Chapter 31 #2
Jamie must have detected some of Drake’s unease, because he brought up the pancakes again. He hoped Beth didn’t mind the pancakes at Nathan’s instead.
“No,” Drake told him. “Nathan’s pancakes are fine.”
Jamie leaned forward. “Good. Good.” He closed the paper. “Although I’m thinking Beth Nielson would know better than to believe Smithe’s Dairy would still be running their weekend pancake deal. Especially with all the bits your mom has going with Marla Smithe.”
“Bits?” Drake asked. “What bits?”
“Oh, you know. They moo at each other when Beth walks in the door, for one. Because, Dairy .”
“They …they moo at each other?” Drake had never known his mom to moo.
Jamie brushed this revelation aside. “You’re not here for the party,” he reiterated. “And I’m getting the sense you’re not here for the pancakes. So, what brought you to town today, bud?”
Panic set in. Drake didn’t want to admit that he was on his way to see Melinda, but the truth was obvious. “I was driving to my mom’s,” he started. “For advice, I guess. I wanted some advice, and then …” Drake made the motion of heading past the condo with his arms. “I went to the shop instead.”
“Ah.” Jamie nodded. “So, you need advice. From someone who’s not your mom.”
“I don’t know … maybe,” Drake admitted. That was why he had gone there, he realized. He had wanted advice from someone who knew what he was like in a relationship. And the best person for that would be, of course, Melinda.
“Well, Melinda’s busy with the whole party thing, but why don’t you try me?” Jamie suggested.
Drake hesitated. It was hard to believe he was this calm talking to Melinda’s husband.
Was he calm? He wiped his forehead. He wasn’t sweating.
Jamie was easy to talk to, and Drake feared he might be having a good time.
“Well,” he started. Some of the story slipped out.
Then, a lot of it. Drake was spilling his guts about Ellie, minus the magical theater.
He even admitted to repeating things he’d done with Melinda all over again in their relationship.
Now, Ellie was repeating what Melinda had done to him.
“She’s going to call off the wedding. I’m sure of it. ”
“Slow down,” Jamie said, holding a hand up. “How do you know that?”
Drake explained that Ellie had a habit of locking people out.
Leaving without saying goodbye. Jumping ship.
“You seem pretty focused on the past,” Jamie pointed out. “And who you both were with other people. Which isn’t all that relevant now. Frankly, it sounds pretty unhelpful.”
Drake nodded. He took a sip of his coffee. “I guess I’m thinking about the past because I’m hoping it’ll show me what’s going to happen with Ellie. Maybe even explain why she wants to be with me .”
“Why?” Jamie asked. “You seem like a great guy. Very goodlooking.” Jamie pointed between the two of them. “Yes, I’ve noted the resemblance. So why do you question that?”
“Because she’s amazing,” Drake said. “She’s confident and adventurous. She’s talented. She’s passionate . She, she pours herself into things without thinking about why she shouldn’t and goes for what she wants.”
“And you’re not those things?” Jamie clarified. “Passionate? You don’t go for what you want?”
“Not really,” Drake said. “I’m not great at taking risks. New endeavors. That kind of thing.” It was uncomfortable to admit this truth out loud, especially to someone he’d met only a few times.
“Well,” Jamie said, placing his hands on the table. “I think you need to trust Ellie when she says she wants to be with you, man. And I think, for your own sake, you need to go after what you want in life.”
“Just like that?” Drake asked.
“Just like that.”
When the food arrived, Jamie loaded his pancakes up with butter and syrup. They talked about the town and its traditions as they ate. When they were finishing up, Jamie signaled for Cindy to come back. “We’ll take an order of pancakes to go,” he told her. “This is Beth Nielson’s son, by the way.”
“Oh, I love Beth!” Cindy said. “Get that coffee in my belly!” she shouted, pointing at Drake before she walked away. Jamie laughed at a punchline that Drake didn’t understand.
“What was that?”
“Another one of your mom’s bits,” Jamie explained.
Seeing Jamie’s comfort in the place where he grew up and ease with Cindy made Drake realize something about the booth.
He had thought this was his booth with Melinda, but it wasn’t.
Restaurant booths, and the people in them, were always evolving.
Drake wasn’t meant to sit there forever, and Melinda had made new memories there with Jamie.
Now, it was their booth—a place where the two of them talked about their friends, the store, and philosophies on life.
“Well,” Jamie said once the check was wrapped up, “you ready? I’ve got to get back to the party. You know how Melinda is with setting things up.”
Drake nodded. He recalled the gathering she’d once thrown on his birthday. Thirty minutes before their guests arrived, the kitchen had sounded like a full brass band was clattering around. “Yeah,” he said eventually with a chuckle. “I do know, actually.”
Drake’s dad was out for a walk when he arrived with the pancakes.
His mom, delighted over the unexpected drop-in, started asking too many questions about why he was there.
A show starring two sisters who renovated tiny homes was on television.
Beth was such a creature of habit that Drake had correctly predicted the exact outfit she’d be wearing when he walked in: navy sweatpants and her white sweater embroidered with London’s Big Ben.
As he often did when he arrived there, Drake fixed the leg on the kitchen table that always gave out.
Then his mom sat in one of the dining chairs and opened the Styrofoam food container, pouring the syrup on top of the pancakes and taking a big bite.
