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“Hey, Mel,” she said. “If I had known you were coming here, I would have planned ahead and made a date out of it.”
“I didn’t know I’d be here either,” I admitted. “I was supposed to be working.”
“Taking a mental health day?” she asked.
“Something like that,” I said. “Hey, where’s Cassie?”
“She’s with Mark,” she said. “Mark told me I had been cooped up around the house too much in the last week and I needed to get out and do something without worrying about the baby.”
“That’s awful nice of him,” I said, only feeling a little jealous.
Carmela had been a good friend to me since high school. Since I didn’t have many friends that had stayed in town, she was a rare breed. Most everyone else had jumped on the Wine Mom train, and that got old fast. But Carmela was something else. She was smart and fierce and would bend over backward to help someone she just met. It made her very good at her job as a family lawyer, and in fact, she had been the first personI’d thought about calling when everything went down with the board.
“Yeah, he’s kind of perfect,” she said. “But I told him I had no idea what I was going to do. I didn’t want to go into the office. I’ve gotten so used to working from home that putting on pants to work is… weird.”
I laughed.
“Sounds like a good problem to have,” I said.
“You would think so,” she said. “But when you work from home, everything tends to blend together, and suddenly you can’t remember what time of day it is or what day it is at all, actually.”
“The baby probably doesn’t help with that,” I said.
“Sort of. Sometimes Cassie cries at specific times for specific things. One cry she has I recognize as her ten-twenty feeding time. When I hear it, I know what time it is.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “You’ve got it down to a science, though. That’s pretty cool.”
“I suppose. Anyway, enough about me. What’s up with you? I heard something about your family’s store being bought? Did you sell?”
I sighed. “It’s why I’m avoiding work, actually,” I said.
“Hello,” Suzette said, suddenly appearing at the end of the table. “What can I get you to drink, hon?”
“Water, please,” Carmela said. “But I know what I want to eat if you’re ready, Mel.”
“I’ll figure it out while you order,” I said, hurriedly picking up the menu. I scrolled down it for the usual suspect meals while she rattled off an impressively large order that ended in a cup of coffee and a sweet tea.
“And you?” Suzette asked.
“I’ll have the number four,” I said.
“Coming up,” Suzette said, disappearing again.
“As you were saying,” Carmela prompted, taking off her jacket and tossing it in the corner of the booth. I couldn’t help but notice her chest was enormous. Having a baby had apparently turned what was already a fairly large-chested woman into someone that looked like she could sing mezzo-soprano when the traveling opera came back into town.
“Right,” I said, shaking myself back into function. “Well, it turns out the board thought they had the authority to sell if they didn’t think I could properly take care of the business. So, they did. Some guy named Victor bought the shares and now thinks he owns the place.”
“Wait, Victor?” she asked. “Not Victor McLaren.”
“Yeah, that’s his name,” I said, pointing to her with the straw that I was unwrapping. “He came into the office this morning telling me how he didn’t want to step on my toes or whatever. All while clearly stepping on my toes.”
“Victor is one of Mark’s best friends,” Carmela said. “I heard he moved back to town and was making an investment, but I didn’t know in what. It’s what he does, investing. I just figured he was buying some business that was hitting the skids, so he could rehab it while he was in town.”
“While he’s in town?” I asked, hope rising in my chest despite my best efforts. “Has he said when he was going to leave?”
“No,” she said. “Not to my knowledge. All I know is Mark and Camden both are beyond ecstatic he’s back. They keep saying the band is back together. God help me if they start playing any sort of music.”
“That would be ugly,” I said.
