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It hadn’t been enough. Even with the cash advances, both from her emergency credit card and her For Real, Do Not Use Unless You Want to Eat Cat Food for The Rest of Your Life backup emergency credit card, it hadn’t been enough. As soon as the last pair of her former colleagues’ work clogs shuffled out the door, Molly grabbed a stool, squatted her ass down, and threw every morsel of tunnel-vision motivation into making the numbers work. She’d called all her banks, including, begrudgingly, the bank of mom and dad, and then she’d called the bank—the bank of record on the court document.
Turned out, money talked a heck of a lot louder than she’d thought. And corporations, especially financially minded ones, well, they sure as heck listened. It had been surprisingly easy to broker the terms of the sale, provided she could pony up the cash before the close of business the next day.
Cash she was still several grand short of. Slight snag, there.
Until Benny, saint that he was, found her still slouching on the same stool hours later and offered her the biggest lifeline in the forms of a promise, payment, and, perhaps the most needed of all, pizza.
“This is a pity pie, isn’t it?” Molly mumbled around a mouthful of pepperoni and cheese. “A consolation prize for the fastest attempt to rack up the most debt in the shortest amount of time.” She pumped her fist in the air unenthusiastically and drolled, “Yay, winning.”
The creases at the corners of his eyes deepened, mirroring the weathered lines on his forehead that spoke of not only years of grueling labor but the mental anguish of a world not doing right by you and the tenacity to power through regardless. His arthritic hand, gnarled at the knuckles from years of butchering everything from prime rib to pancetta, grabbed a plain slice and—gasp—folded it in half before shuttling the tip into his mouth. “Only thing pitiful is what went down here,” he said between bites. Then he shook his head. “None of us came this far only to get kneecapped at the finish line, which is why Marisol wanted me to give you this, with her blessing.”
Benny shifted to the side, pulled out a folded piece of paper from his back pocket, and handed it to Molly between two fingers as casually as one offered a messy-faced child a napkin. She tried not to wince at the mental comparison.
“What’s this?” She quickly wiped her greasy fingers on an actual napkin before accepting the note.
What she unfolded was anything but.
Molly leaned forward to confirm what she held and nearly teetered off her stool before she managed to catch herself. The check in her hands was for the difference she needed to complete the property transaction, plus a hefty amount extra.
“I promised Mari I’d give her a proper retirement when it came time, take the two of us back to the Dominican Republic. She’d get to be with her sisters and the rest of her family, and I’d finally spend my days in a sailboat under the sky catching and filleting my own fish instead of all this farm-raised crap.”
Under normal circumstances, Molly would have wholeheartedly echoed the man’s sentiments regarding his pesca preferences, except for the small fact that farm-raised canned fish was pretty much the only protein she saw herself being able to afford over the next few months.
A situation potentially remedied by the check weighing down her palm and the warmth spreading throughout her chest caused by what Benny was offering her.
Molly summoned a voice thick with heavy emotion. “You’re not retiring. You’re only fifty-two. Oh, P.S. and by the way, I can’t accept this.” She thrust the paper toward him like it was on fire but only watched, mildly aghast, as Benny ignored her in favor of another slice.
“You know as well as I do that this career puts the long in longevity, and not in a good way. Longer hours, longer work weeks, longer time before a promotion comes your way, if you’re lucky and manage to use the right set of skills to impress the right people.” His rejected crust nubbin landed next to its sibling on the paper plate. The sound was as insistent and final as the sincerity Benny pressed into his words. “Very few cooks get to have any form of real retirement. Most of us can’t afford to stop working and only do so when we no longer have a choice, either because our bodies finally give out or our adult children finally give us an ultimatum.”
