Page 36 of Another Last Call
“I’ve worked at this bar day in and day out since you were born. I was younger than you are now when I started running it, and everything turned out fine. So I’m taking a break. Next week, Steven and I are going on a road trip. It’s still warm enough to take his motorcycle down south. I might even buy one of my own.”
“Down south? How long are you going for?”
“Well, until we can come back up after the snow melts.”
My entire world had just changed around me, and my brain still hadn’t quite caught up. Mom patiently stood up, wandering to my kitchen and busying herself making coffee. When she came back a few minutes later with two steaming mugs, I took it gratefully.
“Why didn’t you talk to me before doing any of this?”
My mom, the eccentric astrologist, the quick-witted bartender, the woman who loved to shake things up and throw people off, grinned at me.
“Mercury is in retrograde and I’m an agent of its chaos.”
Nineteen
Caleb
Ihadn’tintendedtokeep what I was doing from Maggie.
Truly.
She was so completely consumed with raising money for The Sea Glass that I barely had a chance to talk to her. And I didn’t want to get her hopes up if things didn’t work out.
I’d approached Josie at the fundraising dinner Maggie had planned. After all,shewas the business owner. And if she wasn’t interested in my proposal, that would be that. All I’d intended was to ask her what her opinion on the matter was.
“I’m of the opinion that you’re crazy,” she said when I explained my idea, but asked if she could sit with it for a bit, which was more than reasonable.
What was slightly less reasonable was her showing up at my cabin unannounced.
That same night, after the fundraising dinner.
At two a.m.
“Josie?” I said groggily when I answered the pounding at the door. “What’re you—”
“So this is the infamous cabin,” she said.
I blinked the sleep out of my eyes. “Mags told you about that?”
She nodded. “Let me see this place, will you?”
“Uh… okay.”
I let her in and gave her the same tour I’d given Maggie, albeit in a way that felt far more surreal given that I was in a baggy pair of sweats and a hastily pulled on hoodie while Josie wore the same floor-length skirt and leather vest she’d been wearing at the dinner. She was interested in the renovations, asking about paint colours and flooring types, about how I knew what to do and what experience I had. Finally, I took her out on the deck so I could explain my vision for the backyard.
I don’t know that she heard a word of it. Instead, she walked to the railing, staring out at the stars reflecting on the smooth glass of the lake.
“God, Caleb,” she said. “This view is priceless.”
I nodded. “We spent almost all our time out here when I was a kid. Dinner at that table there every night, unless it was raining.” I sighed, staring at the empty chairs surrounding it. “The lake is the whole purpose of the house. Hopefully, whoever buys it will see things the same way.”
She was silent for a moment, then turned and leaned against the railing. “Hon, I gotta ask one thing before we get down to it. Don’t take it the wrong way.”
My shoulders tensed and I hoped she wasn’t about to ask about what happened between me and Maggie. “What’s that?”
“Why do you want to own half the business?” She folded her arms across her chest. “You’ve got money. You’ve got this house. You don’tneedto be the part owner of a dive bar in a tourist town. Frankly, if I agree to this, you’re not going to make back what you put into it for a very, very long time. So why not just walk away?”
I almost told her about Todd, the fucking bastard, but held it back. If I knew anything about Josie and Maggie, it was that Maggie’s way of handling asshole customers was a sore spot between them. And even though Maggie would probably be pissed at me, I didn’t want to do something that would cause tension between her and her mom.
