Of Literature and Lattes, page 19
He stepped through the office and into Janet’s “studio.” The little room always made him smile. “Hey, you two.”
Madeline was perched on one of Janet’s stools. Janet stood cleaning brushes, her eyes red with tears.
“Chris just left,” Madeline said.
“Ah . . . Was he at the Williamses’ last night?”
Janet snuffled with her nod. “He said she wasn’t in any pain and that they were all there. All six of her kids . . . and . . .” She wiped her nose. “It was beautiful.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“I know.” She waved her hand as if trying to clear away sadness. “But she was a wonderful woman.” Janet’s tone suggested that wonderful women should defy the laws of nature and never die.
“She was.” Seth couldn’t stop a little laugh. His soon-to-be-wife-again really was dramatic. “I’m headed over there now. Do you want to come?”
Janet nodded. “Madeline?”
The younger woman shook her head. “I didn’t know them well. The last thing anyone wants to do on a day like today is make small talk with an acquaintance.”
Janet and Seth walked back out the front door and headed to his car, parked in front of Olive and Eve Designs.
Eve threw open the door and called out just as Janet opened Seth’s passenger door. “Janet? Do you have a sec?”
Janet looked to Seth first. He gave her a tiny nod. There was time. “Sure. What’s up?”
Eve pointed to the display windows. “Olive’s on vacation for another two weeks. We decided to each take a full month this summer, but . . . It’s horrible.”
Janet faced the window and absorbed what Eve had put on display. Her mouth dropped open. The shop’s three mannequins were dressed in green, toes to nose, with an odd accessory added to each. A black leather coat for one. A chunky brown necklace on another. And the most improbable white cashmere scarf gracing the third.
“I read that green was this summer’s hot color.”
“Maybe not on everything.” Janet tilted her head.
When she snagged her lower lip between her teeth, Eve knew she was working not to laugh. “I said it was horrible. Can you help?”
Janet glanced back to Seth, who stood next to his car, eyes fixed with a mix of wonder and horror on the same sight. Eve thought he looked like he was trying not to laugh too. She slumped against the shop’s doorframe. “I’ve been working on this since five this morning. Olive changes the windows every two weeks. She’ll be furious if she finds out I let her last display sit almost a month.”
Seth nodded. “It might have been the wiser choice.”
Janet flapped a hand at him. “Stop it. Wait here . . . This will take five minutes.”
She walked into the store and stopped. Eve followed her gaze as it skimmed across every shelf, rack, display, and detail. Without another word Janet darted around, grabbing a pair of white slim-fitting jeans, a fistful of gold necklaces, a multicolored silk blouse, blue capris, and a thin white belt.
She crossed back to the window. Eve stepped beside her.
Janet then dropped a pile at the base of each mannequin. “On this one, lose the pants, keep the blouse, and add these items . . . For this, keep the pants, but use this blouse and the necklaces.” She stepped behind the final mannequin. “And this has to go completely. Use everything in this pile and nothing up there.”
“Thank you.” Eve pulled her into a hug. “And while you’re here, can you give me Alyssa’s cell number?”
Janet stepped back. “Alyssa? Why?”
“I hope to hire her.”
“To work here?” Janet looked confused.
“No, to give us some ideas.” Eve’s confidence wavered. “Didn’t I hear she was helping businesses? Lexi said she did some work for Mirabella that was invaluable. Andante too, I heard, not that it’ll help him now. But Lexi called it a ‘game changer.’ We need one of those.”
“What does she do?”
“I gather just what you did with the clothes, but with numbers. I can keep the books, but we need more than that. She makes the numbers make sense, tell a story, Lexi said, so you can run your business better. That’s a silly analogy. I mean—”
“It’s not. It’s a perfectly good analogy.” Janet stepped to the register and wrote Alyssa’s number on the back of a sales card. “Call her. She’d probably love the business.”
“Thanks.” Eve beamed. “Have a great day.”
