8. Jake
JAKE
The restaurant gets this quiet stretch before lunch that never lasts long enough. Lights low. Chairs flipped on tables. Fans turning overhead, pushing around air that smells faintly of salt, seafood, and beer.
I’m behind the bar because I don’t know where else to put myself.
Back here, there are things to do. Bottles to face. Condiment trays to fill. Lemons to cut. Glasses to polish. There’s a system to it. One thing, then the next.
Back here, I’m not the man who just stood in the middle of his restaurant and held Mo while she cried into his chest, and felt every damn part of himself remember her.
The pink Holey Moley box sits on the bartop, cheerful and completely unaware it knocked the breath out of me thirty minutes ago.
Written across the center of the box:
THE CENTER OF EVERY DOUGHNUT IS FAT FREE
Maddy’s joke from way back. Her way of making fun of the nineties diet fad.
One corner of the box is crushed in. The flap’s ripped. There’s a glaze smear on the dark wood floor, marking the exact spot where my past came crashing back.
I brace both hands on the bar and lock my elbows, pushing my weight through my arms trying to force some distance between me and what just happened.
Doesn’t work.
I let my head hang and breathe out slow. At my feet, Hank licks his chops. “What’d you get into, mister?”
He looks up with his bottom teeth out, face arranged in that bulldog expression that somehow says I regret nothing and I’ve done nothing wrong at the exact same time.
I huff a laugh and rub a hand over the back of my neck.
I’m a grown man. Thirty-one years old. Former NFL quarterback.
Crabber. Restaurant owner. Bulldog dad. I’m not a twenty-year-old kid anymore with big dreams and zero coping skills for emotions that show up loud and uninvited.
But when she cried into my chest, the ache I’ve been carrying around for ten years eased.
Then she walked out the door, and I felt it start creeping back in.
Only this time it feels different.
She didn’t bolt. She didn’t joke her way out of it. Didn’t laugh like it was nothing. She cried. She stayed in it. Then she left slowly. Slow matters with Mo.
Every part of me wanted to stop her. But she’d already given me more than I expected today. More than I think she meant to. So I stayed where I was and let her go.
Only this time it didn’t feel like losing her.
I slide the doughnut box farther from the edge of the bar, more careful with it than I ought to be.
Hank leans against my shin, falling asleep with one eye open and the other squinting. “Okay,” I tell him. “You can have the lap.”
I lower myself to the floor with my back against the bar. Hank climbs up and settles across my thighs with a long, satisfied sigh heavy enough to count as a statement. “Comfortable?” I ask.
He shuts one eye and leaves the other cracked open. “Glad I could be of service.”
The kitchen door swings open. Bethany steps out and stops when she sees me on the floor with seventy pounds of bulldog in my lap. “Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” I keep my voice low for Hank, not that it matters. He could sleep through a hurricane if it happened in a room where somebody was willing to give him a lap and snuggles.
Her eyes go over me, then the room, then back to me again. Old habit. She’s one of the few people I know who can scan a space without making it obvious she just did.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.” She reaches behind the bar for the specials notebook. “You just look like you got sacked on a scoring drive.”
I blow out a laugh. If there’s one person who’ll call you out without warming up first, it’s Bethany. She knows what stress looks like. She also knows when to mind her business.
Usually.
“I’m fine.”
“Sure.” She flips open the notebook, skims a page, then says, “The grouper at Hart’s looked tragic yesterday. If it still looks depressed when I get there, I’m switching us to shrimp for tonight.”
“That’s fine.”
She glances at me again. This time her face softens just a notch. She’s watched enough people carry old wounds around to know what one looks like when it starts moving again. “She okay?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
Bethany nods once. “Good.”
That’s all she says about Mo. Then she points at Hank. “He looks guilty.”
“He’s sleeping.”
“He’s never sleeping,” she says. “And one of you has gas.”
I look down at Hank. He fake snores louder.
She heads for the kitchen door. “Call me if you need anything.”
“I won’t.”
A small smile pulls at her mouth. “I know.” The door swings shut behind her.
“And it’s not me,” I holler.
From the other side of the door, all I get is a deadpan, “Sure.”
I should get up. There’s plenty to do. Deliveries to check. Ice beds to build. Tables to set. Beer taps to test. A whole restaurant to get ready before noon.
Instead I stay exactly where I am because Hank’s comfortable and I don’t have the heart to disturb him.
My thoughts go right back to Mo. To the way her shoulders shook. To the fact that she didn’t apologize for crying. To the way her hand stayed at my wrist for a while after the worst of it passed.
My eyes drift up to the doughnut box. Do I want to know if she remembered? Or am I better off not knowing if she didn’t?
My phone buzzes on the bartop. I ignore it.
Hank does not.
His head jerks up. Ears pin back. His whole body goes alert in that split second way that always makes it look as if somebody switched him from bulldog to missile.
“Oh boy.”
He launches off my lap. His rear end tucks under, and then—
He takes off.
Hank is hauling ass across the restaurant. A little torpedo with legs. He cuts a hard corner around the first table, slides, corrects, keeps going, loops around the hostess stand, then tears back through the center of the room, weaving around the tables in tight figure eights.
The zoomies have fully possessed him.
I can’t help but laugh.
He stops mid-lap and turns to me. “I’m not laughing at you.”
That’s a lie, and we both know it.
He does another lap. And another. Then, like his battery dies all at once, he stops in the middle of the dining room and flops onto his side so dramatically it feels rehearsed. He lies there panting, cheeks puffing out with every exhale.
I shake my head. “Did you get it all out?”
He gives me a long, dramatic huff.
I push myself up off the floor, still smiling, and reach for the doughnut box. “If I’m going to do this,” I mutter, “I’m doing it fast.”
I flip the lid open.
Glazed.
Old-fashioned.
Crullers.
Then what used to be a chocolate.
A chocolate for courage.
That was ours.
When we were kids, if one of us had to do something we didn’t want to do, Maddy would slide a chocolate doughnut across the counter and say courage.
Somewhere along the way, it became our thing.
Chocolate if you had to apologize. Chocolate if you had to tell the truth.
Chocolate when we needed a little bravery.
She remembered.
Not just me. The details. The old-fashioned I always said I didn’t want and ate anyway. The crullers. The glazed. The chocolate.
Ten years, and she still remembered.
I set one hand on the bar beside the box and scan the doughnuts again.
Something’s off.
I count once.
Then again.
There should be one more.
Slowly, I lower the lid and look at Hank. He stares back at me from the floor, eyes a little glassy, tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, his inner peace clearly achieved.
I narrow my eyes. “Hank.”
He immediately closes his eyes and starts fake snoring.
“You big fatty.”
His fake snore gets louder.
The zoomies weren’t random.
He ate a doughnut.
Then the whole thing hits me at once. I grab the edge of the bar because I start laughing so hard I can’t stand up straight.
Hank cracks one eye open to check whether I’m done yet.
I point at him, still laughing. “We both got wrecked by the same pink box.”