The Fortune Cafe (4 page)

“Are you going to read it?” he asked.

“Read what?”

“The fortune you’re still holding.” He nodded to her other hand, the one not guilty of being overly familiar with customers, the one still clutching a cookie.

“That’s what I was going to ask!” Cái huffed. He watched her closely in case she decided to hide her cookie among the debris on the floor to be swept up later. In truth, she probably would have done exactly that if she hadn’t had such a curious and
intent
audience.

“Fine, Cái. But I still say it doesn’t count since it
broke
. Broken does not mean opened.” She separated the two halves connected by the paper and pulled the paper from the half cookie while she popped the other half in her mouth. She deserved to eat it if she was going to be burdened with the message inside. She read it. “Huh. Totally unlikely,” she said and popped the other half of the cookie in her mouth.

“What does it say?” Cái asked.

“Sorry, Cái, it was a voodoo-wasted sort of moment. Bummer to disappoint you. She scrunched the little paper up in her hands and stuffed it in her pocket.

“But what does it say?” Cái demanded to know.

“Aw, c’mon. Put him out of his misery,” Harrison said, as if he had anything to do with it.

“What? And ruin the possibility of it all? Wouldn’t telling about it make it null and void?” She was just messing with him. She didn’t believe in any of it.

“You’re talking about wishes!”
Cái said. “Completely different side of the divining spectrum.”

“Divining—” She blew out a long breath. “Cái, I totally love you, but I think you’re one fake Chinese cookie away from the nutter house, you know that?”

“Just read it to me.” He practically begged. “I had a good feeling about them when I put the cookies on the plate. I knew these were special. It is fate that you became the owner of this fortune and not the Lunatic Woman. You have to tell me.”

She would have probably given in if the police hadn’t shown up at that moment. Pandemonium erupted again. Lots of people stepped forward, wanting their five seconds of glory by recounting the tale. Harrison refused to press charges. Cái refused to press charges, using the same argument Emma had used when Harrison tried to clean up the food by hand: any restaurant that dealt with entitled toddlers knew how to handle displaced meals.

The real victim in the assault had been Emma. There was no hiding the swelling mass of purple on her arm.

Much to the dismay of every would-be witness within the walls of The Fortune Café, she also declined the opportunity to seek justice by pressing charges. To be honest, she simply didn’t have time. She still had to ink an entire storyline
and
get shipping envelopes ready to go for when the orders came in. As it was, she would be spending every spare moment for the better part of a week signing books and shipping them off.

All she wanted at the moment was to clean the mess up, finish serving her tables, and go home to the real work.

The police finally gave up trying to coerce her to press charges and left. The customers trickled out, realizing the excitement really was over.

Harrison refused to leave. He insisted on making “restitution,” as he called it. As if he were some teenage delinquent put on community service for bad behavior. He swept the mess while Emma finished caring for her tables. He mopped the floors as she handled the checks for each one. He wiped down all the tables— even the ones not in her area. The three busboys, Jeff, James, and Rob acted as though they’d discovered the TARDIS was a real time machine. Nate, the sous chef, declared Harrison to be the patron saint of the restaurant and told him they’d make a bobblehead in his honor, and Cái smiled as if very pleased with how well the evening had gone in spite of the fact that he had a bruised waitress and a shattered plate. Soon, the only people in The Fortune Café were the staff and Harrison.

“Can I take you home?” Harrison asked when the closed sign had been flipped, and everyone but Cái and Emma had left. She’d wanted to take off, too, but felt weird leaving when Harrison seemed so intent on staying.

“I have my bike.”

He nodded. “Oh. Okay. So how about I walk you while you walk your bike. I’d offer to put the bike in my car, but I’m in the two door.”

The two door?

“Or we could leave the bike here, and I can just drive you home.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “I kind of need it to get back, and I have this rule about not taking rides from strangers.” She wasn’t so sure why the idea of him going home with her filled her with such terrifying excitement.

He put his hands over his heart and gave a pained expression. “I’m wounded! How can you call me a stranger after all those years of cheating off my papers?”

