The Fortune Cafe (2 page)

Jen, an older waitress, came to the back to pick up an order and laughed at Nate’s impersonation. “You pegged Cái right on!” Jen never seemed to say Cái’s name right. The name was supposed to sound more like the word
sigh
. Her tongue always looked tangled when she used the boss’s name. When she said it, it sounded more like she was saying
say-ee
. Emma tried to tell her to picture him sighing and pronounce his name like a sigh, but she couldn’t do it. They’d all given up correcting her. When he was around, she had simply taken to calling him
sir
.

Cái showed up at exactly that moment. Nate hurried to straighten his face before Cái figured out they were messing around. Her boss’s gaze fell on Emma immediately. “Did you hear my restaurant cry out in her sadness, Emma?” Cái said, his white hair seeming to float as he shook his head in despair.

She smiled again. “Oh, I heard all right. But I think it’s because the door needs to be oiled.”

He frowned and lifted a finger to give her a lecture on magic, but she stalled him. “I better get out there. No reason to disturb your restaurant’s voodoo by being late and avoiding my work. Someone’s already seated in my area.”

Cái cracked a smile even as he said, “It is not voodoo. It is my ancestors smiling on me. You open a fortune cookie, Emma, and you will see magic in your own life.”

“You
do
know fortune cookies aren’t even Chinese, right? But nice try. You keep your magical cookies to yourself.” She grinned at him on her way past. She really did adore the old guy. He always treated her like a much loved granddaughter.

He’d been trying to get her to open a fortune cookie since her first day working for him. He said only the first fortune carried the magic, so the first was the most important. She had never opened a cookie. What had begun as a silly game for her had turned into a battle of wills. Cái wanted her to open a cookie, and out of sheer stubbornness, she refused.

She tucked her pen and notepad into her apron pocket and went out to face her customers.

“Hi!” she said with a smile. “Welcome to The Fortune Café where there’s magic in the menu. Would you like to hear about our specials?”

The couple seated at table thirteen kept their heads down, studying the menu as if Emma planned on giving them a quiz later.

Usually people looked up immediately when she approached their table, but sometimes, people trusted the menu more than the waitress. She didn’t mind waiting, except that the pause stretched into something awkward, and they still hadn’t acknowledged her. Maybe they hadn’t heard her?

She waited a second longer— long enough to admire the man’s dark hair and trim, yet solid, build— before she tried again. “I’m Emma, your waitress. Can I start you off with something to drink?” Someone else had already started them with water and tea, and the wine menu lay untouched on the table’s edge meaning they were likely doing fountain drinks.

That was when the man looked up from his menu. Emma glanced at him with a smile that froze as soon as their eyes made contact. “Harrison?” she asked, feeling dumb for blurting out the name she hadn’t said since her high school graduation when he’d hugged her and then whispered something she hadn’t heard over all the shouts of jubilation. They’d thrown their caps in the air. Everyone was yelling and laughing and hugging. Harrison’s whisper had been lost to the celebration. When asked him to repeat himself, he almost did, but her boyfriend at the time had tackled her from behind, and when she looked up to see Harrison, he was gone, lost in the sea of students. She hadn’t seen or heard from him since.

Such was the way of high school.

The way his blue eyes softened at seeing her now did something to make her breath catch in her throat. “Emma Armstrong!” he said. He stood, knocking his long legs against the table, making the water in the glasses swirl and spill over the sides to the tablecloth. He didn’t seem to notice the disturbance or that his napkin fell to the floor as he folded her into the hug that took her back those seven years to graduation night. They’d sat together at that final event of high school. Of course they sat together. His last name was Archer, and hers was Armstrong. They’d been seated next to each other in every class they happened to have together for nearly their whole high school careers. There had been a few teachers who didn’t do assigned seating, but even then, they had ended up next to each other, habit and insecurity proving stronger than a desire to meet new people.

As he hugged her now, she realized he smelled the same— spice and soap. It felt like opening a scrapbook and being pulled into all the memories hidden inside. She didn’t know what cologne he wore, only that she couldn’t stop herself from breathing in the memory of him and feeling an immediate sense of security in his arms. It startled her to realize that she hadn’t felt so safe since her dad died.

