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Calista

After

For the last four days, my word of the day was one I’d neither heard of before nor been able to use in a sentence.

For some reason that startled me.

“When would I ever need to use the word flummoxed?” Maybe I wasn’t the problem. Maybe it was the app on my phone. An app I currently paid for, might I add.

“Did you say phlegmy? Are you sick?” Gus yelled like we were on opposite sides of the room rather than separated just by the width of the coffee counter.

He’d forgotten his hearing aids again, and I tried really hard not to wipe the spit I could feel that just landed on the end of my nose.

“No phlegm here, Gus.” I handed him his coffee in a to-go cup along with his change, which was the five-dollar bill he had handed me to begin with.

“Oh, well, that’s good. You make the best coffee in town.” He nodded at me in fierce agreement with his own statement.

“I make the only coffee in town.” I quirked an eyebrow at him.

“Doesn’t make it any less true.” Gus was perpetually uncomfortable with giving compliments but handed them out like candy on Halloween. It meant that he was always rosy-cheeked and flighty with his eye contact.

I always do the same thing every day to soften his apparent discomfort because I really liked Gus. “You’re just trying to butter me up for a free cookie.” The first was free for everyone, but Gus didn’t know that.

“Is it working?”

“Like a charm.” I grinned at him brightly before sliding a still warm chocolate chip cookie into a bag. “Have a good day, Gus,” I said, handing it to him.

“See you tomorrow, Cali.” He harrumphed and dragged his feet the whole way out of the café.

Gus had been my first customer every morning of every day except Sundays for the last year and a half. He was also Santa Claus every year at the park in the middle of town since before I was born, and even in his retirement from community-based activities, he still looked the part.

In the plan that was my life…well, I hadn’t really planned my life. Not with extreme detail. Not beyond my single, nonnegotiable: that I lived a life where laughter was always around every corner. I wanted the creases around my eyes and mouth to proudly show the evidence of it to people who knew and loved me. To people who didn’t.

I guess if I unpacked it, that happiness was the coalition of a few things. Things that, if you’d asked me five years ago, were also baseline items.

Four walls and a roof over my head. Being able to wake up every day in Darling and its inherent warmth, its safety. This town was a bubble from the outside world, and almost everything good that had ever happened to me could be recounted and placed somewhere within the seven minutes and fourteen seconds it took to both enter and exit the town limits.

The last part of that baseline used to be someone to share it all with. Someone to depend on to help keep the clouds from impeding on the sunshine that was all the good that life had to offer. All the laughter.

But plans change.

The bell above the door to the café sounded just as I rounded the corner of the small kitchen tucked away in the back, a tray of fresh cookies in hand.

“There she is.” My dad strode into the café with a grin splashed across his sun-kissed skin and rounded the counter. He dropped a kiss on the crown of my head before he grabbed two cookies right off the tray and his coffee off the top of the machine that I’d made at the same time as Gus’s.

Dallas Grey had been my second customer every day except Sundays for the last year and a half.

“Hey!” I reached for the cookie contraband a second too late. “I’ll tell Mom!” I gave him my most serious look, with a hand on my hip for emphasis.

“You know, you look just like her when you do that.”

“Compliments will get you nowhere!” I yelled as he reached for the door.

Two seconds later, the bell rang again, and he reappeared. I rolled my eyes to hide my smile with zero percent success. “I’m not going to tell her, but you should know the amount of sugar, butter, and chocolate in those is enough to make you blackout for maybe a second.”

“Then why do you make them?”

“Because they taste amazing.”

“Well, see, that’s why I take two. One to try, and—”

“One to be sure. Yeah, yeah.” I crossed my arms and scowled at his still-smiling face. The smile that I’d inherited. I was my father’s daughter, through and through. From the same hazel eyes to the wavy black hair. I was a copy and paste of him, whereas my sister, Abbey, was the spitting image of our mother.

“Don’t be a smartass, and remember we’ve moved dinner to tonight at six because your mom’s got to be at the hospital Thursday night. Don’t be late, or you’ll hear it from your mother.”

I saluted at him. “But smartass is my middle name, as you’ve told me many times. And I know, no lateness here.”

“Love you, kid. Best coffee in town.”

“Love you too. And you have to say that. We’re related.”

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“I’m still waiting for Walter to get back from his ‘summer camp,’ so yes.” Walter was my rabbit that I’d won at the Autumn Fair in town when I was eight.

He let out an exasperated sigh. “You never did let that go.”

“You still haven’t given me any other explanation.” I grabbed a cup from the top of the machine as Maggie, my constant third patron for the last year and a half, slid past my dad.

“Morning, Dallas.”

“Morning, Mags. How’s Delilah?” he asked, wiping his hand down the front of his shirt, eradicating the last evidence of his contraband cookie.

