The Fortune Cafe (17 page)

Prickles of guilt at the thought of Carter squishing himself into a sofa proportioned for her eroded the numbness she’d woken with.

She wasn’t in the mood to feel, so she snuggled further into her mom. A half hour passed before her mom patted her back. “You need to eat. I’m going to whip something up.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I don’t remember asking,” her mom answered in the tone that had guaranteed every chore of Lucy’s childhood got done in the time and manner that her mom decreed. Her mom rummaged around the kitchen and within minutes the scent of sautéing onions floated out to the sofa, making Lucy’s stomach grumble. Maybe she could handle breakfast after all.

“Mom? Thanks for coming. I’m going back to work tomorrow. You should too.”

“We’ll see how you’re looking tonight. In the meantime, eat.” She set an omelet down in front of Lucy. “I figured we’d better focus on protein because you’re going to need some endurance for talking through this breakup.”

Lucy nodded and ate, cleaning the whole plate. When she was done, she pushed it back and turned to face her mother who had waited quietly beside her. Lucy opened her mouth, and her phone rang. For a second, her stomach lurched. What if it was Blake? What if it wasn’t? She snatched it up. Spyglass Jewelry.

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Stella at Spyglass. I got your message last night. I’m sorry, but it’s not done. It really is going to take at least a couple of weeks. I promise I’ll call you when I start working on it so you know what to expect, okay?”

Her voice was gentle, and Lucy swallowed, feeling guilty for hounding her. “Thanks, Stella. I swear I’ll be patient from now on. Thanks for calling me back. That was nice of you.”

Stella assured her that it wasn’t a problem. Lucy hung up and dropped her face in her hands. “Nothing’s gone right since I broke my necklace, Mom.”

Silence met that, and she glanced up to catch a look on her mother’s face similar to the one she wore when grading her students’ essays and not buying their interpretation of historical facts.

“Let’s start with what happened last night,” her mom said.

“Blake called me yesterday and said he wanted to go to dinner. He took me to our favorite café. I was going on and on about how good the stupid salad was, and then he said, ’We need to talk.’ And since nothing good has ever followed that, I wanted to puke up the salad.”

“Did you?” her mom asked, looking alarmed.

“No.”

“Good. That would have been a waste, especially since the right thing to do would have been to throw any remaining salad at your fiancé.”

“Mom!”

“I’m sorry, sweetie. I’m already breaking my own rules. It’s hard to be nice when he’s hurting you.”

“You didn’t like him?”

“We want whatever is going to make you happy. If that was going to be Blake, then we loved him.”

“But I didn’t make him happy. He said that he’d been unhappy for a long time. I told him that it would be a lot better when the wedding was done. A lot of the tension between me and Deborah would go away. But he said,” and here she gulped, afraid that the next words would come out on a sob. She took a deep breath and tried again. “He said that he’d been unhappy before the wedding craziness started and that he didn’t want to put either of us through any more of it. How could I not know that I was making someone I love unhappy?”

“Come here, baby,” her mom said, pulling her back into a hug and rubbing her back. “You couldn’t make him unhappy if you tried. You couldn’t make anyone unhappy. You’re not wired for it.” She pushed Lucy away enough to fix her with a stare that wouldn’t let Lucy look away. “What I noticed about Blake right away is that he’s deeply unhappy in a way that some people are doomed to be.”

Lucy couldn’t make sense of the words. “I know he wasn’t great this weekend, but you saw how he was last summer. Laughing, joking, having a good time with everyone. He’s a life-of-the-party kind of guy.”

“He is,” her mom agreed. “And a lot of those guys need that, the constant party where he can shine. Every joke they make, every funny story they tell, is about keeping him front and center. I’d bet he doesn’t spend a lot of time alone, does he?”

No. He didn’t. Whether it was going to the gym or buying groceries, he liked her right there with him. “I think that’s pretty normal for two people who love each other, right?”

