Chapter 28
CHAPTER 28
CAROLINE
“Anything else, Todd?”
“Just the pie and the V, thanks Caro.”
“Eight fifty.”
Todd, a sheep farmer I’d known since I was stroller-sized, waved his phone over the machine and the transaction cleared. With one hand, he collected the can of energy drink and the brown bag with his savory meat pie and waved with an index finger. “See ya, Caro.”
Being back behind the counter at Levitate was like stepping out of a time machine. Last time I’d worked here, I’d been waging a war with teenage acne and saving to enroll in the Burlesque Studio in Wellington—from there, it was going to be a very easy and fast path to becoming an enormous success, with my own studio and my own apartment in the cool part of town. Teenage Caroline’s Magic 8 Ball had never given any indication things would derail as badly as they had.
Instead of fame, riches, and marabou, I had guilt, unusable airline miles, and a broken heart .
Nothing at Café Levitate had changed. Dad’s pride and joy was located down the end of Main Street. Our tables had laminated tops with black and white drawings of the Eiffel Tower on them—although neither the café nor the town had anything to do with Paris. The sign out on the shop face was brightly painted corrugated iron cut into the shape of a cup and saucer. The café smelled like coffee, and the blackboard above my head had the specials in spiky writing: today it was a bacon and egg pie and a medium flat white for six fifty. Bargain.
Levitate was Dad’s baby, and this place would always be my home. Despite what I’d said to Chase, Woodville wasn’t terrible. It was quaint and charming, if you liked that sort of thing.
I just didn’t.
Being back behind this counter made me feel like I needed to shed my skin. It didn’t fit. I’d outgrown it.
I thought of Chase constantly. Sweet, lovely, morally rigid Chase. His conviction that he knew what was best for everyone didn’t come from arrogance, I knew that. He was a good man. But he couldn’t flex to consider things from anyone’s perspective but his. He had a lot of empathy, but there was only so far that could take him—he just didn’t get it. He couldn’t. He would always try and fix things, and lock me in, and solve all my problems. That wasn’t what I wanted. If I wanted a sugar daddy, I could have gotten one. I didn’t want that.
I wanted him to tell me how much he loved me.
The bell above the door tinkled, the joyful sound mocking my misery. Two women in athleisure pushed strollers through the door, laughing and chatting. They chose a table by the door, and one of them waved to summon me.
Levitate didn’t do table service, as Monica Shailor-Chapman well knew, because she’d been coming in here since she was stroller-sized herself.
Wiping glasses, I pretended not to see her, and she pretended not to know I was pretending, and we carried on like that until she cracked and came to the counter .
“Hello! Sorry, do we come up to order—Caro? Oh my God, Caro Holliday? Is that you?”
“Kia ora, Mon,” I said through a big Summer Smile.
“Caro! You’re back!” She raked her eyes over me. “Wow! Last I heard, you were in the Big Apple working as a”—she reached down to cover the ears of the kid in her stroller—“ stripper .”
There wasn’t much point in explaining this stuff to Monica, as she was deeply committed to her narrow-mindedness. But still, I gave her the cliffnotes. Out of principle.
“I’m a burlesque artist,” I corrected. “That’s not the same as a stripper, but the art forms are linked. Burlesque owes everything to sex workers and strippers. New York was amazing. So were Melbourne and London. And Stockholm too. I’ve done burlesque in a lot of countries.”
I might not have been successful by New York standards, but Dolly darn it, I was by Woodville’s.
Monica’s lips thinned slightly. “Well, now you’re back. Making coffee. No place like home, aye?”
A piercing ring interrupted our conversation, saving Monica from having her tape-in extensions ripped out by the fistful.
The café phone was an old wall mount with a long curly cord and a dial that you had to jam your finger in and twirl. Dad didn’t see the point in upgrading something before it broke—which was why his cell phone looked like something you should be paving into a path. (Although it had come back to life after its third swim in the trough, which was impressive.)
“What can I get you, Mon?” I asked over the ringing phone. “The usual? Two paninis, two lattes?”
“Oat milk in hers, Caro!” Monica’s friend Tanya called from their table, bouncing a smiley baby on her knee. “Mon gets dairy farts!”
Monica shushed her.
“Kia ora, Tanz!” I waved as the phone stopped ringing then immediately started again.
“Kia ora, Caroline!” Tanz smiled. Hearing te reo spoken by wāhine Māori was beautiful. I hadn’t heard that in a long time. “Welcome home! I can’t wait to hear about your travels.”
I promised Mon and Tanz that we’d catch up at the pub this Friday as I put their order through. I considered making Monica’s with full dairy, but didn’t because I was a saint.
When the phone rang a third time, I answered it with my free hand.
“Hello! I am calling from The United States of America for Caroline Holliday,” a very familiar voice practically shouted. “Is she nearby?”
“Lyssa?”
“Care! Oh my God, finally. Your cell phone just went to voicemail!”
I’d forgotten to charge it. There didn’t seem to be any point. My world had shrunk down to waking up in the spare room at Dad’s place, then crossing the garden and going to the café. There was no point remembering anything outside of it.