“I never cheated.”

“Huh. Yeah, that must’ve been me cheating off you then.”

She gave him a playful shove. “You didn’t cheat either. You were always top of the class. You graduated with a 3.8 or something.”

He grinned. “You know my grade point average, yet you call me a stranger?”

What she didn’t want to admit was that she used her time commuting to process through lines of dialogue and story in her head so that she hit the ground running as soon as she walked in the door at home. What would he think if he knew she was still doodling dragons after all these years? Especially when he’d become a grown-up and had a grown-up business. Most people didn’t understand her love of her web comic— especially when she worked so hard to meet deadlines for something she gave away for
free
. It was bad enough he’d seen her in her “waitress” world. She couldn’t let him see her in her nerdy comic book world too.

“How will you get back to your car if you walk me home?” There. That was a good excuse for him to part ways with her.

“I’ll walk back to my car.”

“You’re making this really complicated,” she said.

He leaned against the door frame. “No.
You’re
making this really complicated. Just say yes.”

She never said yes to people. Couldn’t. Her life didn’t have room for extra people crowding their way in. Not anymore. But as she stared into his eyes, she thought about graduation day, throwing her cap into the air, and Harrison’s warm breath against her ear as he whispered something she never heard. “Okay. Sure,” she said, not quite believing the words had come from her mouth.

Cái escorted them out and locked up behind them. Then he grinned at her through the window and waved with a fortune cookie in his hand. The little punk still looked smug. She’d have to let him know she was immune to his trickery.

Harrison waited while she unlocked her bike from the telephone pole and kicked back the stand. She usually rode on the bike trail that followed along the boardwalk and turned her bike toward the beach. They followed along her usual route with the bike rolling along between them.

The sound of waves breaking against the sand and fizzing back out into the ocean filled the silent spaces between them. Awkward. “So,” she began, “you’re in town for your parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary?”

He seemed surprised. “How’d you know?”

“Your date sort of shouted it. I think everyone on Tangerine Street knows. She yelled loud enough to shatter the windows in most of Seashell Beach.”

He winced. “I am so sorry—”

“No. No more apologies. And who knows? Her outburst might be good for business. People might keep coming back to the café if they think food fights are part of the evening entertainment. Seriously though, you can’t help the actions of another person.”

“I can. Sort of. I should have picked a better place for that conversation.”

Emma laughed. “That wasn’t a conversation. That was a death match. If you’d been in private, no one would’ve ever found your body.”

Harrison laughed too, and Emma sighed with a bit of personal satisfaction. She’d made Harrison laugh. Take
that
, Lunatic-Andrea.

“So what happened?” she asked, feeling only kind of guilty for prying. She really did want to know, and seeing Harrison again after so long, she couldn’t help but be curious about him. How was it possible that she sat next to him for all those years and never saw him the way she saw him at this moment? They’d always been friends, sure. But now his presence intrigued her. She felt hot and cold all at once. She was either violently attracted to him or coming down with the flu. She felt a pang of missed opportunity, but then... wasn’t her life just a long series of missed opportunities?
Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

Harrison had taken a long pause to try to figure out how to answer her question. Finally he said, “What happened... what happened was I opened my fortune cookie, and she insisted on me reading it out loud.”

“A fortune did all that?” Emma asked. “Cái must be right. There really is a force to be reckoned within those cookies.”

Harrison laughed again.
Point two for me,
Emma thought, then chided herself. It wasn’t a contest. How could it be a contest when the other girl wasn’t even around anymore?

“So what did your fortune say?” she asked, more out of habit than anything since she used people’s fortunes in her web comic all the time. The difference here was that she found herself genuinely wanting to know what kind of fortune incited Andrea into a rage.

“Oh, I see how it is. You won’t tell anyone what your fortune says, but you expect everyone to tell you?”

Emma had actually forgotten she received a fortune. It wasn’t like it really belonged to her since she hadn’t willfully opened it. “Fine. I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” she said.

Smells from other restaurants floated out onto the boardwalk from open doors. A low hum of conversations from other people out walking and joggers pounding past filled the air.

