Chapter Seventeen
Baby, I’ve been going crazy
’Cause you got me in that fight or flight
Tongue tied, up all night
Lost in your eyes, seeing starlight kind of vibe
—US Lyric Bot [@HourlyUS]
I tossed and turned the whole night, only one thought on my mind:
I might be falling for Jake again.
And I couldn’t.
Not when he’d be leaving. I’d been down this road before, so I knew what would happen. I’d fall for him, he’d fly off, and then nothing.
Jake and I had busy lives. If this livestream worked, I’d be off at college. He’d be planning for the tour. It wasn’t going to work.
I needed someone who’d be there for me when things got tough.
And that’s not what you got from guys like Jake.
I appreciated that he was helping the café, I really did.
But he was still a ghost for four years.
And while he told me he remembered everything I said, and the thought made me feel warm, I couldn’t stop wondering, did he only remember when he was actively reminded?
Why else had it been so easy to forget about me for so long?
If Jake really cared, wouldn’t he have shown up at the café before all of this happened?
Maybe Jake was just acting like this since he was finally here with me in person and I was right in front of him.
It didn’t mean his intentions were bad. People’s feelings tended to weaken and change when they were away from each other, didn’t they?
So it made sense that, now that he was physically here with me, he’d have a change of heart and revert to his old self in some ways.
But would everything stay that way when he left again and we were no longer together?
And even more important: Was it worth it to let my own feelings get deeper?
Now I knew the stories behind his stunts, and how I’d been wrong when I thought he’d gotten too busy to talk to me before because he was partying, when instead he’d just had a packed schedule with the band.
But regardless of the reason, he still lost touch with me and made the conscious choice to ignore me, just letting our relationship dissolve.
Would he be there for me if I ever needed him again?
I couldn’t let myself fall for someone I didn’t know I could always count on.
All right. I could handle this.
All I had to do was deal with this one little issue.
Okay, two issues, since there was still the fact the place I loved most in the entire world needed help.
Maybe two point five if you counted the hiding-the-truth-from-Mom fiasco and also the whole oh-God-what-if-I-go-off-to-college-and-Mom-isn’t-healed-and-everything-falls-apart-because-I’m-not-there-and-it’s-all-my-fault thing.
I sneezed.
Never mind. I had three issues.
Because last night, I got so distracted over my please-don’t-be-feelings for Jake that I forgot to shut my window before I went to bed and got lungfuls of pollen from the flowering tree outside my window all night.
My head pounded and my eyes watered. I was having a bad, bad, bad allergy day combined with not sleeping, and I needed to be dressed and at the café in . . . fifteen minutes.
I couldn’t do it.
“Hey, Mom,” I started, throwing open my bedroom door and sluggishly making my way toward the kitchen. “I know I’m saying this kind of late, but I don’t think I can make it to the ca—”
I didn’t finish my sentence. Mom sat at the kitchen table, poring over a letter, her lips pursed tight. One hand fisted in her hair, holding it out of her face, and her eyes were lined with worry.
I stopped in my tracks, feeling the cold kitchen tile through my socks. Unease settled over me.
“Mom?” I questioned cautiously. “What’s going on?”
Voice quiet, she said, “The landlord’s raising the rent.”
I could feel the entire world sweep out from under me.
This was what I’d been worried about ever since Mrs. Dodge mentioned she had to close up shop.
What if we had to close? I knew The Tiny Tiger wasn’t doing well, but what if we weren’t even given the chance to reach fall and see if things got better?
I swallowed, and my throat felt too dry. “Did it go up a lot? How high is rent now?”
Mom slid the letter across the table toward me. Forcing my feet to move, I walked over and picked it up. My already blurry eyes got even blurrier as I read the little black numbers over and over again.
It was high. Really high.
“What are we going to do?” I asked, my mind jumping to the cats.
Rumple, who went through his first owner dying, then found happiness and a home at the café.
Little Bunny, who’d become disabled for life and hopped around on three legs but felt safe staying with us until we could find her a family.
All the other cats who counted on the café as a sanctuary.
Me, who needed it too.
“Don’t cry, Lucy,” Mom said, mistaking my red-rimmed, allergy-watering eyes for tears and pulling me into a tight hug. “We’re going to be okay—you said the café’s been doing well this summer, right?”
