Page 38 of Bed and Breakup (Dial Delights #15)

Robin

On Wednesday, we take advantage of the surprisingly pleasant weather—usually Eureka feels like one big sweaty foot in late July—to work on outdoor projects.

We’ve been getting a fair amount of rain, and flowers, produce, and weeds alike are springing up in the garden at a breakneck pace.

I spend the morning picking and watering and pruning while Molly knocks a few things off our exterior to-do list nearby.

In the afternoon, we refinish the gazebo.

Molly teaches me to inspect the wooden boards, hammer in loose nails, and paint the stain evenly across the planks for a consistent color.

When we’re done, I stand back to inspect our work.

The structure looks as good as new. Well, maybe not new, but pretty damn good for being decades old.

Her job done, Molly throws herself on a shady patch of freshly mowed grass, arms and legs spread like she’s about to make snow angels.

When she hasn’t moved a few minutes later, I walk over to make sure she’s still breathing.

“Everything all right down there?” I ask, wiping the sweat from my face with my T-shirt.

“Yep. Fine. Just going to lie here until my bones crumble to dust and absorb into the earth.”

“That doesn’t sound very fine to me.”

Molly cracks her eyes open. “When did we get so old?” she asks. “I swear I used to get three times as much done in a day and wake up limber, energized, and ready to go again. Now I feel like I’ve been mauled by a bear.”

“Only you could get mauled by a bear and still look this cute,” I say, eyeing her messy-chic bun, sun-pinkened cheeks, and the tantalizing strip of skin between her yellow crop top and denim shorts.

Molly’s mouth twitches with a smile. “I’d trade my cuteness for less sore joints in a heartbeat.”

“I have something that might help,” I say, remembering what I tucked away in a kitchen drawer last week. “Be right back.”

I return a minute later, plop down on the grass beside Molly, and hold out an offering.

“A joint?” Molly says, sitting up. “That hasn’t been hiding in the inn since 2018, has it?”

“It’s fresh. A line cook gave it to me. You’re not a snitch, are you?”

“Hell no.” Molly grabs the joint from my hand, and I pass her a lighter.

She puffs to get it going, then exhales a cloud of smoke.

“Ahh. Wow. I haven’t smoked since New Orleans.

” She passes it to me. I take a hit and hand it back.

This time, she does a fancy French inhale, releasing a puff from her mouth and breathing it back in through her nose.

“Damn,” I say. “Looks like you’ve practiced since I last smoked with you.”

Molly brings the joint to her mouth and blows out a series of smoke rings. “I’m an artiste now. It comes with the territory,” she says, then holds out the roll to me.

“We in the restaurant industry are more no-nonsense about it.” I take a big breath in, then try to hold back a cough but fail spectacularly.

When I recover, Molly has an amused look on her face. “Should I shotgun you like you did for me when I was a little newbie stoner?”

I laugh, remembering when I first got Molly high by blowing smoke into her mouth.

Weed was never hard to find in this town.

Eureka kind of loophole legalized it in 2006, a good ten years before Arkansas passed a medical marijuana law.

That’s what happens when retired hippies have a strong majority on the city council.

“I still can’t believe you’d never smoked before we met,” I say.

“Where was I supposed to get drugs?” Molly says. “I never went to college, had no friends, and lived with my grandma.”

“Fair point.”

Molly takes a big hit, then leans into me, lips to lips, and blows the smoke into my mouth.

I breathe it in and hold it. I get momentarily lost in the thought that the air in my lungs came directly out of Molly’s, that there’s a pocket of space inside of me that was once inside of her.

I release the smoke in a thin stream, never breaking eye contact.

“It’s kind of fun being on this side of the shotgun,” Molly says.

“You never shotgunned any hot lesbians on your art tours of the Southeast?”

Molly smirks with red, narrowed eyes. “Never,” she says. “No matter how much they begged and pleaded.”

“You must have left a trail of broken sober hearts in your wake.”

“What about you? I imagine you blew weed smoke into the mouth of every girl who asked for your autograph.”

