Page 58 of Nothing Less than Magic
Chapter 15
My laptop will be ready at noon, so I decide to kill time by having breakfast in Ghost. There’s a cute café around the corner from Main Street. Austin and I used to talk about trying it, because every time we walked by, it smelled so enticing. Like fresh baked bread. We were also taken with the name. Hugs with Mugs. But we never made it past the door. The wait was always too long.
Today is no different. The place is swamped, with a line out the door. It’s a sea of plaid shirts. Who knew everyone in this town loved breakfast so much? I write my name on the list and find an unoccupied corner in which to wait, because it’s too cold to stand outside.
The restaurant is larger than it looks from the street. There’s a to-go counter where customers can pick up a coffee drink and a pastry. Everything looks so mouthwatering; I’m tempted to try one of the cinnamon rolls or a morning bun while I wait for my name to be called. But the line at the to-go counter is also insane.
The Hugs with Mugs theme is everywhere in the form of giant hearts painted on the walls and rows of mugs hanging from hooks on the wainscoting chair rail. The idea being to choose one before being served. There’s no rhyme or reason to the mugs, just a random collection of cups in various colors, shapes, and sizes. Some of them have names on them, and I wonder if they’re reserved for regulars.
The hostess, a young woman with a pierced eyebrow and dreadlocks, says there’s a seat available at the counter if I don’t want to wait. It’s a cramped spot in the corner. but I take it, grabbing a mug with a bright yellow smiley face on the way.
The proprietors haven’t gotten around to taking down the Halloween decorations. There are still plastic cobwebs and fake bats and spiders above the backbar. The menu is huge, at least twelve pages, and I flip through it, trying to decide what to eat. A server fills my smiley-face cup, then dances away to fill a request for more syrup from a diner on the other end of the counter.
The elderly man next to me pays his bill and leaves. Next thing I know, Sadie’s sitting beside me.
“Fancy meeting you here,” she says. “Actually, I saw you through the window.”
“Don’t you have to open up Flower Power?”
“Not for another hour. But I thought I’d get a jump on things.”
I hand her my menu, because she doesn’t have one. “What’s good here?”
“Everything. Well, not everything. Stay away from the black bean chili omelet, it’ll give you the trots.”
“Good to know,” I say.
“The pancakes are out of this world and probably what they’re most known for.”
I’d noted that there were at least a dozen different versions on the menu.
“I’m getting a carrot-cake muffin and a side of scrambled eggs,” Sadie says. “It’s my go-to.”
She does just that when the server comes to take our orders. Despite Sadie’s recommendation, I get the cinnamon swirl French toast.
Since my last breakfast with Dad, I’ve never eaten pancakes again.
“You want to talk about it?” I cut to the chase, because I can sense it; a good therapist always can. She wants to finish what she started last night.
“Talk about what?”
I turn in my stool and hold eye contact with her. “Whatever’s going on with you and your husband.”
She takes a long sip of her coffee and stares at me over the rim of the cup. It’s got a peace sign on it. “Oh, that.” She lets out a long breath. “He’s been seeing another woman for at least two years, as far as I can tell. Truthfully, I don’t know why he hasn’t left me yet. I guess it’s the kids.”
“How do you know this?” It’s not really important how she knows, but to have the full picture, I need the backstory. The who, what, when, where, and why. It just makes it easier to put everything into perspective.
“What? That he’s been seeing her for at least two years?” She shrugs. “I have the password to his phone. You’d think if a man was going to carry on a secret affair, he’d change his stupid password. But not Frank. Who knows, maybe he wanted me to find out?
“Anyway, his phone was going off one day like a rocket. Every five seconds or so, it would vibrate with a new incoming text. He’s a Caltrans employee and works a lot of nights and was sleeping. I figured if someone needed to get a hold of him so badly that they were texting every few seconds, it had to be important.
“Instead of waking him up, I took the liberty of looking myself. It was her. She was pissed that he’d broken a date with her over the weekend. It had been our twentieth wedding anniversary, and I’d twisted his arm to take me out to a nice restaurant, a place where they didn’t have chicken fingers on the menu. That’s why he broke their date, because he was out with his wife. Can you imagine that she actually had the nerve to be angry about that?”
Sadie falls quiet as I’m served a heaping plate of French toast and she a plate of eggs. Her muffin is the size of a human head.
“They don’t mess around here as far as portion sizes, do they?”
She nods.
