slime. He’s scum. I will never forgive him for this!”
“But...what do I do without him?” Ashley had cried.
After they hung up, Ashley just cried for another hour. There was a light knocking on her door and she knew it was her mother. She didn’t answer or say “come in.” She laid there, her head on her pillow, leaking tears, gripping her cell phone in case Downy called her to say he’d made a terrible mistake.
Gina came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. “I brought you some tea,” she said, her hand on Ashley’s back.
“No, thank you,” Ashley said thickly.
“Ash, I’m sorry this happened.”
“Really, I can’t talk about it anymore.”
“Just a little, please? So I can understand where you are right now? Emotionally.”
Ash rolled onto her back, her wet eyes red and swollen. “He has another girl. A beautiful, snotty college girl who he’s screwing because he says it’s not that big a deal. And right now I just don’t want to even live.”
“Ashley, please, don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”
“I’m not going to school tomorrow. Maybe not the next day, either. Maybe never.”
Three
Cooper noticed Sarah had been preoccupied over the past couple of days. Quiet and maybe a bit sullen. She said the inspection was going to be hell and while she might not be worried about her team, a strong leader always worried about the inspectors. They had to be ready for anything.
All Cooper could do was be available, support her in any way he could. He found himself fighting the worry that Sarah had changed her mind, that something had caused her to reconsider those three little words. I love you. Yet when he possessed her, when she was joined to him, her passion for him drove worry from his mind. During those times she was one hundred percent his and he was completely hers.
In the meantime, he had a business to learn. This beach bar was unlike anything he had ever done before. Ben’s old helper, Rawley Goode, old being the operative word, might be a little on the strange side, but he had turned out to be a damned good assistant. Rawley was somewhere in his sixties and he’d been ridden hard. Rawley told Cooper that Ben used to only be open in the mornings and evenings. Ben had put in his longest days during summer, and he bumped up the schedule with the help of part-time teenage help. Rawley said, “I clean and get supplies. I can work in the kitchen or behind the bar, but I ain’t social. You give me a list and cash. I go to Costco and other stores. But in summer, you have to stay open late. The sunset over the bay is better ’n football on HD.”
During his first week of operation Cooper noticed that the bulk of his traffic was between seven and ten in the morning and four and seven in the afternoon. There were stragglers here and there at other times. Those patrons were almost exclusively Thunder Point residents. But on the weekends, particularly in good weather, there was heavy traffic all day and into the evening—bikers, cyclists, pleasure boaters, sport fishermen, folks traveling on Highway 101 in want of a meal. He did an impressive business on bottled water alone, not to mention the other things he was able to offer. When he inherited this place, it had been a run-down shack with a homemade sign on the road that said Cheap Drinks. Now it was upgraded and classy and he was damn proud of it. Cooper put a decent sign on his property at the turnoff from highway 101. Ben & Cooper’s. And beneath that, Food and Drink. He stocked liquor and non-alcoholic beverages and had a contract with Carrie James, owner of the town’s deli, for prepared and wrapped food items. The reopening of the bar benefited both of them.
A lot of his first patrons from out of town wanted to know what had happened to Ben. Well, it was a sad story and he didn’t like to dwell on it, but the fact was that Ben had been found at the bottom of the cellar stairs and at first it was thought to be an accident. But, since then, there had been evidence to suggest he’d been killed by a blow to the head that caused the fall. The suspect—a seventeen-year-old kid from town—was out on bail awaiting trial. That still blew Cooper’s mind—a seventeen-year-old kid. The kid, Jag Morrison, had been trying to convince Ben to sell the beach and adjacent property to his father, a local developer.
Cooper had been just going through the motions—renovating and opening for business. He didn’t think he was a shopkeeper or bar-owner kind of guy. He had been a pilot for fifteen years—helicopters. But the more he got to know the town, the people and the many moods of the Pacific Ocean, the more the place grew on him. After just a short period of time instead of moving on, he was considering making even more improvements to the property. After watching Sarah on the water, he thought renting kayaks and paddleboards would be an excellent idea.
None of it came naturally, however. Cooper bought himself a new laptop with a decent accounting spreadsheet program and was still figuring it out. Rawley wasn’t able to help him out with this part of the business. It was during his weekday midmorning downtime that he sat at his own bar and was plugging numbers from bills and receipts into his spreadsheet that the door opened and Mac McCain walked in. With relief, he closed the laptop. “Hey,” he said. “Aren’t you usually at the diner about now?”
“Usually,” Mac said. “Gina’s daughter stayed home from school. She went home to check on her and I didn’t feel like having coffee with the cook. Stu just isn’t as pretty no matter which way you cut it.”
“I noticed that. How’s everything else?”
“Same,” he said. Mac went right behind the bar and helped himself to a cup of coffee. “You? Business shaping up?”
“Aw, I don’t know. I mean, business is good. There are people in here all the time. But I’m not real clear on the accounting and that sort of thing. Kind of makes me wonder how Ben managed. He was a genius with a wrench but he didn’t seem to take to paperwork and numbers.”
“Everyone wondered that same thing,” Mac said, sipping his coffee.
“It’s tedious, that’s for sure. Say, something’s been weighing on my mind a little bit. Been a long time since I had a girlfriend, you know? You ever wonder what the hell’s going on in Gina’s head?”
Mac broke into a huge grin. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“So that’s a no? Because Sarah—she’s got a lot on her mind, I know that. But man, she’s on another planet sometimes. Makes me wonder if anything is wrong. But then she’s back and I wonder why I wondered....”
“Coop, you remember how many women I live with, right? There’s Lou, Eve and Dee Dee at home, but then there’s Gina and all her women—her mother and her daughter, who at the moment is a mess over some boyfriend issue. Half the time I don’t have any idea what’s going on in any of their heads!”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s a no?”
“That’s a no.”
“How do you handle that?”
“Do you see me handling anything? I pretty much just duck.”
“Oh, you’re a big help....”
“Sorry, man. I just do as I’m told most of the time,” Mac said.
Cooper