I had told her that. My stomach churned. “Well . . .”
“I hate asking you this, because you know I want you to be able to decorate your dorm and spend your hard-earned money on yourself, but do you think you could give up your wages just for this month?” She pulled away from me to look down at the bill again and grimaced.
“And next month? That could help the numbers. I can make it up to you later, but we won’t get through till the fall unless—”
“I’ve already been giving up my paycheck,” I blurted out.
Mom’s jaw dropped. She shook her head slightly, like she misheard me. “What?”
I knitted my fingers together nervously. “You can’t add it to the total of what we have because it’s in there already.”
“But why?” Mom asked, perplexed. “That’s supposed to be for you.”
I was about ready to actually cry, not just look like it because of my allergies. “I had to,” I whispered. “Everyone’s going to Espresso Inc. I’m having trouble getting cats adopted out. It’s been, like, the worst summer ever.”
“But you said we were getting reservations, and—”
“I lied,” I admitted, feeling small and stupid.
Mom shook her head, angry and confused all at once. She’d never looked so disappointed in me. “But why, Luciana?”
“Because I wanted to be there for you,” I admitted. “I didn’t want you to worry. I thought I could take care of everything.”
The belief I’d been riding all summer suddenly sounded so weak and laughable. When I first took on the café, I’d felt so grown up and confident. Now I felt like I was six years old again, fessing up to my mother about a mess I made.
“You’ve been through so much with your leg, and I thought I was handling things and didn’t want to add to your problems,” I added.
Mom opened her mouth, but I pushed ahead.
“Don’t tell me it’s nothing, because I see you.
” Mom let out a shaky exhale, looking caught.
“I see the way you’re sore after physical therapy and how slow you move now and how frustrated you are because you can’t be doing what you love.
” I shut my eyes. “Because you trusted what you loved to me.”
Which I was supposed to protect.
“I just wanted the future to be okay. I thought I could fix everything. For you and the cats. For me. But I couldn’t.
” I laughed harshly at my own overconfidence.
“But you always talked about having an emergency fund, right?” I didn’t know how much was in it, just that Mom mentioned starting one years ago and saying it was important.
I never brought it up before because I didn’t want to be the one to finally make her use it.
But I guess that ship sailed. “You can use that, right?”
“Lucy,” Mom said carefully, her face going a shade paler. “We don’t have anything in the emergency fund anymore.”
The refrigerator could’ve chosen that moment to tip forward and squish me flat and it still would’ve been less shocking. “What?”
Mom took a deep breath. “I had to use it for my medical bills.”
“But don’t you have health insurance?” I asked, confused. “Aren’t they supposed to take care of us?”
“Our insurance has only been paying a percentage of the doctors’ visits,” Mom said quietly, looking crestfallen. “Between the surgery and the physical therapy I still need, there’s not enough money left to carry us through the low season like before.”
I felt sick, unable to breathe in a way that was not just my allergies. “Why didn’t you tell me things were that bad?”
“Because I didn’t want you to worry,” Mom said with a quiet sigh, echoing my exact words from a minute before.
We stared at each other a beat, realizing the irony.
“The money situation didn’t affect what you did in the café,” Mom explained. “You were already working as hard as you could. You didn’t need to have this burden when you already shouldn’t have had the responsibility of the café.”
Guilt seeped through me. Was she regretting trusting me? Did I endanger everything I was trying to protect?
Mom glanced down at her phone with a sigh. “Listen, we’ll talk about this later. I’ve got an appointment in twenty minutes to talk to the bank about a loan.”
A loan? Things were that bad?
She looked over at me. “I took a look at our website since you were asleep and saw we got some bookings for this morning. We can’t afford to miss a chance at having a cat adopted out.
” She shut her eyes for a moment and let out a deep breath through her mouth.
“If we have to close, we’re going to need to get them in as many good homes as possible, as quickly as we can.
The no-kill shelter here’s not going to be able to take them, since they’re already at full capacity. ”
“Okay,” I answered instinctively.
Every thought I had about asking Mom if I could skip work today vanished from my mind. I didn’t care that my head throbbed and my throat was scratchy and my eyes burned. I needed to be there. I refused to be someone who dipped when things got hard.