Janet walked out the door and stopped in front of Seth. “Did you know our daughter is a ‘game changer’ and has been helping businesses like a one-woman consulting firm?”
Seth smiled. “Doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Chapter 28
A week can change everything . . .
Alyssa felt like a new person. After four days Janet let her off smoothies and soups, and she decided her new eating regime wouldn’t be so bad after all—as long as it required chewing. Real food had never tasted so good. Neither had real care. It wasn’t that her mom hovered for the week, it was that she was available without hovering. Something had changed, even Alyssa had to admit to that, though she couldn’t articulate it. A fog, dark and heavy, had rested between them so long she didn’t feel its pervasive weight until it lifted.
Not a single Is that something you really want to do? or an Is that best? or the real gem, It’s up to you, with a raised brow and skeptical tone, was heard all week.
Part of it, she had to acknowledge, was that they hadn’t talked about anything substantive or meaningful. They had laughed—and Alyssa had forgotten, or perhaps had never known, her mom’s dry, sharp sense of humor and childlike enthusiasm.
“Drink this.” Janet had slid a smoothie across the counter on day two.
Alyssa had lifted the glass to examine the brownish-green color within. “What’s in it?”
Janet raised a challenging brow. Alyssa sipped and almost threw up. “That’s disgusting. Are you trying to kill me?”
Janet howled. “I can’t believe you drank it. I love that you did that! It’s your favorite salad from Bistro North. The kale salmon with fennel . . . Here, pass it over.”
Alyssa handed her the glass and washed her mouth out at the sink. “What are you doing?”
“Taking a sip.”
“You can’t do that. It’s foul.”
“You did. It’s not funny if the joke’s only on you.”
With that Janet drank half the glass before gagging and bumping Alyssa away from the sink to wash out her own mouth.
The next afternoon Alyssa came home from Jasper’s covered in grease. She had accidentally tipped an oil drainage pan onto herself. Janet was already in the laundry room vigorously scrubbing her own hands and arms.
“I shattered a glass bottle of ink all over myself.” She snorted, taking in her daughter. “You’d better get in here. You look worse than I do.”
The two of them stood side by side scrubbing themselves down with Goo Gone for a half hour. Both emerged pink, sore, and too hungry for soup that night.
“But tonight’s your last night. Dr. Laghari said no solids for four days,” Janet had groaned. “We can’t give up now.”
“One meal can’t matter, Mom.”
“But what if it does?” Janet pitched her voice low and earnest. The weight of the world, or at least Alyssa’s gastrointestinal integrity, hung in the balance with this one last liquid dinner.
In the end they sat at the island together eating an entire recipe of sweet potato soup, from the pot.
And those were only two memories Alyssa now held close. There were two other hand scrubbings at the sink that turned into bubble fights as Janet washed off paint and Alyssa scrubbed at grease from Jasper’s Garage; there was the afternoon they decided to eat only what Janet had in the garden and ended up with a ragu of tomatoes, zucchini, kale, yellow squash, and parsley—and nothing more. Then there were the two nights of movies, curled up in blankets, drinking tea, laughing at Book Club or crying with Mrs. Miniver.
But neither addressed the elephant in the room—the tensions, the misunderstandings, the chafing attitudes, or Janet and Seth’s upcoming wedding. Or maybe, Alyssa thought, she had it wrong and the elephant was gone after all.
Part of her wanted to believe that was true, and to finally let it go, because this was the first time Alyssa felt side by side with her mom rather than two steps behind, unable to keep up. She no longer felt small, weak, lost, or even alone.
Janet found her at the bottom of the stairs staring up at her favorite painting. “You have always loved that.”
“You never did. Why’d you and dad buy it?”
“Buy it? It was my honors project in college.”
“You painted that?” Alyssa turned to her mom.
“You can have it if you’d like.”
“Someday, yes, but . . . Come on, Mom . . . How could you never tell me that? Does Chase know?”
