Page 64 of Save the Date
“And just as determined not to let the Colonel boss you around?”
She helped herself to a French fry from the paper basket that held his sandwich. “Look. I love my dad. I really do. He’s tried to be supportive, in his own way. After Norma, the former owner, moved away and left me the business, the Colonel loaned me the money to make the improvements to the building and buy my equipment. I’m the creative type, not a finance genius, but he sent me books about drawing up a business plan, and bookkeeping, and all that.”
“I sense a but.”
Cara looked away. “Sometimes I think he wants me to fail. Things haven’t been going so great. I’ve had a lot of capital expenditures—car problems, computer problems, equipment problems. Everything costs more than it should, and it’s all stuff I didn’t anticipate. And it took a long time for the business to start coming in.”
“I don’t know anything about flowers, but I’ve seen a lot of yours at all these weddings lately, and they looked pretty damn impressive to me. And I do know Torie, and Lillian Fanning. They wouldn’t have hired you for Torie’s wedding if they thought you were no good.”
“Iamgood at what I do,” Cara said. “But I’m an outsider in Savannah. These girls here, it’s like a closed society. If you didn’t go to Country Day or Savannah Christian or St. Vincent’s you might as well be from Mars.”
“But you did Torie’s wedding. And that bizarro wedding for the Winships. And Maya’s. And it sounds like this clambake the Trapnells and Strayhorns are planning is pretty extreme.”
That stopped her cold. She was whining. And God knows she hated a whiner, almost as much as she hated a crier.
“You’re right,” she said, straightening her shoulders. “You’re absolutely right. It’s just that it’s taken so long, and I’m still not really in the black. And stuff keeps happening to me.…”
She filled Jack in on the broken cooler and the spoiled flowers, and all the rest of her financial woes.
He listened calmly, nodding, not judging.
“My dad wants his money back,” Cara said, taking a deep breath. “And I can’t blame him. When I borrowed it, the deal was that I’d start making payments in February. But I haven’t. I couldn’t. Not while keeping the lights on in the shop.”
“And you explained that to him?”
“I tried. But the Colonel is the Colonel. He hears what he wants. And what he wants to hear is that I give up. He wants me to admit defeat, move back home, and be a dutiful daughter.”
Cara felt her fists clench and unclench. “But I can’t. I just can’t!”
“Then don’t,” he said lightly. “Look, I know starting a new business is hard. Especially in a new town, where, as you say, you don’t really know anybody. Ryan and I have been here all our lives, and it’s been an uphill battle for us.”
“Really?” It was hard to imagine anything was difficult for this charming Irishman, who’d apparently never met a stranger.
“Hell yeah,” Jack said. “For one thing, our timing sucked. I quit my job, put all my savings into buying tools, equipment, all of it, everything it takes to start a new business. Our plan was to do high-end historic-restoration projects. And it would have been a good plan, except the economy was still stalled. People who’d bought an old house in the historic district had paid top-of-the-market prices and now, planning to renovate, they find out they’re already underwater on their mortgages. That hundred-thousand-dollar kitchen we were supposed to build for them? Forget about it. New master suite? Not in the master plan anymore. It wouldn’t have been so bad, if it had just been me. But I’d talked Ryan into coming in with me. And we had guys. Masons, carpenters, electricians. We had to let everybody go. Everybody who was expecting a paycheck, counting on us, we had to let go.”
She leaned closer across the table. “How’d you survive?”
“We lived lean. Took whatever crappy jobs we could get. Our family’s friends felt sorry for us, so they’d hire us to hang some Sheetrock, build a garage, replace a deck. I sold my condo downtown and bought the place over on Macon Street. It was a foreclosure. Ryan, he’s actually got a teaching degree. He did some substitute teaching, hired on as an after-school soccer coach at the Y. And we just kept at it.”
“And you’re okay now.”
“Finally. People are feeling better about the economy. The people we did those little jobs for, they were happy with the work. They’re calling us back for bigger projects. And they’ve told their friends.”
“So, a happy ending. You’ve got a good business, friends, a house, a dog.”
“But in the meantime, Zoey left me. She got tired of hanging around, waiting for me to come home from work, to make her my number-one priority.”
“You’ve still got the dog,” Cara said, looking away.
“And I’ve got high hopes for everything else,” Jack said. “There’s this girl I keep running into at weddings…” And then he did it. He actually winked at her.
“You make me actually feel like I’m not a hopeless cause,” Cara said, sitting back in her chair, feeling herself actually relax.
“You’re a work in progress, darlin’,” Jack said. “Same as me.”
26
It was nearly 10 a.m. when Bert finally walked through the front door at Bloom. He dropped the morning newspaper on the worktable and headed straight to the coffeepot, ignoring Cara’s pointed stares.