“Oh, she’s doing good.” Mags took her regular seat right in the middle of the café. Most people craved the corners, or at the very least a wall to press their backs against. Not Mags.

“We meant to catch up the other day, but she never got back to me.” I walked around the counter and set down her coffee and a cookie. We’d been doing that since I got back to town, playing a never-ending game of phone tag that resulted in a total of zero catch-ups.

“She had an unexpected visitor.” There was a twinkle so bright in her eyes when she said the word “visitor” that I sort of wondered if the only person who hadn’t expected them was Delilah.

“Oh?” I said it as casually as possible, but no one grew up in a small town and didn’t develop a small taste for a little gossip. “Any ideas who?”

“Dylan Mason.”

My sudden intake of breath was so aggressive I immediately began choking on my own saliva. My dad was there in a heartbeat, coffee in one hand and smacking my back with incredible amounts of force with the other.

“ Ow,” I rasped, desperately waving him off in an effort to protect the integrity of my bones. “Dad, you’re going to break a rib. Did you say Dylan Mason? ”

“The very same.”

“The one that, you know…” Holy shit, I really needed to call Delilah.

“Mm-hmm.” Mags nodded her head, eyes still twinkling as she took a sip of her coffee and let out a grateful hum. “No one makes coffee like you, Cali.”

“Keep your eyes on your cookie. This one’s drooling.” I pointed at my dad before ushering him out the door. “I’ll see you tonight. Drive safe and be safe, please.”

“Always do, always am.” With a final kiss to the top of my head, he walked out the door, and I couldn’t help the pressure that filled my chest. My dad was a firefighter, and it had always been my claim to fame when I was a kid growing up but the feeling of waiting with bated breath for him to walk through the front door every night hadn’t ever shifted. Lodged in my heart like shrapnel.

Owning the café and being one of two employees, I was constantly run off my feet in a really non-aggressive way. Especially considering that Sammy and I only worked together on Saturdays.

I didn’t have to worry about forgetting orders or customers growing disgruntled over a lack of available seating. The stream of people was reliable—just enough to keep me moving, yet never too overwhelming.

An empty seat? Filled within minutes.

A stack of dockets cleared? Time to put cookies in the oven or take them out.

The rhythm was predictable: walk out front, hand off cookies, take the next order, prep a sandwich.

So, no. I hadn’t pictured my life in detail, but I knew it wasn’t supposed to look like this.

And you know what? That was okay. Because now I knew what my days would look like. I knew the people who would fill them. The first person to walk through my coffee shop door. The second. The third.

I knew the cookie recipe by heart—reliable, unchanging. Just like the life I’d built here. It wasn’t splattered with the laughter I’d dreamed of. The peace that settled after was fleeting, but the thin clouds above left enough light to get by.

It was four fifteen p.m., and, just like the day before, I started to close the café. The bell on the door rang, which was jarring for two reasons.

In the last year and a half, the bell had never rung at four fifteen p.m. The second was that in the brief moment when the street outside could be heard from the inside of the café, a chorus of voices trickled in.

The street in front of my café was usually quiet. The school run was done, and Mrs. Dellante had walked by with her five Pomeranians, stopping for almost exactly fifty seconds while they drank out of the dog bowl out front. That was why the chattering didn’t make sense, because it hadn’t existed before. Never at this time or on this street.

I leaned around the doorframe that led into the kitchen and noticed first the cars that had parked on the street. It would be a pretty good bet that I knew almost all the cars in all of Darling. A weird thing for me to have in my arsenal of things that may potentially impress you, but I saw them drive by my window every day. Sometimes several times a day, and I’d never seen these ones before.

Work trucks lined the street all with one thing in common: they all had ‘Mackenzie Co.’ on the side. The same logo was on the back of the shirts of the huddle of men that had congregated out front. It seemed stupid to me at that moment that the very last thing I noticed was the man, the strikingly big man, standing in the middle of my café.

I hadn’t really thought about what would happen if this exact moment came to be. I think I did a lot to actively avoid it entirely, but it struck me as strange that so much and so little had changed about the person standing in front of me.

Was he bigger ? Was that possible ? Had he spent the last two years tracking down the exact location he more than likely already knew I’d be at?

I found all the above all at once too hard to comprehend because I had stopped waiting for Fane Mackenzie to show up at my door a very long time ago.

I wanted to blink and for him to disappear entirely.

“Calista.”

The moment my name left his tongue, I could hear the way he laughed as if it were the bell above my door. I felt myself glitch, my world being smothered in too bright sunshine and then doused in heavy sheets of rain.

I wanted to take out my contacts and rub my eyes. I hated the finicky little bastards on the best of days, and this just felt like another reason why I should stop wearing them. The only sane explanation was that I had been given a pair that had the illusions of this man right on them.

The mop I was gripping like my only tether to the real world fell from my hands and clattered to the floor, and all I could think was that I was finally able to use my word of the day.

Flummoxed.