Janet tilted her head at Alyssa’s question. “I doubt it. Why would I bring it up?”
“But . . . how did you just stop? You had real talent. You trained. It just feels wrong.” She looked back to the painting. “Like a lie.”
Janet laughed, a short rueful sound full of self-awareness, even self-reproach. “Of course it’s not normal. Nothing about it was or is. I can’t even tell you it was a different time, though in some ways it was; I can’t tell you anything to explain it other than it was never an option for me.” She faced Alyssa. “I had to fight for every step with my parents, and that got too hard. I got tired of fighting . . . Then I started fighting somewhere else.” She reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her daughter’s ear.
Alyssa felt herself tip into the touch. “Dad?”
Janet shifted her gaze back to the painting. “Not your dad, at first. He didn’t know how much painting meant to me. And to some degree that was what hurt the most after a while. But if I never shared with him how much it mattered, how was he to know?” She shrugged. “Of course I only came to that realization after we divorced.”
“I had you on a pedestal, you know,” Alyssa whispered.
Her mom nodded and ran her fingers through Alyssa’s hair again, pulling a strand over her shoulder. “Toppling idols can be a messy business. If I’d been more honest with you, all of you, we might not have gotten to where we did.”
Confirmation bias.
The term drifted to Alyssa’s mind, and blaming her mom suddenly wasn’t so easy, so cut-and-dried. She had seen what she wanted to see, maybe needed to see, and when it didn’t suit her purpose she’d rejected it all and stormed away. Only to do the same thing again—only this time it landed her in the midst of a federal investigation.
Alyssa felt her stomach clench and brought herself back to the present. Standing at the bottom of the steps, staring at her favorite painting, she said, “You need an art show.”
“What?”
“Jeremy has all that wall space at Andante. He needs to reach out to the community more, and you need to show your work. It’s a win-win and I’m arranging it.”
“No. You can’t. I can’t.”
“Of course I can. You can too. We can plan it for the end of the summer. There’s plenty of time and you’ve got plenty of pieces. You already have those tiny portraits by his front window.”
“Because meddling Madeline gave them to him.” Her mom’s voice danced with laughter and something more, intrigue. “Do you really think we could?”
“Absolutely. Maybe that last weekend before Labor Day.”
“Because you’ll be gone after that.”
Alyssa started in confusion. “I . . . I was thinking because we could hold it on a Friday night when the shops stay open late, and that stops Labor Day weekend, but you’re right, that too.”
“You don’t have enough time. Let’s spend your weeks getting you better so your next chapter in life is outstanding.”
“Don’t do that.” Alyssa stepped back.
“What?”
“You always do that. You make my ideas sound like they’re wrong or not enough or that something, anything, is more important. That A is better than B, because you thought it up, and they both completely preclude C. What if A and B and C all together are exactly what’s right? What if helping you, doing this together, is what I need to get better?”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Because you’re not listening.” Alyssa heard her own whine, and it frustrated her further. She couldn’t explain what she had always felt. She took a breath to try again. “What if working for Jeremy and Lexi and Eve, and setting up an art show for you, finally connecting with you, is what I need in order to heal?”
“I just don’t want— Eve Parker called you?”
“That’s not the point.”
“I’m sorry. You hadn’t mentioned her.”
“Again, stop saying you’re sorry,” Alyssa huffed.
Her mom stood silent.
Alyssa felt all her energy drain from her. What started only minutes before as an exhilarating idea exhausted her. “Yes, Eve called, and I’ve already started going through her data. They’ve got a lot of waste in that store and I think I can help. More than that, I’m still standing.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just didn’t want you to spend your limited time on me.”
Alyssa shook her head and walked up the stairs. “But somehow even though it’s my time, it never feels like my choice.”
