“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” She leaned over the table, clasping his hands with hers, and squeezed as much as the plaster would allow her to. “I totally understand. God, you must have known her as long as you knew Frank.”
“She hated my guts, you know? She hated my damned guts, but when they told me she was dead, I just couldn’t take any more of it. I even told Con that.” He refused to cry, even going so far as to lean his head back and blink, but the tears came anyway. “Fucking hell. This is so stupid. I can’t stop crying over this crap, and fuck, I don’t want to do any of this. Not the coffee shop. Not the studio. I just want to play the drums and write music.”
“Well, I can help with one.” Jules picked out a tissue from her backpack and wiped at Forest’s face like he was a toddler. “You know jack shit about the coffee shop and what it needs. Do you trust me?”
“Are you kidding? I’m wondering why Frank didn’t leave you the damned shop to begin with.” He rubbed at his nose. “Do you want to buy half of it? A partner or something? You practically run the place. Okay, you do run the place. I just sneak in to steal coffee and sign the bills once in a while.”
“You’re serious.”
“As a fucking heart attack. We get along fine. I’m the first one to say I don’t know what to do with these plans. How the hell am I supposed to rebuild something if I don’t know what’s going to work?” His hands were shaking, and Forest had to put his coffee down. “There’s already lawyers and shit picking at me. Might as well have them do something to sell you half the business.”
“Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but make sure I only own 49 percent. Keep a controlling interest. I love you. You love me in your own weird little Forest kind of way, and I know you’re sincere, but never ever hand over all of something you own. Always keep control of it in some way.” She used a tissue on her face, smearing her mascara on her fingers. “And shit, I came here to ask if I still had a job, and now you’re trying to sell me half of it.”
“Anything, so long as I don’t have to figure out what the hell to do with the banquettes.” Forest read down the list of things to be replaced. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“The booths.” Jules laughed. “Okay, I’ll take these and look things over. Now how about if we sit here, and you tell me all about your guy, Con.”
VERY LATE Sunday afternoon, Forest found himself still without a coffee shop but with a reasonably chipper shop manager slash friend poring over the notes she’d made about the Amp and what she wanted to do with it—providing Forest ponied up the cash instead of waiting for the insurance company to get off its ass and pay the bills. They’d already gone over the proposed plans, and she’d tanked most of the designers’ suggestions, pointing out none of the names on the bottom of the blueprints actually worked in a coffee shop.
“You know we should go all retro and do a sixties theme,” Jules mumbled around her pencil. “Kind of like a tribute to Frank.”
“If this place became a tribute to Frank, you’d end up wearing camo pants and tie-dye shirts,” Forest snorted as he steamed milk for his coffee. “And does air freshener even come in skunkweed?”
“No no no, less Humboldt and more mod,” she complained. “Mod is cool.”
“Frank hated the mod thing. Said they all went on to become faux skinheads just to stay relevant.” Forest shrugged away Jules’s outraged gasp. “Hey, take it up with him when you see him. I had to listen to him rant about how mod wasn’t about the working class and was some jacked-up, pretentious offshoot of beat poetry elitists. And you never wanted to get him started about new punk.”
“Well, I love the mod look. Your take on history is jacked up, there, sweetie.”
“Better than what I was taught in school,” he replied. “Not all of us had apple pie and Thanksgiving dinner families like you and Con.”
“You guys are so cute.” Jules caught the nickname before Forest could even wince at saying it. She grabbed at his wince and ran with it. “You sound all sweet talking about him.”
“It’s his nickname. People have nicknames. You have a nickname,” he pointed out. “If anything, I’m the weird one ’cause I don’t have one. And he’s not… he’s just a guy who was there when the shooting happened. Nothing else.”
Even if he’d promised to be something else, something more, but Connor’s words meant jack shit because, other than the texts, Forest might not have even known the man was alive.
“Okay, so wait, he pretty much saved your ass, took care of you, then made you dinner.” Jules tapped off her points on her fingers. “And afterwards, got drunk with you then slept on the floor and was gone before you even woke up?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Forest agreed from across the room as he steamed more milk for their refills.