Page 8 of Another Last Call
No one.
I should have invested some of my tip money in the sex toy industry, given how many I was buying. My reputation as a server was that I was quick and accurate, but cynical and surly. If people knew how long it had been since I’d gotten laid, they’d understand why I was cranky all the time.
That, and because this was the rest of my life. Mom had bought The Sea Glass as an investment after she got pregnant, figuring that at least she’d be guaranteed a job and a steady income that way. And she’d been right, mostly. We’d always had enough to get by.
But we’d never had enough for me to even think about leaving. I graduated high school and watched as my friends left one-by-one, off to different cities and colleges and universities, while I stayed in Marble Beach with my mom. One day she’d retire, and she’d pass The Sea Glass down to me, and I’d replace her as the eccentric lady behind the bar.
I didn’t mind it. Not really. Without The Sea Glass, I didn’t know what I would do. I had never worked anywhere else. Even if I had the means to move away from Marble Beach, I’d just end up being a server at some other dive. At least here, I had my mom, and I didn’t have to pay rent.
And I loved Marble Beach. I did. Crushing loneliness and pig-headed tourists aside, it was a beautiful place with beautiful people. I liked the work; I liked that The Sea Glass wasourplace, that my mom and I had made it what it was.
I just kind of wished I wasn’t so alone.
The upside of being the owner’s daughter was that I often got to do what I wanted. One of those things was performing. Mom let me play music at the bar a couple of times a week, especially in the summer when she had seasonal help and didn’t need me to waitress all the time. As a kid, I’d begged her to buy me a guitar for Christmas one year, and she had. I had worked my ass off to learn to play it and was reasonably decent at it. Sometimes people came in just to see me play, which felt pretty good.
So at eight twenty-nine that night, I picked up my guitar case and headed back downstairs to the bar. Some of the locals cheered as I started setting up, and I smiled one of my increasingly rare smiles. Mom came over as I was settling in, kissing me on the cheek.
“Kick ass, sweetie,” she said.
“Yes, Mom,” I said, then started strumming my guitar and slipped into the world of music.
Six
Caleb
Ittookaboutaweek and a half before I started having second thoughts.
Between cleaning out the cabin, drawing up plans for my renovations, and driving back and forth from the nearest city to order supplies, I’d been busy enough that I hadn’t needed to think. Other than a couple of trips to the grocery store for essentials that I’d forgotten, I hadn’t even ventured out into the town part of Marble Beach.
I’d learned to work that way from my dad. Head down and focused on the project at hand until it was done. I knew how to manage my time and find the most efficient way to do any given task. It was one thing to work hard, but hard work without efficiency was just a waste of time.
“Time is money,” I’d said to him once.
He’d been sitting at his desk in his office at home. Mom had sent me up there to get him for dinner and he’d sighed as he closed his computer, muttering something about how there weren’t enough hours in the day anymore.
It was just meant to be a joke, but when I said what I said, he stopped and looked up at me, his brow furrowed.
“If that’s what you’ve learned from me, I’ve failed,” he said.
I must have looked confused. Dad stood up and put a hand on my shoulder as we turned to go to the kitchen.
“Time isn’t money, Caleb,” he said. “Time is all we have.”
To Dad, time was the reward. It wasn’t the thing to squander on something as stupid as money. I didn’t understand it back then. I thought he was just being typical Dad with his whole “money isn’t everything” philosophy.
But when he got sick, I got it. Time is all we have.
Until we don’t.
So that had been my work philosophy. Efficiency. Working as hard and as smart as I could so that I had as much time at the end as possible. And that’s how I was approaching the cabin renovation, right up until I got the massive delivery of materials I’d ordered.
The cabin was livable. I would never have said it wasn’t. But to compete with the other massive lake houses that dotted the shoreline, it was going to need a decent amount of work. And I couldseewhat I wanted. Besides the obvious upgrades—new cabinets, new countertops, upgraded fixtures in the bedrooms and living room and all that—I had grand plans to take the cabin to the next level.
Dark, gleaming hardwood throughout with heated floors beneath. A three-level deck facing the water with room for a hot tub on the lowest level. A steam shower in the basement bathroom and a large soaker tub in the master ensuite. A built-in wet bar. Every luxury that the other lake houses had that my dad had always scoffed about and deemed unnecessary.
I could see it all in my mind and had ordered everything I needed with confidence. But when the delivery truck got there and began unloading the supplies I’d bought into the garage…
“That’s the last of it,” the driver said, wiping his hands on his pants. “When’s your crew getting here?”