An hour later, dressed in her Jasper’s Garage uniform shirt, Alyssa hit the stairs again. She looked around as she crossed from the hall into the kitchen, but couldn’t find Janet. The house felt quiet and empty. She called a quick good-bye into the silence and headed out the door.
Within ten minutes Alyssa parked her bike behind Jasper’s Garage and headed toward the small store through the service bay entrance. She hauled a box from the storage room on her way past and opened it with a box cutter.
“Jasper, how do you determine what to order for the shop?”
Jasper materialized from around the corner. “I order what sells. Same stuff always sells in here.”
Alyssa shook her head and held up three bags of pork rinds. “No one eats these anymore, and this is the second box I’ve opened.”
“I haven’t redone the ordering in a while. You can shove the Fritos over to make more room.” Jasper tucked his rag into his shirt pocket.
“But the Fritos sell. Tell you what, rather than me changing any more oil—”
Jasper chuckled.
“I’ll pump gas, fill tires, and do all the easy normal stuff out that door.” She pointed to the station’s two islands. “But when no one is out there and you’re back there”—she pointed to the service bay—“why don’t I standardize all your ordering and inventory? Put it on a single system that will cue you as to what sells and what needs to be reordered.”
“You can do that?”
She dropped the pork rinds back into the box. “It’s about the only thing I can do.” She grabbed her laptop out of her bag and opened it on the counter. A navy blue Porsche rolled up to the full-service pump. “As soon as I finish with this customer I’m going to wow you, Jasper.”
He chuckled again, a full belly laugh this time, as she pushed through the door and headed to the Porsche.
Chapter 29
The next afternoon, Lexi was laughing at Alyssa too, except her laugh was high and clear and bright. “What are you on?”
“I have no idea.” Alyssa flopped back in the booth. “Collagen and slow-stewed vegetables, I think, but I feel good, Lex, really good. I have all this energy.”
“But?”
Alyssa stared at her best friend. “No but.”
Lexi shook her head. “Not buying it. You have a touch of frantic about you too. Something’s up.”
Alyssa shrugged and snapped her laptop shut.
They had spent the last two hours going through Lexi’s data as Alyssa gave her the final report and recommendations. What started with an assessment of every penny spent and every penny earned ended with the recommendation that, while the PR company had focused on downtown Chicago media, 80 percent of Mirabella’s reservations and clientele came from the north and northwest suburbs. There was a lot more to do locally for a lot less money—including offer more chicken dishes and fewer organ meats.
“Tell you what. You can tell me everything while we walk to the lake.” Lexi stretched her back. “I can’t thank you enough for all this, but I also can’t think anymore. I need sunshine, and I’ve got a couple hours until I’m needed back here.”
Alyssa slid from the booth and followed her friend out the restaurant’s side door.
Ten minutes later, at a power-walk pace, they hit the beach. Every kid in town was there—laughing, playing, swimming, and chasing the waves. Lake Michigan looked like an ocean with its swells and deep blue.
Lexi pulled off her sandals, Alyssa her flip-flops, and they crossed the sand, heading for their favorite outcropping of rocks.
“You gonna talk now?”
Alyssa settled on her old favorite flat stone while Lex took the one next to her. Both looked out at the waves.
“I don’t think I can stay two more months, Lex. Mom and I? We’re good, then we’re not, then— I don’t get her and everything I do is wrong. I offered to help her hold an art show yesterday and she basically said it would make me sick.”
“She cares about you.”
“That’s not care. She just didn’t like the idea.”
“I doubt that. But you’re her first priority. Can’t you understand that? She’s doing her best, but she sees things differently than you.” Lexi nudged Alyssa. “If you and I saw things the same way, I wouldn’t have just paid you three thousand dollars. So there. Proof.”
“That’s not the same thing at all.”
“Sure it is . . . Remember our fourth-grade art class?”
“How’d you get there? How do you even remember that class?”
“I remember that you hated it. You’d get so mad you’d crumple and pitch every sketch and painting. You were a pain the entire year, and that’s when I figured out you don’t like the unknown.”
