Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
OLIVIA
Olivia swung open the door to the diner. It was warm and cheery, covered in soccer team photos from years past that Pop had sponsored. He’d even been the coach when Wells, her older brother, had been the right age.
The new management had kept the old name and left most things untouched, though the flowers that Pop had kept on every table were gone.
Familiar faces waved to her as she walked through. She spotted Lily near the back, talking to Pearl and a woman Olivia recognized from the last Fairwick Falls Christmas party.
Part of her desperately wanted to impress Pearl. She was cool and aloof in that give-no-fucks kind of way.
The fact that I have an all-consuming crush on her brother is unrelated, obviously.
She’d had to change the batteries in her vibrator this morning because she’d worn them out last night.
She clenched her core thinking about the night before. Those fucking enormous hands on my legs nearly made me come on the spot.
“Oh, hi, bestie,” Lily said, dragging Olivia out of her naughty memories.
“Hey you. Hey Pearl.” Olivia waved.
Pearl glared through narrowed, judging eyes. “Hey,” she said flatly.
That’s fine. I’m no stranger to winning people over. I’ll keep working on it.
The tall woman across from Pearl with peachy-pink hair stuck out her hand. “Allison, I work at Bloom with Lily.”
“Oh, I remember you from the Christmas party,” Olivia said, taking her hand and laughing. “I’ve already decided we’re going to be best friends.”
“I’m still so embarrassed.” Allison grimaced. She looked like an actual sweetheart in her pink plaid dress.
“That you shoved a cake in my brother’s face? Honestly, it was the best thing to happen to me last year,” Olivia said with a bright laugh. Allison had had some very strong, very negative feelings about Wells, Olivia’s brother, but he’d been tight-lipped about the reason why.
Allison smiled gratefully. “I’d ask for you to both join us, but we just finished up.”
“Hey,” Pearl said so sharply at Olivia that she jumped. “There’s a ladies’ night at the Thirsty Beaver. Next week. We’re going.” Pearl stood up.
“Oh…kay?” Olivia responded.
“What Pearl is trying to say is, you should come, too. It’ll be fun!” Allison said with a smile. “Lily will be there, and we can probably drag Rose and Violet away as well.”
Eeep! Friends!
“Count me in,” Olivia said, smiling brightly.
Pearl gave her a ghost of a smile as she left.
She joined Lily in a big booth.
“I desperately want Pearl to be my friend,” Olivia said, thunking her head against the back of the booth.
“Would it have something to do with the very tall, very handsome neighbor you see every day?”
She kicked Lily underneath the table with a glare. “Yes.”
“Hey, guys.” Jessica, one of the long-time diner waitresses, stopped at their table, looking frazzled.
“Hey Jess, I’ll get the apple-pie pancakes.”
“No,” Jessica said as she delivered drinks to the booth next to theirs.
“What do you mean no?” Olivia turned to Lily, who shrugged.
Jessica shook her head, disgusted. “We fired the kitchen staff last week, and the new staff is worse. Can’t order anything too complicated. Single ingredients only.”
Lily looked hopeful. “Can they do a vegan chef’s salad?”
“What do you think?” Jessica arched an eyebrow.
“Ugh, fine. Fries,” Lily said, handing her the menu.
Olivia handed in her menu. “Cheese on mine please.”
“No promises,” Jessica said with a battle-worn grimace and stalked off.
Olivia grabbed the small coffee pot that was always on each diner table. She poured both of them a cup of coffee.
“So,” Lily said happily, “catch me up, bestie. Ugh! Can you believe I get to say things like that to you in person? So exciting.”
Olivia dug through her huge bag and pulled out a stack of old photos. “My mom found these of us as a kid.”
“Oh my gosh,” Lily squealed as she laid out the photos. It was the two of them playing dress-up as kids, with terrible makeup and crazy clothes. “I loved playing Fashionistas with you.”
Olivia was surprised. “What did you call it?”
“That’s what we called it. Remember? We were fashionistas. We made our own outfits, and we had fashion shows…?”
“Oh,” Olivia said, looking at the photos again. “I thought—I don’t know—it was just the photos the one time.”
“No, we would do it every weekend!”
Olivia took a sip of coffee but then spit it right back into her cup as bitter, burger-flavored liquid filled her mouth. “Is this coffee… greasy?” she said in horror, smacking at her tongue.
“Don’t tell Pop,” Lily said, eyeing her untouched cup like it carried a disease. “It’s really bad now.”
“It might kill him,” Olivia said. “Maybe literally. The man’s eaten hamburgers and fries for eighty years.” She took a napkin and wiped the taste off her tongue.
She’d thought the milkshake incident had been a one-time thing.
