Chapter 12 #3
She was acting like making love on the riverbank hadn’t shattered her the way it had him. But he kind of thought it had. She was way too good for meaningless sex. And she was way too good for him, too.
He keyed in the passcode on the old iPad and tapped the Presentation icon.
When he hit play, a spinning image cartwheeled onto the page, then filled the screen.
The presentation was computer-generated, he realized, but it looked for all the world like the fully renovated Cantina from the outside, front, with the big sliding glass doors wide open, and the taco station and fire-and-water feature in place on the huge flagstone patio that used to be the parking lot.
On one side of the station, there were tables and people eating. On the other side, people were dancing.
The view panned into the new addition, over a gleaming dance floor, across the stage, and then behind it, where there were a pair of dressing rooms for guest bands.
Back inside, the presentation took him through the kitchen with its devoted veggie station and new cook surface in place, and then back through the dining room with the bar gleaming, the tables in place, new light fixtures.
He noticed each light fixture was different.
And the tables and chairs were in several different designs too, so he could see what each choice would look like in place.
Upstairs, she’d added a partition dividing the space into two offices, rather than one. He wondered if that was an effort to distance herself from him. Had making love driven them further apart instead of bringing them closer, as he’d feared?
The camera took him out the rear of the building to the new parking lot, then around the right side, where the new main entrance was a big set of double doors almost where the little shed used to be.
The presentation returned to the view from out front, and he saw that he could now manually click through each room. Every item she’d changed popped up with notes when he touched it. The whole thing was brilliant. On the final screen, he touched a summary tab.
She had the whole place laid out right there, as if it were already finished, everything they’d already agreed on and then some, with spaces for him to enter the amounts of the estimates from the contractors for each portion.
He tapped to open the app and figured out how to add his own notes to hers.
The stage needed more outlets for amps. The dressing room needed extra guitar strings and drumsticks and fiddle bows for emergencies.
And the mic…he wanted it to look old-fashioned, one of those fat rectangular ones with radio call letters on it, only it would say…
What would it say?
What was he going to name the place?
Breakfast was long over by the time Lily came downstairs. She’d overslept by hours and only realized during her shower that she hadn’t slept that well in weeks. One would think she’d released a little tension.
She’d meant it when she’d told Ethan that making love didn’t have to change anything. It had been…beautiful. Wonderful. Everything. And she hoped it would happen again. But she knew it might not.
As soon as Lily took her place at the fully set breakfast table, Garrett came and sat across from her.
She looked at him, then at the table, set for four. “Oh gosh, tell me you haven’t been waiting for me before having your breakfast,” she said.
Garrett leaned forward, holding a hand to one side of his mouth to stage-whisper, “If I’d eaten earlier, she’d have given me oatmeal, like most days.”
“Oatmeal’s good for you, especially considering what you have the rest of the day,” Chelsea said, heading in from the kitchen with platters of steaming food.
Lily didn’t know how the woman did it. She must’ve heard her moving around upstairs and started cooking immediately.
Her dad came from somewhere, rubbing his hands together. “Garrett waited for sausage. I, on the other hand, waited for you,” he said. “What took you so long?”
“I haven’t been sleeping, to be honest. I think it finally caught up with me. And by the way, oatmeal would be better for you, too, Dad.” But he was already scooping hash browns onto his plate.
Ethan’s chair remained empty. He’d had an early appointment with the bank.
“Bubba was out of here hours ago,” Garrett said. Lily didn’t know whether he’d read her thoughts or her eyes. “Chelsea, is it all right to call him Bubba when he’s not here?”
“I don’t think there are rules,” she said.
Garrett shrugged. “He was all worked up about the bank and the cantina.” He put three sausage patties onto his plate.
Chelsea reached out her fork and took two of them back.
He never missed a beat in his conversation.
“He said to tell you that you’re brilliant, and he’ll return your tablet when he sees you. ”
Chelsea said, “Brilliant, huh? What’s that about?”
“All I did was put everything we’ve talked about for the cantina into a presentation for him to show the bank.” Then, smiling, she said. “It was kind of cool. Animated and all.”
She took a cinnamon roll and looked at her coffee.
Reading her face, Chelsea said, “You want a travel mug for that?”
“She sure does,” Hyram said. “Here we waited breakfast, and she’s gonna take it to go.”
“I choose to believe she did it for me,” Garrett said, reaching for one of the sausages his wife had stolen. She slapped his hand, then rolled her eyes and let him have it.
Hyram said, “Take two of those cinnamon buns, honey. They were still in the oven when Ethan left so he didn’t get one.” He put extra emphasis on the name with a make-believe-scowl at Garrett.
Garrett shrugged. “Oh, sure, easy for you to say. He’s always been Ethan to you.”
“He’ll always be Bubba in our hearts,” Chelsea said.
She handed Lily two freshly filled travel mugs and put two oversized, glaze-dripping cinnamon buns into the big plasticware bowl she’d brought in from the kitchen.
“Make sure I get that dish back,” she said.
Then she shot Garrett a horrified look and said, “Ohmygosh, I’m old ! ”
“No, you’re not,” Lily said. “I’m the same way with my plasticware.”
“Me, too,” her father called out. “But I’m also old.”
“And I’m…the only one at the table without an opinion on plasticware,” Garrett said.
Lily blew them all a kiss, headed out to her car, drove toward Quinn proper, and straight on through to Mad Bull’s Bend. She didn’t bother with the highway. It was too nice a day. She drove the back roads with her windows down and flipped on the radio.
A familiar voice filled the car. Ethan’s voice, crooning his heart out in that lonely, longing song that had made her fall in love with Quinn before she’d ever seen it.
“Home.” She smiled and let the notes and his deep, rich tone wrap around her, and she sang along, but softly so she could still hear him.
She even added a little harmony, and wondered why tears sprang to her eyes when he sang the final lines,
Land of my biography
Too good for the likes of me
In my dreams, I’ll always be
Home
Her chest swelled with emotion. And more, a niggling in her mind that he really meant it. Ethan Brand thought Quinn, Texas was too good for him. He thought his family was too good for him. He thought she was too good for him, too.
The final note died and the DJ said, “That was Ethan Brand, roaring back onto the scene with a just dropped runaway hit that’s already burning up the charts, ‘Home.’”
An ad came on, so she lowered the volume. Runaway hit? Climbing the charts? Ethan hadn’t mentioned it. Though, obviously, they’d been focused been on other topics. Still, this was huge. Did he even know ?