Chapter 3
Two hours southwest of Bluebell Cove, Theo Maddox was on a date, sort of, with another restaurateur named Nellie Strong.
It was a sunny morning in late April, and they wore light jackets and strolled through the market of this quaint, idealistic, anonymous town, a town that was halfway between Theo’s home in Bluebell and Nellie’s home near Moosehead Lake.
This was where they’d finally decided to meet.
Nellie had a sharp eye for detail and an even more advanced palate than Theo’s, and she wanted to taste-test everything at the Friday market to see if she could “invigorate” her current restaurant menu.
It was a research mission. It was also a mission for Theo to see if the butterflies he’d felt for Nellie when they’d first met meant anything.
They’d been trying to go on a date since they met six months ago at a pre-Christmas “restaurateurs of Maine” meetup in Bangor, but their schedules hadn’t allowed a moment’s rest till now.
“I want to try that,” Nellie muttered, targeting a Swiss raclette place. She shot forward to get in line, expecting Theo to follow her.
Theo’s stomach heaved. The idea of eating a piece of bread plastered with hot, melted cheese at ten in the morning didn’t sit right with him. But he didn’t want to say no to Nellie.
As they waited, Nellie pulled out a little notebook and wrote down her ideas for her menu. He could hardly read her handwriting, but when he twitched to try to see more, to try to get a handle on what she was thinking, she hid her book against her chest and smiled.
“Sorry,” Theo said, drawing himself away from her. “I didn’t mean to read your secrets.”
Nellie laughed, but it was a sort of sinister laugh. “I think I’m a little in my head. I’ll try to just, I don’t know, enjoy myself?” She put the little book away, but she seemed to regret it immediately. She tapped her thighs with the tips of her fingers. “How was your drive?”
“It was good. I listened to an audiobook,” Theo said.
Nellie wrinkled her nose. “Do you call that reading?”
Theo was caught off guard. “I still read. I mean, I read when I have time?” But the truth was, with his demanding schedule at The Dockside, he often struggled to sit down with his physical books.
He adjusted his sunglasses, hoping that Nellie would at least ask him about the audiobook.
He loved the slightly creepy story with a historical element that surprised him.
But Nellie was talking about how reading was a commitment you had to make to yourself. “I always wake up at five in the morning to go running, read thirty pages, and get ready for my day at the restaurant,” Nellie declared.
“Wow.” Theo ached to be sarcastic with her, to ask her something like, “Have they contacted you about your award yet?” He smiled.
Maybe it would be good for him to date such a go-getter. Maybe she would rub off on him!
They reached the front of the line, where they ordered two raclettes, and Nellie asked the chef behind the counter how long he’d been in business. The chef was maybe in his late twenties, with a thick head of hair that—Theo guessed—would recede once the stresses of cooking caught up to him.
“I started working in restaurants in Boston after I graduated from culinary school,” the chef said as he spread cheese over their bread. “But it wasn’t for me. Too stressful. I always wanted to be my own boss.”
Theo felt as though he were talking to a previous version of himself. Rather than tell the chef to “lower his expectations for his life,” Theo asked him if raclette was all he specialized in.
“For now,” the chef said. “But I have plans to widen my reach. Melted cheese is only the beginning.”
“A great start,” Theo said, his smile false and his nostrils filled with the smell of stinky melted cheese.
“Good luck to you,” Nellie said, taking their plates while Theo paid.
Theo and Nellie walked to a nearby picnic table, where they sat, tasted their raclette, and people-watched.
Theo felt as though his throat was a big knot.
As Nellie chewed and swallowed and was unable to resist making additional notes to herself in her notebook, Theo thought back to his early days behind a market stall similar to the chef’s.
He’d been idealistic then. He couldn’t have known.
“Did you have a market stall like that?” Theo asked.
Nellie raised her chin and blinked at him. “What? No. I started in restaurants. I would never dream of backsliding into market stalls. Didn’t I tell you that back in October?”
Theo couldn’t remember much of what they’d discussed back then.
That night, there’d been so much food and wine and laughter.
After a mutual chef friend had introduced them, there’d been a bubbling expectation between Nellie and Theo.
He remembered thinking that he and Nellie had so much in common, that maybe, sometime down the line, they could merge their knowledge of restaurants, hire other people to manage the restaurants they now owned, and move somewhere warm—like Florida? —to open still more restaurants.
“Did you have a stall like that?” Nellie asked, frowning.
Theo nodded. “After I got out of high school, I went to culinary school, but I was up to my ears in debt. My dream of opening a restaurant down the line seemed silly or useless. I had no capital to get started, and the bank wouldn’t dream of offering me a loan.”
“Why didn’t you ask your parents?” Nellie asked, her lips glistening with oil from the melted cheese.