Madeline was perched on one of Janet’s stools. Janet stood cleaning brushes, her eyes red with tears.
“Chris just left,” Madeline said.
“Ah . . . Was he at the Williamses’ last night?”
Janet snuffled with her nod. “He said she wasn’t in any pain and that they were all there. All six of her kids . . . and . . .” She wiped her nose. “It was beautiful.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“I know.” She waved her hand as if trying to clear away sadness. “But she was a wonderful woman.” Janet’s tone suggested that wonderful women should defy the laws of nature and never die.
“She was.” Seth couldn’t stop a little laugh. His soon-to-be-wife-again really was dramatic. “I’m headed over there now. Do you want to come?”
Janet nodded. “Madeline?”
The younger woman shook her head. “I didn’t know them well. The last thing anyone wants to do on a day like today is make small talk with an acquaintance.”
Janet and Seth walked back out the front door and headed to his car, parked in front of Olive and Eve Designs.
Eve threw open the door and called out just as Janet opened Seth’s passenger door. “Janet? Do you have a sec?”
Janet looked to Seth first. He gave her a tiny nod. There was time. “Sure. What’s up?”
Eve pointed to the display windows. “Olive’s on vacation for another two weeks. We decided to each take a full month this summer, but . . . It’s horrible.”
Janet faced the window and absorbed what Eve had put on display. Her mouth dropped open. The shop’s three mannequins were dressed in green, toes to nose, with an odd accessory added to each. A black leather coat for one. A chunky brown necklace on another. And the most improbable white cashmere scarf gracing the third.
“I read that green was this summer’s hot color.”
“Maybe not on everything.” Janet tilted her head.
When she snagged her lower lip between her teeth, Eve knew she was working not to laugh. “I said it was horrible. Can you help?”
Janet glanced back to Seth, who stood next to his car, eyes fixed with a mix of wonder and horror on the same sight. Eve thought he looked like he was trying not to laugh too. She slumped against the shop’s doorframe. “I’ve been working on this since five this morning. Olive changes the windows every two weeks. She’ll be furious if she finds out I let her last display sit almost a month.”
Seth nodded. “It might have been the wiser choice.”
Janet flapped a hand at him. “Stop it. Wait here . . . This will take five minutes.”
She walked into the store and stopped. Eve followed her gaze as it skimmed across every shelf, rack, display, and detail. Without another word Janet darted around, grabbing a pair of white slim-fitting jeans, a fistful of gold necklaces, a multicolored silk blouse, blue capris, and a thin white belt.
She crossed back to the window. Eve stepped beside her.
Janet then dropped a pile at the base of each mannequin. “On this one, lose the pants, keep the blouse, and add these items . . . For this, keep the pants, but use this blouse and the necklaces.” She stepped behind the final mannequin. “And this has to go completely. Use everything in this pile and nothing up there.”
“Thank you.” Eve pulled her into a hug. “And while you’re here, can you give me Alyssa’s cell number?”
Janet stepped back. “Alyssa? Why?”
“I hope to hire her.”
“To work here?” Janet looked confused.
“No, to give us some ideas.” Eve’s confidence wavered. “Didn’t I hear she was helping businesses? Lexi said she did some work for Mirabella that was invaluable. Andante too, I heard, not that it’ll help him now. But Lexi called it a ‘game changer.’ We need one of those.”
“What does she do?”
“I gather just what you did with the clothes, but with numbers. I can keep the books, but we need more than that. She makes the numbers make sense, tell a story, Lexi said, so you can run your business better. That’s a silly analogy. I mean—”
“It’s not. It’s a perfectly good analogy.” Janet stepped to the register and wrote Alyssa’s number on the back of a sales card. “Call her. She’d probably love the business.”
“Thanks.” Eve beamed. “Have a great day.”