Her friend paused for a moment. His lip twitched on a memory, and Molly’s stomach tightened. “Neither of those options work for me or my Marisol. We never had any children, and while I’m no young buck anymore, I’ve still got some appreciable strength left in me to serve her right by.” He slapped his stomach in affirmation, which was only beginning to show signs of aged softness. His eyes misted over, and a secret smile deepened the grooves at the corners of his mouth. “She deserves more than the leftovers she’ll get when this career is through with me. And helping you buy this place—in exchange for part ownership,” he said pointedly, knowing full well the offer was already on her tongue, “well, that’s about as good a ticket to paradise as we could get.”
“I don’t . . . I can’t . . .” God, where were her words? Never in her entire life had she been short on things to say, and there she was, sputtering like a bad engine starter. Molly’s mother had often joked how, at birth, she was only given a certain allotment of words to use for the rest of her life, and at the rate she went, she’d use them all up by the time she turned eighteen.
If fate had chosen this moment to prove her mother right, Molly would eat her apron.
“Sure you can,” Benny replied, smugly not trying to keep his amusement at her distress out of his words. “Whatever you want to do with this place, it’s yours. We just want to help you get there. Menu, style, interior design, all that crap is beyond my pay grade. You do what you like, and I’ll cook it. All I ask is to remain here and see you through this next venture until Marisol calls me home and books those one-way plane tickets to paradise.” The table legs groaned against the wood floor as he stretched his bulky frame and worked a knot out of his shoulder. “As I figure it, I’ve got at least another ten years of professional cooking in me, but it ain’t my call. Those years are Mari’s.” Then he winked at her. “But she’s happy to consign me out to you for the time being. Told me so herself last night in bed after we?—”
“I adore your wife, but please, under no circumstances, will you finish that sentence.”
The vibration of his teasing chuckle only added to Molly’s internal tremors. Was this really happening? Had her friend just handed her—she glanced down at the check again—the monetary equivalent of her dream?
Benny slapped his hands on his thighs and stood. “Call the bank in the morning and get it done. You and I both know they’ll take your money faster than it takes to overcook a steak, but closing on this property and getting those keys in your hot little hands ain’t no twenty-four-hour turnaround.” He walked over to a table, one that had been ceremoniously hazed by the other staff on their way out, and righted one of the chairs. Once he gently pushed it in like it was occupied by royalty, he smiled at her. “What do you say? You want your restaurant or what?”
Molly swallowed around the emotion that was quickly being overtaken by a familiar determination. She shot to her feet, threw the check into her back pocket, and heaved herself at the man. He caught her weight like a guy used to lifting burdens and giving bear hugs. “I’m going to make you and Marisol so stinking proud of me.”
He laughed into her hair before rubbing her back encouragingly and settling her down. “Then go get it, girl.”
Never, in all her years of working in the hospitality industry, had Molly said no to more customers and been so freaking happy doing so. And there she was, hanging up on the third caller within the hour clamoring to make a reservation at Aurora’s newest breakfast-and-lunch eatery, Suerte and Honeysuckles.
A reservation, she itched to reiterate into the phone, that would never be procured, because when Molly had finally spawned her beloved brainchild of a restaurant into existence, she had included one hard-and-fast rule: no reservations. Like, ever.
“Was that another paying customer you just hung up on?” Benny’s rumbling chuckle was a punctuated chord amid the symphony of a kitchen in full swing. An egg cracked sharply against the flattop before falling to the sizzling surface below. Its weighted plop was barely perceptible amid the instant sputter of bacon grease crisping the egg’s edges and kissing the air with the unmistakable smell of all things breakfast. Another egg joined its mate and firmly hunkered its golden yokey butt down next to two extra-thick-cut slabs of applewood smoked artisan dry-cured bacon.
Now, this was luck. The hard-won kind, with the mouthwatering texture of all her dreams finally realized. Well, mostly realized. In all Molly’s unspoken imaginings of her dream breakfast-and-lunch joint, there hadn’t ever been quite so much debt. Or so much merengue music, for that matter.
Not that she minded that last one a single bit.
“I didn’t hang up on them,” Molly remarked over her shoulder while she punched in an order with the back of her pencil. “I just kindly informed them that we don’t accept reservations.”