“Sorry Lyss. It’s nice to hear from you.”
“I can’t believe our connection is so good, Care Bear! It’s like you’re down the block.”
“It’s not Mars, Lyss. I can hear you fine.”
Lyssa laughed. I could just picture her tossing her head back, masses of hair tumbling around her. Everyone in the café could hear her too. New Zealanders never enunciated anything, so an accent like Lyssa’s carried. Plus, she projected.
“I had to add so many weird numbers to call you!”
On hearing this, Monica tipped her eyes at Tanz. My Summer Smile became a depths-of-winter smile. I didn’t enjoy Monica at the best of times, and having her witness one of the lowest periods of my life felt especially cruel.
“Care Bear,” Lyssa started, “I need to tell you stuff, but can we do this call on FaceTime? And can you go outside into some nice scenery? I need a screenshot so I can show my followers the backdrop to my long-distance best-friendship.”
I wanted Lyssa to ask after my crushed spirit, my broken heart, or my wounded pride. Instead, she wanted to mine our relationship for content. Again.
“Care, are you there?—?”
I cracked.
“Lyssa, for the last time, it’s Caroline. I keep telling you, and you keep ignoring me. Caroline. Like Sweet, like Bancroft. Caroline. You were one of the few people in New York who knew my real name and you never said it.”
There was quiet at the end of the line. I felt bad for snapping. But also… no one should have to fight so hard just for their loved ones to say their name. It was a basic human right.
Lyssa broke the silence by saying quietly, “I’m sorry.”
“I’ve told you so many times, Lyssa.”
“I… I’m really sorry, Caroline. I thought it was cute to have a pet name only I called you. I thought of it like an exclusive friendship thing. Like a secret handshake. But better.”
I thought of how Chase called me Floss, how much warmth he loaded into it and how it made me smile.
“I want you to call me Caroline.” I thought about it. “But you can add cutesy nicknames after, if you want. That can be our special thing.”
“Yes! I love this for us, Caroline, my plucky honey badger.”
“You got it, Lyssa, sweet sugar plum.”
She laughed her big laugh, which let me know she’d forgiven me for snapping. “I love you, Caroline.”
“I love you too.”
I wanted to talk more, to hear about the stuff she had to say, and yes, to go find my phone so she could get her screenshot, but I had to say an abrupt goodbye, because Ghost, my cousin’s dog, pushed through the door and bounded into the café.
I told Lyssa I had to call her back.
“Read Chase’s blog!” she shouted just before I jammed the phone in the cradle.
Ghost was darting between the tables and barking excitedly, and Monica’s stroller-bound kid had a tomato sauce bottle and was squealing with glee as they aimed it at Ghost. Luckily, Tanz grabbed the dog by the collar and the kid fumbled the bottle, so we narrowly avoided sauce walls for the second time this week.
“I’ll take Ghost over to your dad’s house!” Tanz called, pulling a leash from somewhere in her stroller. “Looks like Dean and Hannah have called in.” Tanz clipped the lead on the collie’s collar next to the engraved tag that read “sorry 4 what I broke/ate” and had Dean’s number on the other side. “Back in five!” she said, towing him out the door.
“Can I get some more sauce?” Simon called from his usual table by the front door, wiggling the empty tomato bottle.
I got Simon his sauce, and then I cleaned the panini Mon’s kid had thrown on the floor and wiped their tables when they all left. Half of me wanted to hurry the cleaning to go and see Hannah and Dean. The other half wanted to slow down and delay the moment my cousin would ask why I was back from New York. Hannah was a sweetheart, but she was notorious for lying to spare people’s feelings—like those of her awful ex-husband—and I didn’t think I could handle her telling me that I hadn’t tanked everything and would somehow find a way to build the career of my dreams.
The thought made me even more blue, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. As I wiped tables, I reflected on my best show in Stockholm, where I was billed with performers who’d headlined Vegas. While I made coffees and fluffies for mums and kids in the school pickup rush, I thought about the black and white party, and Jessica, who had offered me a real job in Toronto. I thought and waved to the last customer of the day. Thought and tallied the till. Thought and cleaned the coffee machine.
My desire to delay Hannah’s well-meaning lies was so strong, and the preoccupation so intense, my brain completely skipped a track, and I forgot to call Lyssa back or read Chase’s blog.
I’d just thrown a load of tea towels in the wash when the doorbell tinkled.
“Sorry, we’re clo— Dad! What are you doing on your feet! ”
My dad’s knee replacement had gone well. He was able to move around for short periods on his crutches now, and his physical therapist said he was making great progress. Having to spend so much time with his feet up, not working in the café was a struggle for him, but Mike and I had stood firm. We let him in last week so he could sit and watch and talk smack with his favorite regulars, but he drove everyone on the coffee machine to distraction with his ‘helpful’ hints, and if we turned our backs on him for even a second he’d have a tea towel in his hand.
“Hey, Bucket,” he said, crutching across the imitation wood linoleum. “How was it in here today?”
“Good. Busy. I’m dying to sit down.”
