Page 8 of Fixed Up Ever After
Perhaps an elderly man passing the time while his wife knitted. Or a college student who had been told they needed to study the classics in order to graduate with the rest of their class. Perhaps it was a couple in their forties who read together nightly. Sometimes she got lost in all the places books traveled and sat for hours making up scenarios in her mind.
Her love of reading was somewhat of an anomaly. No one in her posh family owned books outside of decorative purposes. The hustle and bustle of work, marketing meetings, business dinners, and charity events stretched their time thin, leaving no room to curl up with a good book.
But Lola had found small moments of peace throughout school, going to the library or reading during lunchtime. It had been her own secret and a time for her to escape to fantasy worlds where dragons existed and Prince Charming was real.
The real world was far less exciting.
“Ma’am?” A gravelly voice startled her out of her memories and caused her to drop the stack of books she held to the ground. They missed her feet by centimeters, sparing her a cracked nail with her open shoes.
A russet-brown face peeked around the bookshelf, large dark brown eyes stared back at her. A feathered brow cocked up, looking between Lola and the burly man standing only a few feet away from her.
“Lo-Lo, you good?” Monique, her best friend since training bras, asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m good. Just lost in my thoughts,” she assured, knowing Mona—the nickname she bestowed upon her bestie—was quick to jump to her defense. It was a great quality to have in a best friend, but she would rather not displease the contractor she desperately needed in order to get her semi-bad investment off the ground.
“Cool, cool. Sandi and I are going to check out the espresso machine the old lady left behind and see if it works. You need anything?”
“Nope, you and Sandi enjoy,” Lola assured and heard a soft meow coming from Sandi. The cat had to be at least ten years old now since Mona was given the calico during her sophomore year in high school. The damn thing was mean but had formed a special bond with Mona, so now her friend took the old feline everywhere. Sandi only tolerated Lola, which was a lot more than most people.
“Can you repeat what you said? I’m sorry, I didn’t catch it the first time.” Lola used her best, professional voice—aka her white voice she’d inherited from her father’s side. Her Mexican mother had adopted the same voice when speaking to any of her father’s influential clients so as not to stand out as the brown girl amongst the sea of Caucasians. Here she was doing the same thing.
She would deal with that identity crisis later. Right now she needed to hear the verdict of the nearly dilapidated bookstore she had purchased.
“Well ma’am, it ain’t good.” The man said in a southern accent, one she didn’t hear much in Berkeley, California. “The foundation ain’t all that bad, though you have places of rot and mold. You’ll want to fix that before you let any customers inside here. You have an electrical problem, too, stemming from your backroom. It’s going to need to be completely reconfigured. Your water is also running brown. That ain’t what you want.”
Leave it to a man to tell her she didn’t want brown water running through her pipes. She knew very little about plumbing, electricity, and foundation integrity, but she knew enough to understand brown water wasn't good.
“Okay,” she said slowly, her brain already thinking of solutions. The only problem was that nothing was coming. “So can you fix it?”
“Sure, ma’am. But it’ll cost ya. And it’ll take time.”
“How much time?”
“I don’t know. Six to eight.”
“Weeks?”
“No, months.”
Lola’s jaw dropped. She shouldn’t be surprised. He wasn’t the first contractor to come by and give her a large timeline. The thing was that she didn’t have six to eight months to wait around. Each day that passed was more ammunition her mother would use against her to remind Lola how awful this purchase had been. Luciana would then remind her father why she shouldn’t have given Lola the money—money that was hers in the first place since the account had been started when she was a baby and given over to her as soon as she turned twenty-one.
“There is no way you can do it any faster?” she asked him, trying to hide the desperation in her voice, but failing miserably.
The man, looking like the country version of Jack Black, frowned, shaking his head. “No ma’am. We have a few jobs that we’d be working alongside yours and this place requires the most of our time. This is our busy season so if you want the job done right, it will take time.” He shrugged, clearly never having faced a Mexican mother with a vendetta against him.
So, Lola was back to square one. She refused to let this minor setback cause her to spiral into a full-blown anxiety attack, even if she wanted nothing more than to lie down and have a good cry.
“I can see you need time to think about it,” the man said. She wondered how much of a wreck she looked like right now to send a grown man scampering away. “I’ll leave you my business card and you can call me back once your mind is made up.”
The contractor rummaged through his deep pockets and pulled out a bent business card. She took it from him with a tight smile and led him out. “Thank you for your help,” she said as he left, locking the door behind him.
With an audible sigh, Lola leaned against the glass, letting her head hit the hard interior side of the door. Her move back to California and the ancient bookstore was not shaping up like she thought it would.
Lola’s obsession with books, history, and learning was the driving force that had brought her back to California. Florida had been her home for four years, but Berkeley was where she grew up. Her friends and some of the best memories lived here and she made a promise to herself that if the old bookstore on Addison Street ever became available for purchase, she would buy it.
Florida had been a nice break and helped her get over the sudden loss of her relationship with Archie and the expectations her family—namely her mother—had for her. Expectations she knew she would never live up to.
However, her life in Florida quickly became lonely. She hadn’t met many people except coworkers. She liked her previous job fine enough, but it wasn’t something she wanted to do for the rest of her life. It was something she did because it paid the bills and kept her busy.
