Maybe now I never would…
If I bought the house, I’d need to keep running it as a B & B to pay the mortgage. And not the way I’d been running it either. I’d have to be open year-round to cover that kind of payment.
I’d be an innkeeper for the rest of my life.
Not that being an innkeeper wasn’t a good business. It’s just not what I wanted to do. I don’t think it was what I was meant to do.
All of this felt a little like selling my soul. Like letting the house go would destroy me, and so would keeping it.
Doug put his coffee to his lips. “What’s up with the girlfriend?” he asked me.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I mumbled.
She wasn’t my girlfriend, because she didn’t want to be my girlfriend. I’d jump at the chance to be Alexis’s boyfriend in a hot second. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen.
She never made me feel like I wasn’t good enough for her, but she didn’t have to. It was obvious. I’d accepted this with a resigned understanding of my position and decided that I wasn’t going to dwell on it, especially because there was nothing I could do to change the situation. I couldn’t snap my fingers and be a damn surgeon. I couldn’t be anything other than what I was.
“Why isn’t she your girlfriend?” Doug asked.
“I don’t have anything to offer a woman like that.”
Doug set his mug down. “Have you ever heard of penguin love stones?”
“What?”
“A penguin love stone. When a male likes a female, he finds a perfect stone and he brings it to her. If she likes it, she puts it in her nest and that’s it. They’re paired for life.”
Brian watched Liz taking an order at another table but talked to us. “And your point?”
“My point is, the penguin’s not picking her mate because he’s the one who has the best rock. It might look that way, but she’s not. She’s taking the rock because the male she wants the most is offering it. Sometimes what you have to give is enough. Even if it’s a rock instead of a diamond.”
I let out a long breath. If only that were true.
We ate breakfast. Doug was in a good mood, which was nice. His depression always got better in the spring. More sunlight, more time outside, tourists starting to come back. He was thinking of putting in a wood-fired pizza oven at the farm to do pizza and wine pairings in the summer, bring in more business in addition to the petting zoo and barn weddings he did.
Brian listened to us talk and watched Liz. Every time she cleared a plate, he’d look at her brace and his jaw would flex. This shit with Jake was hard on all of us, but for Brian I think it was a special kind of hell.
When we were finishing up, my phone rang. I grinned. Alexis.
“I gotta take this,” I said, sliding out of the booth.
I pushed through the door and swiped the Answer button when I got outside. “Hey. You get your coffee?” I smiled.
“Iced coffee tastes soooo much better when you’re late for work,” Alexis said, sounding like her old self again.
I laughed. “Glad I could help.”
“I have to go in a second, but I wanted you to hear something. I’m going to put you on speaker but don’t talk, okay?”
“Okay…”
“Someone’s singing opera in the ER,” she said.
I could hear the squeaky sound of shoes on a polished floor like she was walking me somewhere.
“Opera?”
“We’ve got a bachelorette party here. The bride has alcohol poisoning and her friends brought her in. The whole group is drunk. One of them is a soprano, and she’s singing in the room. It’s amazing. Ready?”
“Ready.”
She put me on speaker, and I heard a door open. The voice of an angel drifted through the phone. “Ave Maria.”
It was beautiful. Ethereal. It brought tears to my eyes, standing on this sidewalk. It felt like a gift, this unexpected beauty in the middle of a mundane morning.
Alexis tapped me into a different world. She was this incredible woman, working in a hospital two hours away, treating a patient whose friend was singing in Latin. Just in her normal routine, Alexis was living a life a thousand times more interesting and cultured than mine—and she wanted to include me in it.
This gesture made me grateful in a way I couldn’t explain. She was giving me more of herself, even if it was just a peek into a moment of her day.
When it ended, Alexis whispered into the phone, “Gotta go.” And she hung up.