I looked around the room, remembering when Opal had told me about the restaurant’s history, that day I’d first been up here. In the last two weeks, a lot had happened as far as Luna Blu was concerned. First, my dad had officially been reassigned to the next project, in Hawaii, while Opal had submitted her resignation, leaving her free and clear to work on purchasing the building once Chuckles put it on the market. Which he was doing at a very reasonable price, in exchange for two things: a hefty percentage, and a return of rolls to the menu. This agreement was hashed out over a very long meal at our house, punctuated by Hawaiian Kobe beef and two bottles of very good red wine. As for the Melmans, Opal’s old bosses, they’d come on shortly afterward, after she flew down to Florida with a business plan and an offer they didn’t want to refuse. Turned out retirement life was a bit dull for their taste: they missed the excitement of having a piece of a daily business. Between their money, a start-up loan from the bank, and Chuckles’s bargain price, Opal was getting her own restaurant. But first, Luna Blu had to close.
No one was happy about it. For the last week, as we’d been upstairs working away, the restaurant had been crazy busy, packed with locals who’d heard the news and wanted to have one last meal. I’d personally expected the entire place to implode with my dad and Opal gone, but surprisingly, under the dual leadership of Jason and Tracey, things had actually been running pretty smoothly. My dad had marveled more than once that he’d always pegged Tracey as the type to jump ship first. But as it turned out, she’d probably bailed herself into a manager poson at Opal’s new place, if she wanted it.
“Here it is!” Deb said, grabbing a pad of paper from the floor by the landing and holding it up. “Thank God. Okay, let me see what else we have to do.... Final landscaping is in progress, traffic signs are—oh, crap, where are the traffic signs?”
“I’m doing them right now,” Ellis told her. “Take a breath, would you?”
“Then that just leaves the final population details,” Deb said, not breathing at all. She looked around. “There was one final bag I saw here yesterday that hadn’t been put on yet. What happened to it?”
“I cannot deal with these trees and questions at the same time,” Heather said.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ellis said. “Learn to multitask.”
“Where are those people?” Deb demanded. “I swear they were right—”
“Dave probably put them on,” Riley told her. “He was here last night again.”
Deb turned, looking at her. “He was?”
Riley nodded. “When I left at six, he was just getting here. Said he had a few last touches to add.”
“I texted him at seven and he was still here,” Ellis added.
I watched as Deb walked over to the model, scanning it slowly from side to side. “I don’t see any huge differences, though,” she said. “Not anything that would take a few hours, at any rate.”
“Maybe he just works very slowly,” Heather said.
“No, that’s you,” Ellis told her.
“Eighteen minutes!” Deb said, clapping her hands. “People, this is serious. If you have more than you can do in eighteen minutes, speak your piece now. Because this is crunch time. Anyone? Anyone?”
I shook my head: I only had a handful of bushes left to add on. Everyone got quiet, though, as we worked away, the minutes ticking by. Downstairs, we knew they were counting down, as well: as of ten o’clock, they’d be finished, too. It seemed like that was all these last weeks had been about, change and endings. The beginnings were yet to come.
Once again, my dad and I had been packing up the house and our things into boxes. This time, though, they’d be going to storage, not in the U-Haul. As for Hawaii, all my dad needed was a suitcase. The plan was for him to stay the summer, helping Chuckles’s restaurant get its footing, before returning in time to help my mom get me settled at whatever school I ended up deciding to attend. Then he’d come to Lakeview, where he’d fill in as chef at Opal’s place until he decided what he wanted to do next. Their relationship—which, apparently, had begun the night he’d told her about the restaurant closing, and ended up following her back to her house to talk about it—was new. They’d already had to deal with the awkwardness of my dad breaking up with Lindsay Baker (Opal had given up spinning, for now) and were about to face a separation. Neither one of them was naïve enough to think they would absolutely make it. But just knowing he had someone to come back to besides me was a comfort to me. I, for one, was pulling for them.
As for me, I was packed up as well, my stuff folded away into my same boxes, ready to m the trip back to Tyler. It wasn’t easy leaving, especially with so little left of the year to go. Everyone was talking about final plans: the end of the model, graduation, the Austin road trip, even though Ellis, Riley, and Heather were less excited than they had been since Dave was staying behind. As for Dave, he’d been pulling back as well, mostly because he had to. He went to work, school, his U classes, and home. His car was off-limits, parked in the driveway under the basketball goal, so any free time he was allowed was spent working on the model. Now though, for his own reasons, he preferred to do that alone, coming for an hour here and there when the rest of us were already gone.
He might have been absent, but his work was evident, as over the last week people had slowly begun to appear on the model, here and there. He didn’t put them on using the sector system, or pinwheel, or anything else. Instead, their numbers just seemed to grow, day by day, as if they were populating all by themselves. Each figure—men, women, children, people walking dogs, cyclists, policemen—was added meticulously, and clearly with great care. More than once, I’d stood at my front window, looking at the back windows of Luna Blu, and wondered if he was up there, bent over the little world, adding to it, one person at a time. I’d often thought about going to join him, but it was like something sacred he was doing, that he had to do alone. And so I let him.
“Five minutes!” Deb called out, moving quickly behind me, the STOW checklist in her hand. I looked across the model at Riley, who was adjusting an intersection, her brow furrowed, then at Heather, who was sitting back on her heels, admiring her trees. Ellis, off to my left, was clicking a stop sign into place.
“One minute!” I heard Deb say, and I pushed myself back, taking a breath as I looked over the entire model and the faces of my friends gathered around it. As the time ticked away, we all sat there, silent, and then we heard the staff counting down below us. A chorus of voices, marking the end of one thing, the beginning of another.
“Five!” I looked at the last bush I’d put on, touching my finger to it.
“Four!” I looked at Riley, who smiled at me.
“Three!” Deb came and stood beside me, biting her lip.
“Two!” Already, downstairs, someone was applauding.
And in that second, right before the very end, I looked around the model again, wanting to see one final thing. When I spotted it, I noticed something else. But by then, everyone was already cheering, in motion. One.
“Where are you going?” my dad called after me as I turned the corner. “You’ll miss the party.”
“I’ll be back in a second,” I told him.
He nodded, then turned back to the bar, where all the employees and some devout regulars of Luna Blu, as well as Deb, Riley, Heather, and Ellis were gathered, eating up all the leftover stock of fried pickles. Opal was there as well, serving up beers, her face flushed and happy.
