” Emma asked her sister.

  “I had my own errands to run. The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know.”

  Emma’s eyes tightened, and she handed off a bag and quiet instruction to her sister who had yet to apologize for not showing up on time. They were gone in a flurry of veiled and not-so-veiled insults from Emma’s mom to Emma.

  “Wow,” Harrison said, watching her carefully to gauge her reaction. But she walked to the stacked boxes as if nothing had happened.

  It took Harrison a second longer to recover from listening to a mother eviscerate her own daughter, but apparently Emma was moving on to the next task.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, hardly believing anyone could be capable of brushing off such a verbal abuse.

  She glanced at him. “She was actually pretty well-behaved. And you were warned.” She turned her back to him and tried to wrestle a box from the top.

  “Hey, Armstrong. Quit trying to live up to your name. Let me do that.” He pulled the box down for her and tried to get the encounter with her mother out of his mind as he listened to Emma explain the process of her needing to sign the book and then place it in the corresponding padded envelope, and then prepping the envelope to be mailed.

  He looked dubiously at all the boxes and then to her rather extensive list of names for mailing. She smiled softly. “I had really good presales,” she said, the pride in her voice evident.

  He loved to see her smile. “I guess you did!” He laughed. “But you’re never going to get through this before you need to be at your convention tomorrow.”

  She smiled wide. “I stand a better chance with you here. Thank you. You don’t owe me anything, and yet here you are. I can’t begin to tell how much that means to me.”

  “You’re more than welcome.” He leaned over the waist-high stack of boxes that she’d been using as a seat and rested his knuckles on the cardboard on both sides of her. He hadn’t planned to kiss her, not when she was so vulnerable from her mother’s attack, but she leaned forward as if pulled by his gravity. Her eyes fluttered closed just as his lips met hers, soft and yielding. He closed his eyes as well and deepened the kiss, wrapping his arms around her. She scooted closer to him, tucking against him.

  He’d thought about kissing her a million times in high school, but the fantasy was a poor shadow in comparison to this reality. He pulled back, leaning his forehead on hers, knowing that kissing her didn’t exactly make her work load any easier. “That’s not exactly what I meant when I said I wanted to help,” he whispered.

  “Weird, because it seems to be helping...” she whispered back.

  Was he dreaming? Did she know what it did to him to have her, the girl he’d secretly loved during the entire unbearable years of high school, sitting before him with her arms around his neck? “Can you do me a favor?” he asked. She nodded against his head. “If this is a dream, don’t wake me up.”

  She took a shuddering breath. “I’ve lived through enough nightmares to know that we’re standing in reality.”

  “That’s not true.”

  She frowned. “It isn’t?”

  “You’re sitting.”

  She gave him a playful shove.

  “But we really need to get to work. I don’t want you panicking in a few hours because I sidetracked you and didn’t help at all. But even with me here, we need reinforcements.” He pulled out his phone.

  She watched him curiously.
“Who are you calling?”

  “My mom and sister.”

  Her eyes went wide, and she tried to snatch his phone away, but he was tall enough that it allowed him to evade her attack. She stopped trying to steal his phone once he said hello. He couldn’t help but think that Andrea would have kept trying to steal the phone.

  He eyed Emma after he hung up with his mom.

  “You really didn’t have to do that,” she said.

  “It was the kiss that convinced me.”

  Emma laughed, and for a second he thought she might kiss him again, but she went back to work, not willing to allow herself to be idle for too long. He breathed a sigh of relief knowing his mom and sister would come to help. Emma needed them. And he had always known how much he needed her.

  Yes. He was definitely glad he came home.

  Since she couldn’t stop him from calling in his personal cavalry, Emma went back to work. She couldn’t believe he’d shown up, couldn’t believe he was in her house, couldn’t believe the fire still coursing through her at his kiss. Harrison Archer had kissed her.

  She’d been kissed before, but never had she felt glacier-melting heat. After he made the phone call, they settled into an easy routine of him opening boxes, getting books ready for her signature, her singing the books, him putting them in the right envelopes. He didn’t seal the envelopes but instead set them aside so, “Kristin had something to do.”

  His mom and sister arrived shortly thereafter, introducing themselves as Lily— his mom, the person who was evidently responsible for Harrison’s startlingly blue eyes— and Kristin— his sister, who sort of looked like a slightly shorter girl version of Harrison with her brown hair and blue eyes. They must have inherited the hair from their dad because Lily was blonde. Emma felt a considerable amount of apprehension in meeting the people who’d been described as in-love-with-the-ex-girlfriend.

  And though Kristin gave her an interested once-over as if doing a rigorous inspection, she also gave Harrison a thumbs-up. Does that mean I passed? Emma wondered. It must have, because Kristin smiled and acted friendly. Lily did no such inspection but rather acted as though the fact that Harrison liked Emma was more than enough information for her.