Chapter Thirty-four
Cole
“Ah, there he is.” Doc was the first to notice and turn as Cole walked in through the creaky screen door.
Jo scooted her chair back from the table and hurried over to him, her arms outstretched. “Bless your heart. You must be wiped out. Need some coffee or something? Have you eaten anything?”
“I’m fine. Thanks.” Cole gave her a one-armed hug. Truthfully, he wasn’t feeling very warm and huggy toward any of them at the moment.
Getting out of New York had been easy. You know, if you didn’t take into account that every second he was getting farther and farther away from Laila, he was obsessing over his mistakes. He was pretty sure he had made the right decisions about the big things. He’d had to cut his trip short and go back to Adelaide Springs, and he still didn’t see any realistic options, long term, that could keep him from moving away. Even if he could get over the pain of having Cassidy’s taken away from him, facts were facts. Cooking was his only employable skill and his only passion (again . . . employable). It was all the little short-term things that he was pretty sure he was screwing up.
He should have asked Laila to come home with him. Right? Couldn’t he have found a way to make sure their Adelaide Springs goodbye didn’t really feel like a goodbye? Because it wasn’t goodbye. Right? Regardless, why had he not made their New York goodbye better than that? As he’d left her there, only turning back long enough to smile and wave one more time, he’d been going for cool and casual. See? No big thing. I’ll probably see you at Christmas. But what had that left her thinking? Had cool and casual translated to indifference once exposed to the open air?
If she hadn’t picked up an indifference vibe from that, she almost certainly had from, “Hey, Milo Ventimiglia, nice to meet you. You two kids have fun now,” or whatever he’d said to her date. Her actual date.Her actual celebrity date who, Cole was not ashamed to admit, was the most attractive man he had ever seen in person (and he and Laila were ninety-six percent sure they had been seated across the aisle from Dermot Mulroney at the Australian Bee Gees Show in Las Vegas, so he knew a thing or two about good-looking celebrity men). But what could he have done? Was he supposed to pull Milo aside and explain the situation? Ask him not to be as enchanted and beguiled by her as he was of course going to be, because how could he possibly not be? And hey, while he was at it, could he be just a little less handsome? That’d be great. Thanks so much. Should he have slipped Sebastian a hundo and implored him to break things up if he spotted any sparks igniting?
It had been a very long day, and Cole was legitimately disturbed that thoughts about surreptitiously bribing his extremely wealthy friend to commit relational sabotage had become commonplace before he’d even crossed back over the Mississippi River.
He’d gotten to Denver by 2:30 p.m. mountain time, but mechanical issues with the commuter jet had resulted in the cancellation of the day’s last flight to Telluride. And, of course, if he couldn’t get to Telluride, he couldn’t get to Adelaide Springs. At least not the relatively easy way. Rather than wait until morning, he’d rented a car and driven the 250 miles home. The 250 mountain miles home. So he’d had nearly five hours to come up with a bunch more things he should have done differently. That had been fun.
But still, none of that was what had caused him to greet everyone with such an un-huggy disposition. It was the most recent text he had received from his mother, just as he was pulling into town, that had done the trick.
We’re at the bar. Can’t wait to see you! xoxo
Whose genius idea had it been to meet at Cassidy’s?
“You sure you don’t want some coffee?” Jo asked again, ushering him to a seat at the big six-top in the center of the room. “Owen left it warming for you.”
“Who’s Owen?”
“Oh my goodness, would you look at my little boy? When did you become a full-grown man?”
Cole caught Doc looking at him as Cassidy made her way back in from the restroom, so he controlled the eye roll that was desperate to break free, but a little good, old-fashioned sassing his mother was unavoidable. “It’s been about twenty years now, Mom.”
She chuckled. “You know what I mean. Come here, you.”
He stood from the seat he hadn’t wanted to sit down in anyway and hugged his mom like a good boy. If he hadn’t been so tired, and if every single emotional trigger he had hadn’t already been set off, he probably would have been genuinely happy to see her. As it was, it wasn’t that he was unhappy to see her. More just that he had bigger fish to fry, and very little oil left in the pan.
“Okay, Doc. Get me caught up.”
Cassidy looked behind her toward the door as she sat next to Cole. “Shouldn’t we wait for Laila?”
Cole’s eyes flashed to Doc. “Was Laila supposed to come? You didn’t mention that she needed to be here.”
Doc shook his head slowly. “Nope. Not necessarily.”
