Which meant that this was the precise moment that June walked into the café, her son Benjamin chattering up at her happily as he clung to her hand.
Garrett was facing away from the door, so he didn’t see the way June raised her eyebrows and gave an approving look that was unmistakable to matchmakers, or readers of romance novels, everywhere.
Oh my gosh, she mouthed.
Eleanor tried to convey her message with her eyes alone, so she didn’t draw Garrett’s attention.
Stop that, June,she thought as hard as she could at her friend.Don’t be weird about it. We’re just friends.
Maybe that was too much nuance to expect from a mental message, because June gave her a totally un-subtle thumbs up. When Garrett was distracted by taking a sip from his coffee, Eleanor gave a sharp head shake.
Benjamin, in Eleanor’s opinion, was the hero of the hour, because he tugged at his mom’s hand, asking some question that made her turn away from Eleanor and Garrett. June did throw one last reluctant look over her shoulder as she let Benjamin draw her away, however, as if it physically pained her to not come over and say something.
Eleanor made a mental note that, once the bookstore was open, she was going to give Benjamin one book of his choice on the house, as repayment for his accidental aid.
“So,” Garrett said, drawing her attention back to their table. “Opening a bookstore. That’s cool. Is that what you did back in—oh, shoot, I forget.”
“Indianapolis,” she supplied. “And no. I was only twenty-two when I got married, so right out of college, and then Jeremy came about a year later. Before he was born, I had been just finding my footing, but Brian was going into law, so I stayed at home with Jeremy.” She wrinkled her nose. “I know that I was lucky to get to be home with him, honestly. And there’s a lot of those memories that I wouldn’t change for the world. But it does make me feel like I’m in kind of a pickle now, with so many years out of the workforce holding me back.”
He paused, as if really thinking through her words.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I guess there are some things you haven’t experienced. But people don’t give enoughcredit to stay-at-home parents. It’s a job! It just isn’t a job that you get paid to do. And I bet a lot of the skills, like organizing and time management, will translate into your new endeavor.”
His comments warmed Eleanor.
“There’s almost no inventory involved in stay-at-home parenting, though,” she acknowledged. “Unless you count laundry.”
“I’ve seen the messes my nieces are capable of making,” he replied. “Laundry counts.”
They both laughed.
“And your son, he’s off at college now?” he clarified. “That’s what led to your fresh start?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Sort of. You know I’m divorced, but I don’t know if I mentioned that it’s a pretty new development. Brian—that’s my ex—sort of sprung it on me, but in a weird way, I’m almost grateful to him for it now.” She realized, as she was speaking, how true the words were. “We’d been drifting apart for years, but it happened so gradually that I didn’t quite recognize it. Like that terrifying adage about boiling a frog, you know? Increased by degrees. At the end, I was living with a stranger, basically. And with Jeremy off to school… well, there was nothing left to keep us together.”
She appreciated that Garrett never seemed to respond to her too quickly. While in someone else, like her ex-husband for example, this might have felt like a sign that he wasn’t paying attention, in Garrett it seemed like the opposite. She got the sense that he was really thinking about what he wanted to say. It made her feel like this conversation was important to him. Like she was important.
It was, she knew, getting ahead of herself to think any such thing, but she decided to enjoy the moment and worry about all that later.
“I know you said you’re on a good side of it now,” he said thoughtfully, “but that still sounds really hard. I think… well, I guess in life sometimes we look at the big, dramatic moments as the ones that define us. But the everyday stuff can be even more important, don’t you think? And you came out of a tough everyday situation and refused to let it stop you. I admire that.”
“Thank you,” she said, genuinely touched.
Now it was Garrett’s turn to fidget. “And, I might have been thinking a little bit… okay alotabout what you said about not letting the past ruin your chances for the future.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. It stuck in my head, you know.” He tapped the side of his head in illustration of this point. “I don’t know for sure what I’m going to do with it yet. I just wanted you to know I didn’t forget. That I’m thinking about it.”
“I’m glad,” she said as the waitress approached with their plates balanced expertly on one arm, a pot of coffee clutched in the other for refills. “Now, hey, let’s see about these famous sourdough pancakes, huh?”
The look Garrett gave her said that he was grateful for the switch to a lighter topic. Eleanor too, felt that a break from their more serious subject matter would help her.
After all, she liked Garrett, but she didn’t want to hope for anything more than friendship between them. Her heartache was still fresh and reasonably raw, for all that she now understood that Brian had had the right idea when he’d suggested the divorce… even if he’d gone about it in absolutely the wrong way.
And Garrett’s heartache had been part of him for so long that she expected that it would take more than a few conversations for him to extricate himself from it.
But she was pleased that, for now, they understood one another better. She felt confident that, no matter what, theywould end up as friends. And friends were no mere consolation prize. Her new friends in Magnolia Shore had made that perfectly clear.