“It can be. But you have to add up all the parts to see the whole. Dad likes to do stuff with me because he likes my company, not because he dislikes his own.”

“Then why would he break up with me? Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to stay in a relationship?”

“Maybe. Except you have such a strong sense of self. I think that started coming out more and more as you got into the wedding planning.”

Lucy stiffened. “You’re saying I railroaded him?”

“No! Oh sweetheart, absolutely not. I think he realized you weren’t going to disappear inside this marriage, but that’s a good thing.”

Lucy rubbed her palms into her eyes. “How did I get it so wrong?”

“Well… he’s a pretty good-looking guy,” her mom said, mischief twinkling in her eyes. “You wouldn’t be my daughter if you didn’t have an appreciation for that kind of thing.”

Lucy laughed for the first time in hours even though it hurt her throat. “You’re awful.”

“Maybe. But this is my advice for any future relationships. If he’s pretty, keep him around for a while to look at, maybe a little longer if he makes you laugh, but if the guy isn’t the kind you would let hold your hair back while you’re vomiting at two in the morning with the flu, cut him loose sooner than later, okay?”

Lucy’s smile faded. “I can’t even imagine a future relationship. I can’t even process that I’m not in one at the moment. Yesterday I was, and now I’m not.”

“Blake’s not a bad guy. Just an unhappy one. You’re definitely going to find a guy who is happy to be with you.” Her mom patted her leg and stood, gathering up her dirty dishes and depositing them in her tiny kitchen. “I’m going to jump in the shower. Then you’re going to take a shower. And while that happens, I want you to think about what’s most upsetting to you about this engagement being called off. We’ll go for a walk and talk some more.”

Lucy nodded. She couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do less but needed to do more. An hour later, she emerged from her shower feeling about twenty percent more human, mainly from washing gallons of dried tears off her skin. Lucy decided on Golden Gate Park for their walk because Blake, for some perverse reason, had hated it. She and her mom sat on rocks in the sunshine, and Lucy talked. And she talked. And the longer she talked, the more of her frustrations with Blake flooded out— the way he always decided where they would eat because he had more “food moods” than she did, the way he told jokes as if he’d practiced them for maximum effect, the way he’d refused to take sides between her and Deborah, saying they’d have to figure out how to work with each other.

Her mom listened through it all without interrupting. When Lucy finally wound down, she sat quietly as her mom scrunched her forehead and thought hard for a minute. “I thought the wedding planning was getting to me too, but maybe I just…”

Her mom waited and when Lucy didn’t finish, she rested her chin on her hands and smiled at her. “You never answered the question back at your house. What bothers you the most about the engagement being called off?”

“What doesn’t?” Lucy asked on a groan. “A massive amount of work went into this. I’m going to lose some deposits. My friends are going to pity me, which is never fun.”

“How do you know?” her mom asked.

“How do I know my friends are going to pity me?”

“No. How do you know how it feels? Have you ever been in a position where people would have a reason to pity you?”

“Of course I have. Everybody has.”

“Name it,” her mom said, a small smile playing around her mouth. “Name the time when people pitied you.”

But Lucy was stumped. There had to be something, of course. Right? Who didn’t have incidents like that? But she couldn’t think of a single example. “I’m drawing a blank.”

Her mom’s smile widened. “I kind of thought you might.” She scooted over until she could put an arm around her daughter and press Lucy’s head down to her shoulder. “You’ve had a pretty charmed life.” Lucy started to lift her head and object, but her mother held her head in place. “That’s not to say you haven’t worked hard for everything you have. And you deserve every bit of it.” Lucy quit straining and leaned into her mom, comforted again. “The truth is, though, you haven’t had anything really hard happen to you since your grandpa died. And in my heart of hearts, I’ve always believed when the first big challenge of your life came, you’d rise up and meet it, but there’s no way to tell until it happens.”