“Oh. Sorry,” Cassidy said. “I just assumed, I guess. I’d love to see her before I fly out in the morn—”
Cole pushed away from the table, causing the chair—those stupid wooden chairs his grandfather had spent hours and hours carving spruce tree and antler designs into the back of even though Cole had wanted something simpler and had then been stuck with them for fifteen years—to fall backward to the floor as he stood. “She’s not here. She stayed in New York. Now can we all please stop acting like Laila and I can’t go anywhere without each other? I can function without her, you know. I’m a grown man who is perfectly capable of—”
He interrupted himself with an abrupt, angry groan. Even he wasn’t buying it. He huffed over to the bar and squeezed the edge of it between his hands, pushing himself off of it and then lowering back down almost like he was doing push-ups. “This is my bar.” He said it softly. To himself. And then he turned to face the six wary eyes looking at him like he was their rabid dog they were really hoping they wouldn’t have to put down.
“This is my bar!” It was a shout, accompanied by a swift kick of the barstool next to him, causing it to clatter and roll until its journey was interrupted by the legs of a four-top. “This is my bar. My restaurant. And he just took it from me. And yes, yes, I know it was never really mine. But you begin to think of things that way. You know? And is that so bad? Isn’t it a good thing to love something so much that you feel like it’s yours, even if it never really was? It’s good for the restaurant, right? Good for the business. Is anyone else ever going to love this place as much as I did?”
He kept facing them but pointed behind him to the kitchen. “Who else is going to spend hours upon hours every week making sure it’s spotless back there? What, is Owen going to do that?”
Even Cole instantly knew that was a weak thread he was pulling at. Of course someone was going to clean the kitchen. Even business owners without a shred of love in their hearts don’t want health-code violations.
“And the coffee?” Yep. There we go. Much better accusation. “He left the coffee warming? With no employees here? Who’s taking responsibility for that? Is the insurance even in his name yet?”
He went behind the bar, switched off the burners, and carried the pot to the sink. As he watched the rich brown liquid circle down the drain and the aroma hit his nose, he sort of regretted that. But he moved on from regret pretty quickly when his eye caught sight of the lost-and-found bin under the bar.
“And this!” He grabbed the box after setting the hot carafe on the top, cooled burner out of habit and briefly wishing he had set it on the hot burner so someone else would have to deal with the scalded glass for once. “The way people leave stuff here.” Cole rifled through the lost objects with his hand while staring emphatically at Doc, Jo, and his mother. “It’s not because they’re careless. Not usually. It’s because they’re so comfortable here that they don’t think about checking their pockets to make sure they have everything before they go any more than they would make sure their books are still on the shelf at home each day. If they leave something, they’ll just get it tomorrow.”
He looked down at the objects and began lining them up on the bar top, one by one. “That’s why Lucinda always has a pair of sunglasses in the box. She just switches them out and grabs them next time. It’s why Fenton’s keys are in here.” Always. And that was in addition to the set Cole kept on a hook behind the soda machine. “Does Owen know to cut people off?? Does Owen recognize when Fenton’s had too much or when Roland’s blood sugar is dropping and he needs some orange juice? Is Owen going to make sure all twenty or twenty-five of the PTA ladies get home safely on Tuesday nights?”
Truth be told, he’d been struggling with that one himself since Sebastian had been around less. Owen might want to put someone on the payroll, just to deal with PTA night.
He spotted Maxine’s huge flip phone with the big, bold numbers on the keypad. The phone designed just for senior citizens. The one Cole had bought for her so she could call for help if she slipped and fell again when she was out walking Prince Charlemagne but which always seemed to be in the lost-and-found box, no matter how many times he returned it to her. He chuckled as he pulled it out, but the humor faded when he eyed a sliver of yellow plastic beneath it. He set the phone aside and tilted the box, and rolling down came three—no, wait, four—tubes of Burt’s Bees pomegranate lip balm. He pulled one out and stood it on its end next to Lucinda’s sunglasses. Then the second. The third. The fourth he kept in his hands a little longer, turning it over and over between his fingers before removing the lid and lifting it to his nose to see if it smelled as good as it tasted.
“Alright, son.” Doc stood and slowly made his way over to the bar, returning the chair and the stool to their proper positions as he passed. Then he released a heavy sigh just as a compassionate hand landed on Cole’s shoulder. “Why don’t you come over here and tell us what happened with you and Laila?”