“I mean it. When’s the last time you took a day off?”
She thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “I can’t remember.”
“You can’t just work seven days a week with no break.”
Halia leaned back and gave her a fond, big-sister smile. “You do.”
“Well… yeah, okay, sometimes I do. But that’s just making breakfast and washing sheets. You work long hours.”
“Sometimes,” she conceded. “Sometimes not. I’ll have more time to rest once we get past the fundraiser.”
“Okay. How can I help?”
“It’s fine. You have enough on your plate.”
“Don’t be that way.” Anne leaned forward and waited for Halia to meet her eyes. “You show up for all of us. Every day. You have to let us show up for you too sometimes.”
Halia blinked slowly, meeting her gaze. Finally she said, “Yeah, all right.”
“So. How can I help?”
She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it… then kept unfolding it, revealing a task list the length of her arm. Anne’s eyebrows rose, and she leaned back.
“Who are you, Santa Claus?”
“Pretty much,” Halia said with a grin. “But I work year round. You should see the Christmas list; that’s even longer.”
“All right, come on.” Anne reached for the list. “Where do we start?”
21
Akemi
On opening day, Akemi was up before dawn.
The morning was cool and misty as she walked up Paradise Road towards the café. A steady stream of cars moved past her – some just cruising, but many rushing up the road at breakneck speeds, hurrying to whatever jobs they had found outside of their sleepy little town.
When she finally made it to their fledgling coffee shop, the sun was just peeking up over the neighborhood rooftops, corrugated tin painted green and red and blue.
Noah had painted the rust-spotted roof of the café sunshine yellow, and they’d used the same color for the trim around the doors and windows. The walls were as white as a movie star’s smile, a startling difference from the dingy, peeling paint that had camouflaged it just a few weeks before.
It was a beautiful little house, but it looked like just that: a house. There wasn’t even a sign marking it as a café.
Kekoa was making them a custom wooden sign, and she trusted him to come through… but even so, it felt like they needed something more.
Akemi went inside and found the a-frame blackboard that they would use to advertise daily specials and the like. The surface was pristine: a blank canvas. Akemi grabbed the chalkboard markers and got to work.
It was a callback to her early twenties, those years that she had spent working in cafés and hostels all around the world, back before her travel blog brought in enough money to actually fund her travels.
The drawing and calligraphy soothed her, and she fell into an almost meditative state, like a creative trance.
Her mind wandered to days soon to come, when she and her son could sink into art projects together… and all the way back to her childhood, when she and her sisters had covered the driveway in chalk drawings.
Finally, she was done. The wordsGrand Openingcrossed the board in bright, sweeping letters. Below that, she had drawn a cup of coffee and writtenCome see our playroom!She drew wavy lines of steam coming up from the mug, and then she capped her final marker.
Done.
Akemi stood and stretched her aching back, then walked a few paces down the sidewalk and turned back to survey her work.