“And dying to hug Hannah, right? She and Dean are staying for dinner to break up their trip. I told them they couldn’t drive another two hours without some of Mike’s mashed potatoes in their bellies. Now Hannah’s asleep on the couch and Mike’s talking Dean’s ear off about darts.”
“I can’t wait to see them.”
My dad eyeballed me. He might have been on pain meds, but he was still sharp as a showgirl’s winged liner. “Did your American friend get hold of you? Lyssa? She called the house and I gave her the café number.”
“Yeah, she did.” I tried to smile, but Dad was never fooled by a Summer Smile.
He balanced on one crutch and pulled out a chair at one of the four-seater tables. “You’ve got a while before Hannah wakes up. Time for a cuppa, I reckon. Have a seat, Bucket.”
I made our tea, and we sipped in companionable silence until my dad broke it.
“Have you seen the web log from the New York man about how much he loves you?”
I froze. “The what?”
“Web log? Mike said— I see from your face he was pulling my leg.”
“It’s just called a blog. ”
“A blog. Right. Do you love this blog man?”
My breath caught in my throat.
I did. But I didn’t want my dad to be the first person I told this to.
Instead, I said, “Maybe. Probably.”
“Did he not understand your dancing?”
Even though that’s what Dad called my burlesque, he was fiercely supportive. One time, one of his friends was gross to me about it, and Dad gave him an ear blistering so bad locals still sometimes quoted it to each other.
“Chase was slow to learn the difference between me and my performances,” I said slowly, leaving out the identity fraud part. “And to be fair, I made that difficult for him. But no, burlesque wasn’t the problem.”
“What then?”
“I had to come home, Dad. You were having a major operation! And I had to deal with all this.” I waved my arms at the café, as if the walls were the problem. “This place has been so close to going under! You nearly lost everything!”
“Bucket—”
“I took care of it, Dad.” My hands were shaking too badly to hold my tea, so I put it down. “I’m back now, and I did what I needed to do to be here. With you. You and Mike don’t need to worry. I’m going to keep the café afloat.”
My dad was quiet for a while.
At this time of day, Levitate was still, the only noises were the hum of the freezer and the tinkle of the wooden wind chimes over the back door. It wasn’t really any different from any other rural small-town café. They were a dime a dozen.
Except this one was important to my dad.
And he was very, very important to me.
“I’m sorry you felt you had to take this on your shoulders, Bucket,” my dad said softly.
I sniffed wetly. “How could I not? Mike told me you were up until three going over bills and budgets and marketing plans every night. You should be thinking about retiring, not learning about ad targeting. And web logs.” He laughed at that. I smiled a watery smile of my own. “I was the one off traveling the world. Being selfish.”
“It’s just a café, Caroline.”
“It’s your life.”
“No, no.” My dad put one of his massive, gnarled hands over mine. “It’s not. It’s just a café. It doesn’t matter if we have it or we don’t. What matters to me is you. You and Mikey. And Tessa, too. You’re my life. This?” He waved a hand. “It’s just bricks and mortar, kid.” My eyes welled over. Dad fished the hanky he always carried out of his pocket and gave it to me. “Don’t cry, Bucket. I’m fine. I have my health. The knee is coming along well, and the other one will last a bit longer yet. And if the café gets taken or the house gets taken, so what? I can always go live with Mike.”
We both laughed at that. I wouldn’t trust my brother with sole care of a goldfish, let alone a dad. Run a café and cook mashed potatoes? Mike could do. Look after a person’s emotional needs? Be present and steadfast, and home before one in the morning? Find someone else.
“If you want to go back overseas, Bucket, then go,” Dad said. “Just visit us more.”
If only it was that simple.
“Thanks.” I sniffed.
“Don’t thank me.” Dad said lightly. His cheerfulness was irrepressible, and always had been. “Your moping is driving away my customers. Even Ghost left here depressed.”
I laughed snottily.
Then Dad’s face sobered. “Caroline… I kept Levitate all these years because I wanted to be able to pass it to you two. I had this vision of a business that my grandkids would inherit and run. But this place isn’t your thing—you have your dancing. And Mike has given it his all here, but I know he has other things he wants to focus on. ”
I made a face. The idea of Mike having goals was hilarious.
“There’s a bloke who’s been trying to buy this place off me for years,” Dad said. “He owns a few cafés in neighboring towns. He offered to buy it, but I’d keep running it. He even wrote a contract that said that. He’s one of those nostalgists. I reckon we’ll make a good team, and I’ll be able to hire some more staff—maybe a real barista. No offense, Bucket, but your lattes are shit.”
I thought about what he was offering, then I realized I didn’t have to think about how I felt—I could feel how I felt. Already, my limbs were lighter, my breath was coming easier.
Like I’d said to Chase, I made decisions based on feelings. And this felt good.
“OK.”
“So you’ll go back to New York?”
“Um …”
Dad’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
“I messed things up. With the blog guy. I hurt him.”
“Is it fixable?” Dad asked.
I sat and thought. I thought for as long as it took to clean glitter off a raised stage. I thought for the duration of a freelancer trying to work out their income tax. I thought until my tea went cold. I thought for forever.
“I don’t know,” I said eventually. “But I’m going to try.”
Because I had the never-give-up gene.