This time, his sigh was a little less muted, a little more weighed down.
“I guess if we can’t think of anything new,” he went on, and Winnie felt that his use ofwewas extremely charitable, “we’ll just go back to the old standbys and try again next year when it comes to being innovative. It’s not ideal, but…”
“I’ll think of something,” Winnie said earnestly, hoping that she could deliver on this promise. “I’ll really get the gears turning. I’ll get you something in the next few days. Really.”
Lyle gave her an appreciative smile, but she could see the tinge of worry in the crease of his eyes. Money was always a concern for a public project like the historical society, but was Lyle more worried than usual?
Winnie would fix it. She would. She had to.
“That sounds great, Winnie,” Lyle said, sounding a little older and a little more tired than usual. “Okay, Cherry. You have those spreadsheets I asked you about?”
While Lyle and Cherry quickly discussed something that had to do with staff retirement accounts, Winnie racked her brain for something new and innovative, but everything that popped into her head was either too expensive or too close to what they had always done, year after year. As their meeting ended and she and Cherry drifted back to their own workspaces, calling thanks to Lyle for the coffee over their shoulders, the question continued to plague Winnie, nagging at the back of her mind.
She wanted to do this for her boss… but how?
A glance at her watch told Winnie that she had about five more minutes before she had to report for the next tour. She decided that was a suitable amount of time to wallow, just a tiny bit.
The problem with coming up with a new and exciting way to fundraise, she thought, dropping her head onto her arms, was that it was basically the same issue as trying to come up with anew and exciting way to be social. In both cases, she wanted to achieve the goal. She was willing to work to achieve the goal. She knew that, once she got there, she would be proud of herself.
But she just couldn’t figure out the first step. She didn’t knowhowto get there.
It was the execution that eluded her. She kept turning the problem over in her mind, but…
Nope. She had nothing.
Her time for wallowing was over. Now, she had to go give a tour to a bunch of tourists and pretend that she wasn’t freaking out inside.
It was starting to feel a little like she had bitten off more than she could chew. And she didn’t know where to go from here without letting her boss or her new friends down.
Worse, she didn’t know where to go from here without letting herself down.
But that was a problem for later. It had to be. For now, she would paste a smile on her face and go tell people about the wonderful, fascinating history of Magnolia Shore, Massachusetts.
CHAPTER NINE
It took only one sip of his spiced latte for Shane to admit that he had beentotallyoff base when he’d worried that Magnolia Shore didn’t have good coffee shops.
It wasn’t a pumpkin spiced latte, the woman behind the counter had warned him. There was no pumpkin in the latte at all. She was saving that for the pumpkin pie latte closer to Thanksgiving. This was more apple-inspired spices… though, she cautioned again, as if she worried that he was planning an interrogation, there was no actual apple in it either. Just cinnamon, caramel, and a hint of allspice.
Shane was not going to ask any questions at all. In fact, he was going to come in here every day and order whatever special they had on order, because this wasdelicious.
Ten minutes at Juniper Café and he was practically ready to move in. Who needed a job or a house? He could be perfectly happy living right here, on this cozy, overstuffed armchair, so long as he kept getting some of these sublime coffees.
He took another sip, savoring it, and then opened his copy ofSix Ways to Determine Your Career’s Next Steps. He had brought it here this morning, hoping to make himself keep reading. Over the last few days, he had learned that it was far tooeasy to get distracted from this text when there was the siren’s song of all the other titles Eleanor offered calling to him from downstairs in the bookshop. He’d read two science fiction titles in the past few days, a reading speed he hadn’t achieved since childhood, but he’d only made it about thirty pages into this self-help book.
He'd hoped that the café, with its comparatively limited reading options, would force him to buckle down and really think about what he wanted next.
A few days in Magnolia Shore had proven clarifying in some ways. He’d found, for example, that he didn’t miss coding, at least not yet. His finger didn’t itch to get back to a keyboard, the way that they always had when he’d been a teenager. Back then, any time spent doing anything other than working on computers had felt like a waste.
Now, time spent not at his computer felt like a gift.
But he also wasn’t ready to abandon the career he’d built over the last two decades, at least not entirely. He had to figure out balance between starting over and finding a shift that left him feeling a little less in a rut.
Okay. He could do this. He opened the book.
A good way to think about your next career step is to reflect on what really inspires you,the book recommended.
Shane closed it with a frown.