Theo wasn’t willing to get into the backstory of his parents, of why he wouldn’t have imagined asking for their help. He never told anyone about them on a first date, certainly. And he hardly dated anyone long enough to dig deep into the secrets of himself.
“They couldn’t help,” Theo said flatly.
“But they could have, like, co-signed a loan?” Nellie pushed it, raising her eyebrows.
Theo’s stomach churned with a mix of resentment and too much cheese.
Why did Nellie think she could tell him now what he should have done nearly twenty years ago?
Was she that much of a control freak? Why hadn’t Theo sensed this about her during their six months of correspondence?
Why hadn’t he felt it during their one night of drinking and laughter six months ago?
“I started a stall at the market to make ends meet,” Theo said, ignoring her prying eyes.
“Just looking at that guy with his melted cheese and bread makes me nostalgic. I was so sure that opening my own restaurant would get rid of all my problems. All I had to do was save enough to rent out a place in Bluebell Cove and create a name for myself in a community that had known me since I was a little kid. All I had were my dreams.”
“I guess it worked out for you,” Nellie said.
Theo bent his head and wiped his hands on his napkin.
Before them was a bustling market, filled with friendly families, mothers and fathers carrying babies, and teenagers grabbing sweet breakfast treats on their way to their friends’ places.
Neither he nor Nellie was from here, but it felt so much like Bluebell Cove, a community of friendly and fun-loving people that he would always love despite everything that had happened there.
With a strangled sigh, Theo said, “Listen. I’m not feeling so well.”
Nellie rolled her eyes just the slightest bit. “I have some medicine in my car?”
Theo shook his head, folded up the rest of his raclette, and stood.
He’d been looking forward to his date with Nellie for months and months.
He’d imagined them sitting in the sunshine, trying to dig into the facts of one another and learn as much as they could.
But he already understood Nellie to be a judgmental woman who’d been given everything she had.
He saw no future with her. And he knew he had to return to Bluebell Cove—as early as possible—and get to work.
The truth was, things at The Dockside weren’t running smoothly.
They hadn’t been for more than three years.
That was another reason he’d been at that meetup in October.
He’d wanted to ask his fellow restaurateurs for advice about how to proceed.
He’d wanted advice on “how not to run my own business into the ground.” But when he’d met Nellie, he’d been too embarrassed, thinking that she wouldn’t like him if he admitted how rough things were going.
“My restaurant is falling apart,” Theo said suddenly now, realizing that he didn’t have a future with Nellie anyway.
Nellie leaned against the picnic table and adjusted her sunglasses. Her tone was entirely dismissive but businesslike. “I’ll say it again. Have you taken out a loan?”
“They won’t give me anything else,” Theo said.
“How’s the rent at your current place? Have you considered moving properties?”
“I can’t move,” Theo said. “I have an old contract, and anything else is about three times as costly as what I have right now.”
Nellie groaned. Theo was empathetic to her plight. She’d thought she was coming on a research mission slash date with a “handsome chef from Bluebell Cove.” Instead, she had to listen to whatever this was. A sob-fest. Demands for advice.
“What’s the problem, then?” Nellie asked. “How are your overheads? What is your menu like?”
“I don’t know. I can’t keep up with the market.
Everything in Bluebell Cove changes so fast. During the summer, tourism is at an all-time high, which should be great for us.
But I’m watching all the restaurants and hotels surrounding me fill up, while I barely fill my tables during the lunch and dinner rush.
I’m at the end of my rope. And my food is… ”
“I know your food is good,” Nellie said, waving her hand. She sounded dismissive of that, too.
“How do you know?” Theo demanded.
Nellie laughed. “Do you think I’d go on a date with someone who couldn’t cook?
A friend of a friend knew you back in culinary school.
I asked around. She said you were the star pupil in the class, that you were going to go somewhere.
Well, it looks like she was wrong about that last part.
But cooking skills never leave you.” Nellie got up, finishing off the last of her raclette.
“If you’ll excuse me, I have to carry on.
I made a list of all the foods I want to buy while I’m here. ”
With that, Nellie headed back into the throng of market-goers, leaving Theo at the picnic table.
Tears threatened him, but he told himself to keep them at bay.
He refused to be seen as the failing chef who’d just been left thirty minutes into a bad date.
With his head held high, he walked back to his green pickup, then drove back to the highway.
When he spotted Bluebell Cove on the horizon, that quaint and cozy town on the edge of the sparkling and impossible-to-fathom Atlantic Ocean, his heart shot into his throat.
And when he pulled into the lot behind The Dockside, his beloved and failing restaurant, he tried to forget about Nellie, about the messages they’d sent one another over the months, about the ache he now felt now that she would no longer be a part of his life.
Dating was not easy. Some said it was worse than owning a restaurant.
Theo decided to focus on one over the other—maybe for the rest of time, or at least till they boarded up his restaurant and ran him out of town.