He stopped under a light post and pulled his hand out of the pocket of his jeans. Good quality jeans. Likely name brand, not that she knew offhand any currents trends or brands worth knowing about. That part of her life had ended just after high school when she’d fled the walls of her home and got her own apartment. She no longer felt the need to keep up with anything. That had been her mother’s thing, not hers.

He peeked at her from above the strip of white paper. He cleared his throat. “Tonight,” he began in a deep, mysterious voice, “you are reunited with your soul mate.”

He gave her a meaningful look, and for a moment Emma thought he was telling her that
she
was his soul mate. But he’d received the fortune while with a date, so of course he wasn’t meaning that. Seriously? A good-looking man walks her home and she starts reading signals into everything? Emma forced herself to laugh at his theatrics. “Well, Cái must be wrong after all. There is no way that girl is your soul mate.” She didn’t know why she felt the need to point that out to Harrison. He was a big boy. He could handle himself. And maybe Lunatic-Andrea was what he really wanted in his life.

He tilted his head as if needing to view her differently in order to understand her. A small smile played out over his full lips. She hated that she’d noticed his mouth at all— full or otherwise.

She edged out of the light so they could keep walking.

He finally said, “Wait a minute. What about yours?”

She kept walking, but he snagged her hand to stop her. “You promised.”

“You know what I don’t understand,” she said instead of answering his question. “Why did that make Andrea, who I don’t remember at all from school, incidentally, rampage through the restaurant?” She tried not to let herself shiver over the fact that he still had her hand.

He let go, ran his hand down the back of his head, and took a deep breath. “She thought it was about her.”

Emma cast a sideways glance at him. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“Nope. Not good at all. She flat out proposed.”

Emma cringed. “Ouch! She proposed? Not to sound like a poor excuse for a feminist, but shouldn’t you be the one popping the question?”

“Somehow my opinion was left out of the equation entirely.”

Emma hid her smile at the forlorn tone of his voice. “So can I take it that your response to her response was a no?”

He reached over and flipped his thumb over the switch that rang the bell on her bike. “Ding, ding, ding!” He called out. “We have a winner!”

She laughed and popped her front tire over the curb to turn them off the boardwalk and across the street away from the beach. She felt slightly sheepish over being a twenty-five-year-old woman who had a bell on her bicycle. After all, Harrison had just proved that bells on bikes were useful items.

“The thing is,” Harrison continued, “my sister and Andrea are really good friends. They always have been. And that friendship expanded to include my mom. My whole family loves her. They’ve been scheming plans for my wedding since, well... forever.”

“Seven years,” Emma said.

He flinched. “You heard that too, huh?”

Emma waved her arm to encompass the road they walked on. “Like I said, all of Seashell Beach heard it.”

“To be fair, I’ve never seen her do anything like that before in my life.”

“A first does not make it a last,” Emma said, then cringed. It wasn’t any of her business, and it made her look catty to insult this girl she didn’t know.

He smiled. “She’s really not crazy. I just burst her bubble is all.”

Emma blanched at the word crazy. She wasn’t really in a position to be judgmental about crazy, even if she had taken liberties in calling Andrea a lunatic. She mentally repented and vowed not to call Andrea anything derogatory again. The vow seemed easy enough to make; after all, what were the chances of her ever seeing Andrea in the future?

“She really thought that there was still a chance between us,” Harrison continued. “And I don’t know... maybe I thought there was too until—” He blinked as if waking up from a dream and shook his head.

“Until what?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head again. “It’s nothing. Hey, you said you’d read me your fortune.”

“Right. The dreaded fortune...” She fished around in her pocket, nearly toppling the bike while she wasn’t paying attention to the cracks in the sidewalk. She stopped under the nearest light post, cleared her throat, and tried to read in the same mysterious sort of voice Harrison used. She ended up sounding like a chain smoker. “Look around. Love is trying to catch you.” She waggled her eyebrows and stuffed the strip of white paper back in her pocket since no trash cans were nearby.