Page 51 of The Fall Back Plan
It seriously might be the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen. This is such a bad idea. “All right, Jolie. I’ll stop by your place in the next few days with the information.”
She’s out of her chair and heading for the door like she doesn’t want to linger long enough for me to change my mind. “You can call me Jo. And you won’t be sorry, Lucas.”
Be sorry, future tense? She’s right. Because I already am.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jolie
IfeelbetterthatLucas is letting me help, but I still don’t feel good. I want Sloane to keep my name out of her mouth, and I don’t want anyone mentioning me in the same breath as this doll situation. It’s going to be a problem, I know it.
I wasn’t exaggerating when I told Lucas I couldn’t volunteer until this is cleared up. Instead, I go back to the bar and meet Bonnie, who arrives right on time.
“So tell me about your menu,” I say as we settle in at a table once Ry comes down.
“I’m thinking seasonal,” she says. “We’ll have some year-round items, but I want to make sure we’re rotating specials often enough to keep people coming back. I have a good relationship with the growers around here, and I practically live at the farmer’s market, so based on the growing season, here’s what I’m looking at for fall.”
She passes us each a menu, and while she’d shared some of her ideas in our interview, it’s a whole new level of excitement to see it spelled out the way she plans to put it on the menu. “I’m going to spend today getting to know the kitchen and prepping. Family dinner tomorrow?”
I nod. Family dinner is actually the staff, who I’m paying to be here an hour earlier than a normal shift so they can try Bonnie’s dishes and give their feedback.
“Great. Then I’m going to get in the kitchen and stake out my territory.”
“Let me know when you get to prep,” I tell her. “I’d like to help. I’m not a great cook, but I can help with the grunt work.”
“You got it. I need all the help I can get. My first interviews aren’t set up until Friday.” She’s planning to start dinner service in two weeks, eventually expanding to lunch by November. She’ll be busy hiring, training, ordering, and prepping every day until then.
“Great,” Ry says. “We’ll do your final paperwork, I’ll get you your keys, and the kitchen is yours.”
Turns out, grunt work in the kitchen is the perfect thing for me today. There’s something satisfying about rinsing dirt from fresh vegetables, cutting off inedible ends, peeling or grating as Bonnie needs. She’s not much of a talker, and I like that. I’m not either. She answers questions I have, but otherwise we lapse into quiet other than the classic rock she’s playing from a Bluetooth speaker she brought with her.
By the time Tina shows up for her shift, I’m almost relaxed. The cops—Lucas—believe I’m innocent, and I’ll be able to put an end to Sloane’s rumors once I can look at all their evidence and help them find whoever is doing this.
The relief lasts until about thirty minutes into Tina’s shift. It’s a Friday, and by now, we should have had the first trickle of customers coming in with a surge filling most of our tables by close to 6:00. But no one comes in.
An ugly hole opens inside my chest somewhere, and when another thirty minutes passes and brings us only half the customers we’re used to, it grows bigger and bigger until it’s a hungry void of dread that wants to snack on my internal organs, especially all the ones that help me breathe.
“I’ll be in my office if you need me,” I tell Ry.
He surveys the light crowd, a slight look of concern on his face. “Doubt we will. Weird night.”
In my office, I check my phone to see if I’m right about the problem. I open Happenings to check the post from earlier, and it’s as bad as I thought it would be. More people have piled on with comments from “How awful! I’m not giving her my business!” to “I knew something was off about her when I went there with my wife. They water down their drinks too.”
We do not.
Some people are pushing back, asking for evidence or saying they had a good experience at the bar. A handful of names I recognize say good things about me. But the negative comments outnumber them by two to one. The feeling in my chest is worse.
I remember this too well. When the buzzing in my head starts, I’m sure: I’m on the verge of a panic attack. It’s been a long time since I had one. Years. But I had them way too often when I was a kid. It got like this when a situation felt bigger than anything I could do about it. Bringing home a request from school for money for a class party, knowing it could set off my dad. Getting a better grade on anything than Sloane did because it would mean skipping lunch so she couldn’t be mean to me.
I won’t let her do this again. I didn’t have any tools to stand up to her then, but I do now. I take a deep breath then another and lean back in my chair.
I do one of the grounding exercises I learned when I googled these symptoms in college and discovered I was probably dealing with anxiety.Name four things you can see.“Dolly sayings calendar. A Book Smart magnet. My Cataloochee Coffee tumbler. My cell phone.”Name three things you can touch.“My leather purse. The wooden desk. The plastic keyboard.”Name two things you can hear.I close my eyes and listen. “The clink of glass. The music playing.”Name one thing you can smell.I take another deep breath through my nose. “Orange oil for the wood.”
I open my eyes and do box breathing.Breathe in through the nose for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale through the mouth for four seconds.I don’t know if this is right, but it’s the count that works for me, and after repeating the sequence a half-dozen times, the buzzing in my head is gone. I don’t feel good, but I don’t feel like I’m about to spin out either. And I don’t have the overwhelming need to hide in my office anymore.
I go out to the floor to find Ry. “I think I can explain why we’re probably seeing a drop in business tonight.”
“It’s homecoming for Harvest,” he says.