“They’re good,” she said. “Not like Smithe’s, but good.
” The credits for the show started rolling.
Drake already knew the show they liked about beach apartments would play next.
Beth spilled a little syrup on her sweater and wiped it with a napkin.
For some reason, Drake was fixated on that London sweater tonight. He was pretty sure he’d never asked his mom about it. It was an odd choice because it looked like something she would pick up on vacation, but Beth had never been to London. “Why London?” he asked.
“Hmm?” Beth paused midbite and glanced down at her own sweater again. “Oh this,” she said. “I bought it over at Clara’s a few years ago. She had it out on the display table next to all those candles.”
“But why?” Drake asked.
Beth chewed and shrugged. “What do you mean, why? Because your dad and I have wanted to go to London our whole lives. I saw that sweater and thought, that’s nice. It’s like going to London.”
She smiled. Her smile made Drake sad. He shook his head to indicate that he didn’t agree. “But it’s not at all like going to London,” he said, stealing a bite of her food. “It’s more like …You bought a travel sweater from a store you can walk to from your home. Why wouldn’t you just go to London?”
Beth took a few more bites of pancake. “What’s all this about?” she asked.
“I want to know why you never went.”
His mom proceeded to list a series of small, but inconvenient, events that could potentially take place if they traveled internationally.
She mentioned some kind of ticket fraud.
They could get food poisoning and be far from her doctors.
There were loads of scams there; she’d seen a special about London scams on television.
“Plus, why leave this place when it has everything we need?”
“Because …” Drake started. He felt his eyes water a little bit.
Something clicked together in his mind. A part of him understood Ellie more, her resistance to the mundane, her desire to push him toward what was special in life.
“Somewhere out there could be a great thing,” he said, paraphrasing what she had told him when they first met.
“The best thing ever might be a place you haven’t gone to yet.
And by staying here, you’re missing it.”
Drake’s phone beeped. Ellie . Ellie was texting him.
He rummaged around to find his phone. Only the message wasn’t from her.
It was Marc. Baby’s coming soon , it read.
Head over when you can. Ellie and Drake were on call since their friends’ parents hadn’t flown in yet.
Drake showed Beth what the text said, gave her a kiss on the cheek, and flew out the door to drive to the hospital as fast as he could.
It wasn’t just about the London sweater, Drake realized in his car.
His parents’ life was a series of comfortable decisions. It was safer to stay in the familiar than to risk something new, they had taught him, on repeat. Flying to London could come with food poisoning and travel scams. Taking any kind of risk was to be avoided.
There it was: the lesson he had been taught growing up. Taking risks led to pain.
When Drake was young, he’d taken risks anyway.
He bought every girl in class a Valentine’s gift.
But Drake stayed in the safe zone after that day, hadn’t he?
He volunteered to become the school mascot instead of going out for the basketball team.
He worked for someone else instead of starting his own business.
He didn’t tell Melinda that he really wanted kids because it would disappoint her.
And then, when Drake finally put himself on the line again with a proposal, it came back to bite him.
So Drake returned to a life of familiarity.
He changed jobs to something even safer.
He ate at the same three restaurants. And when he met Ellie, he re-created all the special parts of his last relationship without even realizing it.
He’d regurgitated lines Melinda once loved, brought up things she’d laughed at, and repeated moments she found charming. He gave Ellie the same ring.
None of it was fair. Ellie and Melinda weren’t the same person.
Ellie nudged him in ways Melinda never had. What did he want? Where was he going next? What new place could they try that night? Didn’t he want to visit a magical movie theater that would reveal things they needed to see about themselves?
She had her flaws. He was still irritated by how brash she could be. But Drake loved Ellie, fiercely and passionately. Marrying her was a risk, he knew—an exciting, beautiful risk he couldn’t wait to take.
Maybe the cinema had been trying to tell him this.
There was a memory they’d only seen the first few minutes of—the one that started playing the night of Ben’s death, before Ellie left the theater.
Drake and his dad went on a long ride out into the woods for a camping trip.
Only the first moments of the drive made the screen, but Drake remembered everything that followed.
After they set up the tent, his dad gave him the jean jacket he still wore.
They didn’t camp much, so Robert insisted they not leave the area.
But in the middle of the night, Drake couldn’t sleep.
He hiked out for a few minutes on his own to a small lake they had passed earlier in the day.
The moon and the stars were reflected in the water.
Then, a shooting star. Drake was in awe that he’d seen something so serene.
He thought about waking up his dad to join him, but knew he wouldn’t come.
He was sad that his dad was missing out on something this special.
Drake turned onto Main Street again; it was the fastest route to the highway.
The party at My Mother’s Shop was just beginning.
He could see Melinda inside. She was helping a woman pick out a light pink dress.
It was a party that, without Ellie, wouldn’t have existed.
Her article had come out the week before, and people were already vying to get inside.
Ellie, he realized, despite her love of the vintage, the decaying, the almost-broken, wasn’t a collector of old things at all.
She saw the new possibility in them. And in him.
Melinda must have noticed his car had slowed outside because she looked up and waved through the window.
Drake smiled and waved back. Then, she was interrupted by something.
Jamie was passing out appetizers on a plate and stopped to give her one.
He kissed her. They looked happy there, in this life, and Drake got the sense they were exactly where they were supposed to be.
He was headed that way, too.