The other person at the table cleared her throat.

Harrison pulled away abruptly as if he’d forgotten something. “Right. Emma...” He waved a hand toward the woman who was his date. “You remember Andrea, right?”

Andrea appeared startled at the notion of having to remember Emma. Not that Emma was offended or anything. Emma didn’t remember her either. But she smiled anyway. A big smile hopefully would equate to a big tip. “Nice to see you, Andrea.”

Emma prided herself in being a well-practiced truth teller. When her mom asked if Emma liked a new dress, Emma would smile and say, “It’s fun for you!” Which was the equivalent of, “Wow? That dress belongs in a landfill instead of on a person.” Not that she could, or
would
, say something like that to her mom.

She had a lifetime of firsthand experience growing up with a mother who always spoke her mind— even when that mind was filled with poisoned darts. Emma believed the old saying that the truth hurt. But she also believed it didn’t have to. Her mother’s bad example taught her that the truth could be told without the barbs. She didn’t have to admit that Andrea wasn’t memorable. She could simply tell her it was nice to see her. True. No poisoned darts.

Andrea squared her shoulders and scrunched her nose in a way that was probably supposed to be adorable, but came off as her squinting in too bright of light. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you at
all
.”

Emma tried not to be bothered by Andrea’s lack of tact and held her pen and pad a little higher. “Can I start you two off with some drinks while you look over the menu?”

Harrison seemed to have not heard the question as he took his seat again, oblivious to the fact that his napkin still lay under the table. “Wow. Emma! Look at you. You look great!”

This was probably
not
the thing he was supposed to say to a girl while he was on a date with another girl. She really hoped Harrison would be paying for dinner, because if Andrea was paying, he’d just lost Emma any kind of tip at all. “Thanks, Harrison. You both look great too.” She found that as she said it, she totally meant it. He’d been a nice enough looking teenager but as a man? Harrison’s dark hair, blue eyes, and intense smile were incredibly attractive. Mind-numbingly gorgeous. Totally and completely heart stopping. “Drinks?” she said again, trying to remember that, though they were friends in high school, he was there on a date with someone else. She wasn’t supposed to be ogling the customers.

“I’ll have Perrier,” Andrea said over Harrison’s, “I haven’t seen you since school. What have you been doing with yourself?”

Andrea had gone from mildly annoyed to the kind of furious that made Emma take a step away from the table. “Perrier’s a great choice,” Emma said. “What would you like to drink, Harrison?” She really hoped a direct question would pull him out of his trip down memory lane.

“Dr. Pepper would be great.”

Emma tsked. “Mr. Pibb okay?”

He grinned. “Sure. I don’t mind slumming it with the good doctor’s less educated, less spicy younger brother.”

She smiled at her order pad. That was the best comeback she’d heard since coming to work for The Fortune Café. Most people grumbled over the inconvenience of an alternate. “Good choice. And really, from what I hear, Mr. Pibb has a much better social life than his doctor brother. He doesn’t have any kind of reputation to uphold. Makes fun so much easier.”

Harrison laughed.

Andrea scowled.

Emma took that as her cue to let them review the menu on their own. “I’ll be back in a minute with your drinks. If you have any questions about the menu, feel free to ask.” She tucked her order pad in her pocket and hurried to the back room to fill the order. She hadn’t actually written the drink order down. She didn’t need to because she always remembered what people ordered. In all her years, she never delivered an order wrong. She usually scrawled pictures of her comic characters on her pad because it made people feel good to see her writing something. She’d long since traded out her order pad for a small pocket sketch book.

Sometimes, like today, she drew caricatures of the customers at her tables. She usually resisted this temptation because someone might see the pad and complain. She didn’t want to offend Cái’s customers. But Andrea with her snaky, oily attitude kind of called for a picture. Emma had drawn a picture of Harrison wrapped inside the coils of a snake with long eyelashes. It was easy to give the snake features that made it look like Andrea. Andrea’s big eyes, her puffed out cheeks, her dark red hair that likely wasn’t natural but which would make an excellent color for snake scales later on if Emma decided to ink this picture.

Nate peeked over her shoulder. “What’re you working on?”

“Nothing,” she said too fast as she flipped the top of her pad so the pages were safely hidden.