I grin. “You know me. Always a giver.”

“Did you shotgun Georgina?”

I watch Molly for signs of animosity. Georgina’s name used to be an instant fight-starter between us. It still seemed like a sticking point last month, when we talked about Georgina on the porch. Maybe it’s the chill of being high, but now she just seems curious.

“Not that I remember,” I answer, relaxing. “Georgina wasn’t into PDA, and we did most of our smoking in the alley behind Robin’s Egg and Stargazer with our employees nearby.”

Molly tilts her head. “Your shared restaurant building?”

“Yeah, in Portland,” I reply, finding it less painful to talk about than expected.

“It honestly was a bad idea, trying to share a kitchen and dining space between two restaurateurs. It only lasted as long as it did because I left her in charge while I opened the second Robin’s Egg location in Silicon Valley and the Hatch in Seattle.

We were broken up by then. Just trying to make it work as business partners. ”

Passing back the joint, Molly says, “Tell me about your restaurants. What were they like inside? What would I have ordered if I’d visited?”

I raise my eyebrows in surprise. “Didn’t you already google them?”

“I did,” Molly says, running her fingers through a thick patch of grass. “But that’s not the same as seeing them through your eyes.”

I’d typically dive off one of Eureka’s rocky cliffs before reliving my restaurant failures, but Molly’s looking at me like she really believes they were special.

So I give in and start with my first, Robin’s Egg in downtown Portland.

I describe the Instagrammable patio space with ivy-covered walls and punny neon signs and the airy interior, full of mismatched furniture painted in bright colors.

The design was similar at the short-lived Google HQ Robin’s Egg location, which had the misfortune of opening five months ahead of March 2020.

When I tell her about the miniature quiche cups that came in a million seasonal flavors, the ones I later turned into a mass-produced frozen product that saved me from going completely broke during the pandemic, she nods in recognition.

“I bought them once,” Molly admits shyly. “The first time I saw them at the grocery store, I couldn’t resist. I fully intended to hate them out of spite, but they actually tasted pretty good. Not as good as the quiches you made at the inn, but still.”

She ashes the joint as I move on to the Hatch, my higher-priced farm-to-table restaurant in Seattle.

With Robin’s Egg thriving on early buzz and a big check in my pocket from Google, I decided to open a dinner concept just under a year after cutting the ribbon on my first place.

Oh, the ignorant audacity. Guests picked their own garnishes from herbs grown in pots and window boxes around the restaurant, and they could grab fruits and veggies from the garden out back for the cooks to add to omelets or flatbreads.

Finally, I reach my favorite child and biggest disappointment, Kindling.

I map out the restaurant in the air, how guests walked down a forest trail from the parking lot to a clearing in the trees where chairs circled ten firepits, with the kitchen hidden in a cabin built off the clearing.

After watching each of my restaurants shutter in 2020, all that open air felt like a safe bet, even if the concept itself was risky.

I tell Molly about the gourmet skewers and steaks and seafood guests grilled themselves over fires, the flame-cooked side dishes in cast-iron pans, the s’mores made with gourmet marshmallows, cookies, crackers, and drizzles.

Over the course of our conversation, we’ve sunk down in the grass, staring up at the clouds with my head on Molly’s stomach.

Sharing what I loved about my restaurants with her feels surprisingly healthy.

Picturing them at their peaks instead of when I turned the Open signs to Closed for the last time.

“Do you miss it?” Molly asks when I’m finished. “Running a restaurant?”

“Which part?” I say sarcastically. “The long-ass days with no sleep? The cruel Yelp reviews? The constant fear of not breaking even and worrying about making payroll?”

“Not those,” Molly says, her fingers combing through my hair. “The good parts.”

I close my eyes, enjoying the gentle scalp massage, and picture the look on my first Robin’s Egg customer’s face when she took a bite of my bananas Foster French toast. The enthusiasm with which the Hatch’s front-of-house manager guided customers through the pick-your-own fresh herb garnishes.

The family dinners I’d eat with my team around the last campfire at Kindling after close.