She dropped her head against Lucy’s, and the vibrations of her next words traveled down through Lucy’s skull and shivered her spine. “It’s here, Lucy. The hardship that’s going to test your mettle and show you who you really are. It’s here. So the question is, what are you going to do about it?”

Lucy ran the question through her mind, feeling out the truth of her mom’s observation. It felt pretty damn true. Yes, she’d run into obstacles in her job and other things, but she’d never for a single second doubted that things would work out. And they always did. Hard work and luck tended to go like that.

But hard work couldn’t fix this. And her luck was long gone. So what was she supposed to do? Tears stung her eyes again, and she straightened, refusing to let them fall. What she would
not
do is sit around feeling sorry for herself. “I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair?” she said, quoting the song she’d sung when she’d won the lead in her high school production of
South Pacific.

If relief had a sound, it would have been the musical scale of her mom’s laugh. “That’s what I figured. None of the reasons you listed for regretting that breakup had much to do with Blake and missing him or loving him. This is a good thing, even if it doesn’t feel like it.” She patted Lucy’s thigh, and it was more reassuring than hot coffee on a foggy San Francisco morning.

“It’s not that easy, Mom. I already miss him. I mean, the last few months weren’t great. But it’s not like I fell for him for no reason. He was pretty amazing when I met him. Funny and good-looking, ambitious, smart. And he’s been a big part of my life for the last year and a half. Now he’s not going to be in it at all? I can’t just snap my fingers and be okay with that ending by bed time.”

“Of course not. But when you say he was funny, did he make you laugh?”

“Yes.”

“But when it was just the two of you, and he wasn’t trotting out one of his perfectly polished jokes, did he make you laugh? Don’t answer,” she said, holding up a hand. “Just think about that for a while. And when you find the answer, ask yourself what you’re really missing.”

Lucy sighed but nodded.

“Good. Now. The plan. I’m going to get you jump-started.” With that she pulled her cell phone out and made a call. “Carter? It’s Beth Dalton. We’re on.”

Her mom wouldn’t give up any details on the way home. All Lucy could get out of her was her mom’s opinion that Carter was a really nice guy.

When they reached the front stoop, he was sitting there waiting for them. He smiled at her like it was a normal run-in and not like he’d slept a whole night on her couch because she was a crazy person. “Hi. You probably don’t know this about me, but the whole reason I moved here last year was because I was getting away from a bad breakup. So I’ve got ideas for your plan.”

“I have no plan,” she said. What was going on? It felt like being on a moving carousel without anything to hold on to. She was keeping her feet, but barely.

“Not yet, but your mom says you plan like a boss, so I’m sure one will kick in. I’ll just give you something to start with.”

Her mom squeezed her arm. “I know you love a good plan, and Carter’s is great.”

Lucy rubbed her temples. “It’s okay. I can think of my own. It’ll just take me a day or two. And I don’t want you sticking around until then. I’m so thankful you came up here, but I want you to go back to work, Mom. You can go home tonight if you want to because I’m absolutely going to be fine. Here’s what I know so far: in a disaster, I’m not a pouter or a whiner. I’m going to be a doer. So I’m going to work tomorrow, and you should too.”

Her mom smiled. “Love the can-do attitude, daughter. Carter, you ready to take over on Friday?”

Lucy shook her head. “That’s another thing. Carter, you don’t have to babysit me. I can do this.”

“I’m not babysitting you. You’re more like a mentoring project.”

“You’re going to train me to be an expert in bad luck?”

He grinned. “No, even better. I seriously have the perfect strategy for getting over a gnarly breakup.”

She rolled her eyes. “You going to write me an app or something?”

His expression grew thoughtful. “Now that you mention it…”

“Mom, make him stop.”

“Sorry, honey. I approve his plan.”

“No one’s telling me what it is.”

Carter smiled. “You’ll find out when you get back from work tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy your day with your mom.” He waved and headed up the stairs.