“Nothing huh? Picking on the customers again?”

“More like customers picking on me.” Emma sighed and tucked the tall red glass under the Mr. Pibb nozzle. “That’s a woman who could really use one of Cái’s magical fortune cookies. Maybe she’ll get one that says she has a sparkling personality, and she’ll poof into a nice person.”

“That bad?” Nate asked.

“Maybe.” Emma shrugged it off. She’d definitely had worse. And the chances were good that Harrison was paying, so Andrea’s venom wouldn’t matter to her. She’d been saving money to finance the launch of her web comic into a real, tangible book. She had a good following on the internet. She’d been producing free content for the last three years— longer if she counted the various other comic ideas. But the one that kept people coming back was
Dragon’s Lair
. She created the
Dragon’s Lair
comics after going to work for The Fortune Café. She had a magical Chinese dragon named Sigh who spoke true fortunes with varying results of hilarity, irony, and depth. Emma found you could put a lot into four panes of pictures and a few words. The restaurant served as her personal muse.

She truly hoped if she put in the money necessary to publish her serial comic in a full color book, those faithful followers who checked every day for their fix of
Dragon’s Lair
would pony up the money and buy the physical form. She didn’t want to go into debt for her venture just in case it failed. Better for her to fail with money that belonged to her than with money she owed to someone else. Presales had been astonishing. She’d made the final payment to the printer already, and the books were on their way to her— which meant she would have no living space at all until she moved through inventory.

Emma didn’t think it would be a problem— not with the booth already scheduled at the LA Comic Con. She planned to succeed fabulously.

She topped off Harrison’s drink when the foam went down, grabbed the Perrier out of the cooler, and headed back out. She hoped, in that amount of time, Harrison remembered he was on a date.

He didn’t.

“It’s been hard to keep up with everyone here at home since I moved away from Seashell Beach,” Harrison said after she placed the drinks in front of their respective owners.

“You moved?” She had to respond. To ignore him would be rude.

“Yeah, Boston. Went to design school and just kind of... stayed.”

“But you’re home now,” Andrea interjected. “That’s the important thing.” She put her hand over his and gave it a little pat of ownership in case Emma was somehow misreading their relationship.

“Well, I’m glad,” Emma said, not misreading anything. She hoped for his sake he didn’t marry this girl because insecure women made terrible companions. She knew this from experience. Her dad had lived his whole life with the insecurities of her mom. It hadn’t made anyone in her family very happy. “We ready to order dinner yet, or do you two need another few minutes?”

“We’ll need a few minutes,” Andrea said, as Harrison said, “Tell me what you recommend from the menu.”

So she stayed. She kind of had to when he asked a direct question about the menu. But Andrea didn’t like it, not at all. Emma peered over her sketchpad and smiled. She really loved the restaurant. Loved the food. Loved that Cái cared enough to serve the very best from his kitchen. The place really was magical, and in spite of what Cái said, it had nothing to do with the fortune cookies. “I love the xiao long bao, which is a sort of soup dumpling. Or there’s the shumai, which is also a dumpling sans the soup.”

“What’s in these dumplings? I’m vegan, since animals shouldn’t be a commodity, so...” Andrea blinked her eyelashes and sat up straighter as if she’d just announced she was the president. Emma looked at the leather boot on Andrea’s impatiently tapping foot and the buttery leather clutch sitting on the table near Andrea’s plate. Nothing said committed-to-the-cause better than a vegan wearing leather.

“The dumplings come made to order. You can put whatever you like in them. Most people do shrimp or pork, but you can have them stuffed with tofu or spring garlic if you like. For your entrée, the ants-climbing-trees is wonderful if you like it hot, which I love it hot, so...” Emma blushed a little at the possible ways
that
could have been taken. She likely wouldn’t have considered her word choice at all except that Harrison’s lips curved up in amusement whereas Andrea’s curved down along with the narrowing of her eyes. “I mean, anyway, there’s all the usuals: broccoli beef, beef in oyster sauce, lemongrass chicken, and the dry garlic spareribs are proof that mankind is inspired. Pretty much I like everything. If we go over all my favorites, I’ll just be standing here reciting the entire menu to you.”