Page 16 of Autumn at the Oak Leaf Café
‘Huh?’
‘Your loved one? The person you just went to see. He’ll be living the better life in heaven already.’
Madeline scowled. ‘He can go to hell for all I care. Him and his stupid bike.’
10
New Best Friend
‘If I were you,I’d get on to old Regina Clover about getting some speed bumps put in,’ Dan said, as Milady rested her head on Madeline’s knees. ‘That punk had no right riding his racer through here.’ He sipped his coffee, wincing a little. ‘You sure you put sugar in this?’
Madeline shrugged. ‘Sugar, salt, sand, whatever.’
Dan winced again. ‘Nah, I think it is sugar, but you probably want to double down a little.’
‘I’m thinking of quitting,’ Madeline said.
‘Miss, don’t you go worrying over one idiot,’ Dan said. ‘One snowball don’t make a winter.’
‘It might as well. I had two people complain that I was scaring their kids today. I tried to smile, but I just couldn’t. He made me feel so worthless, and then I went and did exactly the same thing to someone else.’
‘Well, why don’t you go and say sorry to them?’
Madeline sighed. ‘I have no idea who it was. I didn’t even see them clearly.’
‘Maybe that’s for the best. Dan swallowed the last of his coffee, then stood stiffly up. He patted his knee and Milady went skulking over.
‘Right, thanks for the nightcap,’ he said. ‘I’d better be getting on with the guarding of this place. Don’t you worry, if any more crazy bike riders come through, they’ll get the eye.’
‘Thanks, Dan.’
She watched the old man wander off across the park. It was nearly seven p.m. and she had stayed open an hour later in order to try to make up some of the business she had missed after lunch when she had closed for a couple of hours to visit the hospital.
Three days, and the honeymoon period was well and truly over. For most of the morning she’d been waiting for someone to show up, only to be inundated on her return from the hospital, as though they had all been waiting outside in the bushes, ready to jump out and scream ‘coffee, coffee, coffee!’ at the top of their voices. She had run out of walnuts, hazelnut topping, marshmallows, and whipped cream. She had got three orders wrong and overcharged one customer by mistake—only realising after they had gone, leaving her worried that they would return tomorrow to complain.
Angela had told Madeline that she could run the business in her absence how she wished, as long as she stuck to a few core principles and kept the regular customers happy. So far, apart from Dan and Pete, both of whom had stopped by regularly to see how she was getting on, she didn’t seem to have anyone. Certainly, no one had come back twice that she could remember.
Around the back of the café, Angela had a little garden. Mostly flowers and herbs, it had been created on top of what had probably begun life as a gravel-covered nothing space a couple of metres wide between the café’s rear wall and a tall iron fence that marked the outer edge of the grounds of the city library next door. Into that narrow corridor, Angela had inserted trellises and flowerbeds, a small rockery, stepped lines of pots filled with herbs, and even a couple of hedgehog boxes. A cast iron arch strung with pink, red, and yellow roses gave entrance to a den-like place, a little metal table and a couple of chairs on a circle of paving stones just wide enough to accommodate it, ringed on all sides by shrubs and flowers, few of which Madeline could name.
Angela hadn’t specifically requested that Madeline maintain her garden, but Madeline found it comforting to pick the weeds out of the flowerbeds and trim back the excess growth on some of the shrubs with a pair of clippers she had found in a box inside the café’s front door. It was easy to forget her troubles when she was hidden in this little space, so now, with the weight of the catering world, not to mention the wrath of all racing bikers everywhere, feeling firmly on her shoulders, she got down on to her knees and began to pick bits of grass out from between the paving stones, making a little pile on the path beside her.
She was just reaching under a hydrangea with huge, pink flowers to get at a stray piece of bramble, when she heard a little mew.
‘Huh?’
She parted the clumped flowers, and there it sat, backed up against the central core of the bush, its claws dug into the earth, its ears flat against its head, shaking as though about to be snatched and eaten by some ghastly giant. It had a calico colour pattern, mottled with black, white, and ginger patches. The left side of its face was ginger, the right black, and the middle was a white triangle. Beautiful green-blue eyes stared at her with a look of absolute terror.
I don’t like cats. I really don’t like cats. But … it’s so cute.
‘Hello,’ Madeline whispered. ‘Where’s your family, then? They haven’t left you behind, have they?’
The kitten gave a weak little mew, as though to say, ‘Please don’t eat me.’
Madeline leaned forwards, reaching out a hand, but the kitten just pushed its back up against the bundle of hydrangea stalks and for her trouble Madeline received a face full of flowers still wet from overnight rain.
‘How are we going to get you out of there?’
The kitten gave another weak mew. It tried to back up further, but had nowhere to go. As it pushed against the hydrangea stalks, it had unwittingly enclosed itself at the same time.