Janet walked out the door and stopped in front of Seth. “Did you know our daughter is a ‘game changer’ and has been helping businesses like a one-woman consulting firm?”
Seth smiled. “Doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Chapter 28
A week can change everything . . .
Alyssa felt like a new person. After four days Janet let her off smoothies and soups, and she decided her new eating regime wouldn’t be so bad after all—as long as it required chewing. Real food had never tasted so good. Neither had real care. It wasn’t that her mom hovered for the week, it was that she was available without hovering. Something had changed, even Alyssa had to admit to that, though she couldn’t articulate it. A fog, dark and heavy, had rested between them so long she didn’t feel its pervasive weight until it lifted.
Not a single Is that something you really want to do? or an Is that best? or the real gem, It’s up to you, with a raised brow and skeptical tone, was heard all week.
Part of it, she had to acknowledge, was that they hadn’t talked about anything substantive or meaningful. They had laughed—and Alyssa had forgotten, or perhaps had never known, her mom’s dry, sharp sense of humor and childlike enthusiasm.
“Drink this.” Janet had slid a smoothie across the counter on day two.
Alyssa had lifted the glass to examine the brownish-green color within. “What’s in it?”
Janet raised a challenging brow. Alyssa sipped and almost threw up. “That’s disgusting. Are you trying to kill me?”
Janet howled. “I can’t believe you drank it. I love that you did that! It’s your favorite salad from Bistro North. The kale salmon with fennel . . . Here, pass it over.”
Alyssa handed her the glass and washed her mouth out at the sink. “What are you doing?”
“Taking a sip.”
“You can’t do that. It’s foul.”
“You did. It’s not funny if the joke’s only on you.”
With that Janet drank half the glass before gagging and bumping Alyssa away from the sink to wash out her own mouth.
The next afternoon Alyssa came home from Jasper’s covered in grease. She had accidentally tipped an oil drainage pan onto herself. Janet was already in the laundry room vigorously scrubbing her own hands and arms.
“I shattered a glass bottle of ink all over myself.” She snorted, taking in her daughter. “You’d better get in here. You look worse than I do.”
The two of them stood side by side scrubbing themselves down with Goo Gone for a half hour. Both emerged pink, sore, and too hungry for soup that night.
“But tonight’s your last night. Dr. Laghari said no solids for four days,” Janet had groaned. “We can’t give up now.”
“One meal can’t matter, Mom.”
“But what if it does?” Janet pitched her voice low and earnest. The weight of the world, or at least Alyssa’s gastrointestinal integrity, hung in the balance with this one last liquid dinner.
In the end they sat at the island together eating an entire recipe of sweet potato soup, from the pot.
And those were only two memories Alyssa now held close. There were two other hand scrubbings at the sink that turned into bubble fights as Janet washed off paint and Alyssa scrubbed at grease from Jasper’s Garage; there was the afternoon they decided to eat only what Janet had in the garden and ended up with a ragu of tomatoes, zucchini, kale, yellow squash, and parsley—and nothing more. Then there were the two nights of movies, curled up in blankets, drinking tea, laughing at Book Club or crying with Mrs. Miniver.
But neither addressed the elephant in the room—the tensions, the misunderstandings, the chafing attitudes, or Janet and Seth’s upcoming wedding. Or maybe, Alyssa thought, she had it wrong and the elephant was gone after all.
Part of her wanted to believe that was true, and to finally let it go, because this was the first time Alyssa felt side by side with her mom rather than two steps behind, unable to keep up. She no longer felt small, weak, lost, or even alone.
Janet found her at the bottom of the stairs staring up at her favorite painting. “You have always loved that.”
“You never did. Why’d you and dad buy it?”
“Buy it? It was my honors project in college.”
“You painted that?” Alyssa turned to her mom.
“You can have it if you’d like.”
“Someday, yes, but . . . Come on, Mom . . . How could you never tell me that? Does Chase know?”