“I’d have suggested going to Fox and Forrest, but there’s never an empty seat since this dumb company ruined the diner.” Lily scooted her cup of coffee further away like it might bite her. “So, tell me more about your neighbors.”
Olivia could sense an impending Lily inquisition. Better distract her. “What’s it like being the unofficial first lady of Fairwick Falls?”
“I will not allow your misdirection, thank you so much.”
Olivia rolled her eyes.
“This is for me to catch up with you, about your life and what you’re doing, Miss I’m-just-taking-a-few-months-off.” Lily arched a well-manicured eyebrow at her.
Olivia twisted a ketchup packet on the table, avoiding her gaze. “Maybe…” She sighed. Time to fess up. “Maybe I didn’t get renewed with the Salt Lake City Ballet.”
“What? No,” Lily said in surprise.
“See, that’s why I don’t want to tell people. I’m disappointing them.”
Lily squeezed her hand. “No, I’m sad for you.”
“I don’t like being pitied either,” Olivia said, taking a sip of coffee and then—Ugh, fuck!—spitting it back out again. “I just like having the reputation of the one who made it. You know? I was really good at that one thing, and now I’m not good at it anymore.”
“If I had ever had that reputation, I’m sure I wouldn’t want to lose it.” Lily squeezed her hand, and one tiny drop of shame evaporated.
It felt so good to feel seen.
“I mean, imagine how exciting your life is right now,” Olivia said, gesturing at her friend.
“Great husband, interesting job, lots of fun things in your future. That’s what I felt like at eighteen.
I had so much promise. Everybody talked about how big my career was going to be. ” She bit her lip, feeling disgusted.
“Your career was big. Is big,” Lily said, correcting herself. “You’ve been all over the world!”
“I’ve been mostly in the U.S., and Argentina one time,” Olivia corrected. “I’m terrified about my auditions in January. I’ll be so old.”
“You are the same age as me,” Lily said with a deadpan look.
“Which is perfectly fine in real life, but in ballet, it comes with compression socks and an AARP card.”
“Yikes,” Lily said. “Do you want to keep dancing?”
Olivia shrugged. “That’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at. Though”—she laughed at herself—“maybe I’m not even that, you know?”
“That’s not what I asked,” Lily said, giving her a pointed look.
“You’ve just seemed down the last few years.
You were practically mopey last Christmas at Pop’s retirement party.
Maybe it’s time for something new. Never in one million years did I expect to end up in my hometown and marry the boy I’d crushed on when I was six.
But—” She wiggled her eyebrows, taking a sip of coffee and then grimacing. “Shit, horrid,” she whispered.
“Like if burgers were made with battery acid,” Olivia said.
Lily nodded with grimace and shoved the cup to the end of the table. “Anyway, it’s all worked out. I get big O’s on the regular and big happy feelings when I launch new flower shops with my sisters.”
Jessica appeared, putting two plates of fries on their table. Olivia’s had a hunk of cold cheddar cheese on the side.
Jessica sighed, shaking her head as she walked away. “Best I could do.”
They burst out laughing. Lily shoved fries in her mouth. “These are passable. How’s your hunk of cheddar?”
Olivia poked at it, and it wobbled for some reason. “Pass.”
Lily’s phone buzzed repeatedly on the table. “Ah, shit on a stick. Rose is in a tizzy. We’re working on this new big location pitch, and she’s freaking out. Can we reschedule?”
“Maybe at a place where we can actually eat real food?” Olivia said with a smile, biting a fry.
“Done. I have to run.” Lily tossed some fries in a napkin and threw twenty dollars on the table. “Pray for me that Rose got some hot action this morning and won’t be on a tirade today. Love you, bye!” Lily ran around the back of the booth and kissed Olivia on the top of her head on her way out.
Olivia broke off a chunk of the wobbly cheese and paired it with a fry.
As she contemplated giving up on this very sad lunch, a familiar face and six-five frame appeared unexpectedly.
Wells, her older brother, walked quickly from the kitchen galley, ducking down behind the back of the booths as he made his way toward Olivia.
Wells lived in Philly over five hours away and worked non-stop as a divorce attorney. She loved seeing him, but it was rare to run into him without months of planning given his job.
“Wellesley Ethan Maroo, what are you doing here?” Olivia said, shocked. Befuddled, even.
Wells shushed her and ducked into her booth in the back of the restaurant. He wore a suit and expensive tie, and the roundness of his tummy pressed against the edge of the table as he attempted to make himself smaller.
“Don’t say my name out loud. Don’t want people to know I’m here,” Wells whispered in a panic.