“Yeah,” I say, barely loud enough for Molly to hear over the wind in the trees above us. “I do miss it.”

“As much as you miss being on TV?” Molly asks.

“TV’s fun sometimes,” I say, noticing how my head rises and falls against Molly’s stomach as she breathes.

“Winning competitions. Meeting some of my heroes. Cooking and eating things out of my comfort zone. But it’s a lot of waiting.

I couldn’t even talk about anything until it aired, and half the time, when I watched the shows, the producers edited them so much that they looked nothing like when we filmed.

Restaurants are real-time. I get to watch people eat what I make as soon as it hits the plate. ”

Molly’s fingers graze my neck and come to rest on my chest, right above my heart. “It sounds like your heart is in restaurants,” she says, voice hoarse, probably from smoking. “And once we sell the inn, you’ll have the capital to open a new one.”

I open my mouth to respond, but can’t find a single word.

When Molly says it like that, my decision sounds so easy.

But is it how I really feel? How do I give up the fame and clout of TV?

And if a new restaurant is the answer, what?

Where? With whom? And why does the idea of leaving the inn to start something new sound so scary?

Molly, seeming to understand my conflicted silence, says, “All this food talk has made me realize I’m starving. I could eat a whole hog, snout to tail.”

I grin at the phrase, another of her gram’s Southernisms. “Same. But getting up to cook sounds so hard,” I whine.

Molly crawls a few feet to grab the end of the water hose I used earlier. “Good thing we’ve got a whole farmers market’s worth of produce right here,” she says, waving the hose toward the garden.

We pick berries and beets and radishes and spinach, then clean them off and snack while Molly tells me how she spent our years apart.

Between bites, she explains how, after teaching herself to repair the inn’s windows and creating the smaller original designs for the guest rooms, she started restoring old stained glass at churches and historic buildings around Arkansas.

Then she worked her way up, making bigger original pieces, thinking more outside the box in terms of style.

She tells me about the first commission she ever made, a high-impact design of colorful triangles for an art museum in northwest Arkansas.

That’s how her agent found her, and from there, things took off quickly.

Molly took a welding class and used her new skills to make freestanding steel-and-glass works, which caught the eye of a Route 66 restoration committee and led her to a multistate job that paid more than she’d expected to make in a lifetime.

“Wait,” I say through a mouthful of radish. “You’re rich?”

Molly’s cheeks turn pink. “Not, like, idiot-billionaire-who-rockets-himself-into-space rich,” she says. “But rich as in having more money than I know what to do with, yes.”

“This whole time, I thought we were both broke,” I say, stunned. “During that first-month standoff, you could have rented somewhere else to live?”

Molly bites her bottom lip. “I could have bought a whole other inn.”

I can’t help it. I laugh. I laugh so hard that I snort, which sets Molly off, and then we’re those stereotypical high teenagers, giggling and rolling around on the grass, cracking up at the other cracking up, tears running down our faces.

It takes us minutes to recover. When we do, Molly picks up a blueberry and starts moving her mouth weirdly like she’s talking to it.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

Molly looks up at me like she’d almost forgotten I was here. “I was just thinking about how blueberries are the happiest fruits,” she says. “Saying their name makes you smile. Blueberries. Bluuueberrieees. Try it.”

I follow her lead, and the corners of my mouth do curve up at the word. “It works for all berries,” I say. “Strawberrieees. Raspberrieees. Blackberrieees.”

She tests out the words while I stare, mesmerized by her lips, and then we both realize how silly we look and sound, and then we’re off on another fit of laughter.

I watch as Molly calms, her face settling into a relaxed grin, observing the clouds passing overhead.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen her this at peace, walls down, beaming brighter than the sun.

Our time together at the inn has brought out a new Molly.

It’s changed me too, I think. I’m starting to see the world, and what I want from it, differently these days.

Will I still be this Robin when I go back to real life, to the cameras and investors and food critics?

Will Molly still be the same gorgeous, confident woman she is beside me right now?

Will we even stay in touch enough to find out?