Janet tilted her head at Alyssa’s question. “I doubt it. Why would I bring it up?”
“But . . . how did you just stop? You had real talent. You trained. It just feels wrong.” She looked back to the painting. “Like a lie.”
Janet laughed, a short rueful sound full of self-awareness, even self-reproach. “Of course it’s not normal. Nothing about it was or is. I can’t even tell you it was a different time, though in some ways it was; I can’t tell you anything to explain it other than it was never an option for me.” She faced Alyssa. “I had to fight for every step with my parents, and that got too hard. I got tired of fighting . . . Then I started fighting somewhere else.” She reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her daughter’s ear.
Alyssa felt herself tip into the touch. “Dad?”
Janet shifted her gaze back to the painting. “Not your dad, at first. He didn’t know how much painting meant to me. And to some degree that was what hurt the most after a while. But if I never shared with him how much it mattered, how was he to know?” She shrugged. “Of course I only came to that realization after we divorced.”
“I had you on a pedestal, you know,” Alyssa whispered.
Her mom nodded and ran her fingers through Alyssa’s hair again, pulling a strand over her shoulder. “Toppling idols can be a messy business. If I’d been more honest with you, all of you, we might not have gotten to where we did.”
Confirmation bias.
The term drifted to Alyssa’s mind, and blaming her mom suddenly wasn’t so easy, so cut-and-dried. She had seen what she wanted to see, maybe needed to see, and when it didn’t suit her purpose she’d rejected it all and stormed away. Only to do the same thing again—only this time it landed her in the midst of a federal investigation.
Alyssa felt her stomach clench and brought herself back to the present. Standing at the bottom of the steps, staring at her favorite painting, she said, “You need an art show.”
“What?”
“Jeremy has all that wall space at Andante. He needs to reach out to the community more, and you need to show your work. It’s a win-win and I’m arranging it.”
“No. You can’t. I can’t.”
“Of course I can. You can too. We can plan it for the end of the summer. There’s plenty of time and you’ve got plenty of pieces. You already have those tiny portraits by his front window.”
“Because meddling Madeline gave them to him.” Her mom’s voice danced with laughter and something more, intrigue. “Do you really think we could?”
“Absolutely. Maybe that last weekend before Labor Day.”
“Because you’ll be gone after that.”
Alyssa started in confusion. “I . . . I was thinking because we could hold it on a Friday night when the shops stay open late, and that stops Labor Day weekend, but you’re right, that too.”
“You don’t have enough time. Let’s spend your weeks getting you better so your next chapter in life is outstanding.”
“Don’t do that.” Alyssa stepped back.
“What?”
“You always do that. You make my ideas sound like they’re wrong or not enough or that something, anything, is more important. That A is better than B, because you thought it up, and they both completely preclude C. What if A and B and C all together are exactly what’s right? What if helping you, doing this together, is what I need to get better?”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Because you’re not listening.” Alyssa heard her own whine, and it frustrated her further. She couldn’t explain what she had always felt. She took a breath to try again. “What if working for Jeremy and Lexi and Eve, and setting up an art show for you, finally connecting with you, is what I need in order to heal?”
“I just don’t want— Eve Parker called you?”
“That’s not the point.”
“I’m sorry. You hadn’t mentioned her.”
“Again, stop saying you’re sorry,” Alyssa huffed.
Her mom stood silent.
Alyssa felt all her energy drain from her. What started only minutes before as an exhilarating idea exhausted her. “Yes, Eve called, and I’ve already started going through her data. They’ve got a lot of waste in that store and I think I can help. More than that, I’m still standing.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just didn’t want you to spend your limited time on me.”
Alyssa shook her head and walked up the stairs. “But somehow even though it’s my time, it never feels like my choice.”
An hour later, dressed in her Jasper’s Garage uniform shirt, Alyssa hit the stairs again. She looked around as she crossed from the hall into the kitchen, but couldn’t find Janet. The house felt quiet and empty. She called a quick good-bye into the silence and headed out the door.