“Tell that to your not-see-through linebacker body, weirdo. Why the hell were you in the kitchen? Are you responsible for this chunk of cheddar not being on my fries?” She tossed a fry at him.
“Well.” He grimaced, slinking further into the booth. “Sort of.”
She squinted, knowing him well enough to know some game was afoot. “What does a divorce attorney have to do with shitty cheese fries?”
“You have to keep this a secret.” He leaned over the table to her, his face as serious as a heart attack.
Her hair tingled on the back of her neck. “Wells, what did you do?”
Wells regularly took matters into his own well-meaning hands, and Olivia had spent her life watching the chaos he left in his wake. It always turned out better in the end, but people usually lost their shit along the way.
“I, um.” He looked over his shoulder. “I bought the diner.”
“What?” she yelled. He covered her mouth. She did the age-old younger sibling trick: licking his palm.
“Eeeugh,” he groaned, yanking his hand away. “What are you, ten?”
“Does Pop know?”
He wiped his hand on a napkin in disgust. “Of course not.”
“That’s why Mom said you’ve been popping into town more and more.”
Wells sighed, adjusting his cuffs. “I just wanted Pop to have a good retirement. Nobody was going to buy a small restaurant in Fairwick Falls that had an outdated kitchen, outdated electrical, outdated everything. The only thing good about it was the food that the owner cooked.”
He grabbed a fry and took a bite of a rubbery piece and then spit it back out into a napkin. “This is the second staff I’ve gone through. I’m going to have to fire this team and bring in a third one.”
“Wells, you are running this place into the ground,” Olivia whispered, now panicked. “What if Pop finds out? Oh god, what if Mom finds out. She will lawyer at you until your ears bleed.”
The desperation in his eyes magnified. “They won’t because it’s all a secret, and you can keep your mouth shut. Hey, you’re looking for a job, right? Can you cook…?”
Olivia leveled a gaze at him.
Wells shook his head. “Right, obviously not. Oh, fuck.” He collapsed back down in the booth.
Olivia turned, seeing if someone had come in. “Is it Pop?”
“Nope.”
Allison, Pearl’s friend, was talking with someone outside the diner window behind them.
“Is she coming in?” he asked, trying to peer over the booth.
“No,” she said slowly, remembering the whole cake-in-Wells’s-face incident from Pop’s Christmas party. “Look, you’re usually all over the place, but you’re acting crazy. What’s the deal?”
“None of your business,” he responded from under the table.
“Oh wait, never mind. She is walking in, holding a single piece of cake.”
A middle finger rose above the table at her.
“Wells!”
“Okay, I honked at her this morning—”
“Jesus.” Olivia wiped a hand down her face.
“It was a petty attempt at payback. She was crossing the street. I was at a stop sign, and she spilled her latte all over her shirt in surprise. She was about to climb onto my hood if I hadn’t three-point turned out of there.”
Olivia munched on another cold fry, wanting the dirt on her brother. “Why does a random woman who moved to Fairwick Falls hate you so much? And why don’t you like her?”
His eyes narrowed. “Oh, it’s moved beyond don’t like. Someone—I’m assuming her—signed me up for every cat facts-style text messaging system she could find. It started after the cake fiasco, so I assume it was her.”
He held up his phone and three new text messages came through.
Endangered llamas in Peru need your help. Scan your passport to get started!
Click here for hot new CAT FACTS in your area
Doctors hate this one weird trick—try vinegar bombs today!!
“I can’t block them fast enough. Can you run interference so I can get to my car?” He pointed to the street.
Olivia’s cheeks were practically aching from smiling. “She’s a genius. Never in a million years would I have thought to spam you as a hobby.”
“I’d hope my sister doesn’t hate me.”
“Fine,” Olivia sighed and rifled through her purse for her sunglasses.
“Hey,” Wells said, stopping her, crouched down so that no one would see him. “You look… better.”
“Than what?” Olivia said with a bemused smile.
“Than the last time I saw you.” He’d stopped in Salt Lake City a few months ago, right before she’d gotten the news that her contract wouldn’t be renewed. She’d assumed he’d wanted to see her dance, but maybe?
Maybe he’d been checking on me.
“How am I different?” she said, surprised.
“You look… happier. Just keep doing whatever you’re doing, freckles.” He looked almost like he’d been worried about her.
Her heart melted for her chaos, golden-boy older brother who had always kept one eye out for her.
“Now go,” he said, shooing her. “Just walk her away from my car before she keys it. The next county is preferable. Bye. Anddon’ttellMom,” he added quickly at the end.
“Love you, too, weirdo,” she said, sticking her tongue out.
She’d left Pop’s sooner than she’d anticipated, still starving, but somehow her heart felt completely full.