Within ten minutes Alyssa parked her bike behind Jasper’s Garage and headed toward the small store through the service bay entrance. She hauled a box from the storage room on her way past and opened it with a box cutter.
“Jasper, how do you determine what to order for the shop?”
Jasper materialized from around the corner. “I order what sells. Same stuff always sells in here.”
Alyssa shook her head and held up three bags of pork rinds. “No one eats these anymore, and this is the second box I’ve opened.”
“I haven’t redone the ordering in a while. You can shove the Fritos over to make more room.” Jasper tucked his rag into his shirt pocket.
“But the Fritos sell. Tell you what, rather than me changing any more oil—”
Jasper chuckled.
“I’ll pump gas, fill tires, and do all the easy normal stuff out that door.” She pointed to the station’s two islands. “But when no one is out there and you’re back there”—she pointed to the service bay—“why don’t I standardize all your ordering and inventory? Put it on a single system that will cue you as to what sells and what needs to be reordered.”
“You can do that?”
She dropped the pork rinds back into the box. “It’s about the only thing I can do.” She grabbed her laptop out of her bag and opened it on the counter. A navy blue Porsche rolled up to the full-service pump. “As soon as I finish with this customer I’m going to wow you, Jasper.”
He chuckled again, a full belly laugh this time, as she pushed through the door and headed to the Porsche.
Chapter 29
The next afternoon, Lexi was laughing at Alyssa too, except her laugh was high and clear and bright. “What are you on?”
“I have no idea.” Alyssa flopped back in the booth. “Collagen and slow-stewed vegetables, I think, but I feel good, Lex, really good. I have all this energy.”
“But?”
Alyssa stared at her best friend. “No but.”
Lexi shook her head. “Not buying it. You have a touch of frantic about you too. Something’s up.”
Alyssa shrugged and snapped her laptop shut.
They had spent the last two hours going through Lexi’s data as Alyssa gave her the final report and recommendations. What started with an assessment of every penny spent and every penny earned ended with the recommendation that, while the PR company had focused on downtown Chicago media, 80 percent of Mirabella’s reservations and clientele came from the north and northwest suburbs. There was a lot more to do locally for a lot less money—including offer more chicken dishes and fewer organ meats.
“Tell you what. You can tell me everything while we walk to the lake.” Lexi stretched her back. “I can’t thank you enough for all this, but I also can’t think anymore. I need sunshine, and I’ve got a couple hours until I’m needed back here.”
Alyssa slid from the booth and followed her friend out the restaurant’s side door.
Ten minutes later, at a power-walk pace, they hit the beach. Every kid in town was there—laughing, playing, swimming, and chasing the waves. Lake Michigan looked like an ocean with its swells and deep blue.
Lexi pulled off her sandals, Alyssa her flip-flops, and they crossed the sand, heading for their favorite outcropping of rocks.
“You gonna talk now?”
Alyssa settled on her old favorite flat stone while Lex took the one next to her. Both looked out at the waves.
“I don’t think I can stay two more months, Lex. Mom and I? We’re good, then we’re not, then— I don’t get her and everything I do is wrong. I offered to help her hold an art show yesterday and she basically said it would make me sick.”
“She cares about you.”
“That’s not care. She just didn’t like the idea.”
“I doubt that. But you’re her first priority. Can’t you understand that? She’s doing her best, but she sees things differently than you.” Lexi nudged Alyssa. “If you and I saw things the same way, I wouldn’t have just paid you three thousand dollars. So there. Proof.”
“That’s not the same thing at all.”
“Sure it is . . . Remember our fourth-grade art class?”
“How’d you get there? How do you even remember that class?”
“I remember that you hated it. You’d get so mad you’d crumple and pitch every sketch and painting. You were a pain the entire year, and that’s when I figured out you don’t like the unknown.”
