“So it’s closed for good?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard. Why do you ask?”
“I work across the street. I’m standing in front of it now, and there are no signs or anything, but it’s closed right now.”
“It happens. Especially if the food isn’t good enough to build a regular customer base. There’s only so long you can coast on novelty.”
Brad got off the phone a few minutes later. It was a nice day, so he decided to walk home.
As he walked, he fantasized about what it might be like to run a restaurant. It wasn’t something he’d thought much about before, but Lindsay had planted that idea in his brain. She’d said all those things about her dream of them opening a restaurant together, and he’d been thinking about it ever since. What would it be like? Would they plan menus together? Interview staff? Choose the theme and the decorations? It would be a lot of hard work, but wouldn’t it be fun to have a space that was theirs, where they could use everything they knew about food to create a wonderful experience and build a regular customer base?
Of course, this was all extremely hypothetical. They were just barely back together, if they even were, and restaurants were extremely risky ventures. He’d just stared at the evidence of that. Still, it was hard not to imagine.
There was an Italian restaurant on the same block as Pepper that was upscale but very good. Brad had gotten lunch from it a few times. So the block didn’t need another upscale restaurant, but the kind of place Lindsay had talked about—a midprice family restaurant with a diverse menu—might do quite well here. The neighborhood had a lot of young families, but also a lot of young working people. Given the crowd at places like Pop, this was a neighborhood with people who had some money to spend but wanted casual, not upscale.
And if he could design the dessert menu? That would be perfect. Not the same defrosted cheesecake every family restaurant served, but a fresh cheesecake with different fruit compotes depending on the season. Not just chocolate layer cake, but a Brooklyn blackout cake—chocolate cake with chocolate pudding filling and chocolate cookie crumbs on top for a textural crunch. He could do a bread pudding, a cookie plate, and then maybe a special dessert. He could make fresh bread for the restaurant.
And working beside Lindsay would be a dream. He’d been feeling conflicted about how things were going between them, but if they could find some way to build a real relationship, and then they worked together to build a successful restaurant? Well, that was a dream worth building.
Sure, he’d heard about couples who went into business together and ended up divorcing. But he knew couples who owned successful restaurants, too.
And, sure, in the back of his mind, he thought maybe his father would think owning a restaurant was a more noble profession than baking cookies for cats, although Brad wouldn’t hold his breath. He couldn’t live his life based on what his father thought. He had to do what made him happy.
As Brad approached Flatbush Avenue to cross into his neighborhood, he realized that it was only a dream. He didn’t have the capital to open a restaurant. Things with Lindsay still felt precarious. It was a nice idea, but a dream was all it could be.
He shook his head and crossed the street. Running a restaurant felt like as much a dream as actually making a relationship work with Lindsay, something he was losing hope would ever really happen as the days went on.
***
Lindsay went to the cat café the next afternoon.
She’d been shut up in her apartment too much the last few days. She was working at home this week while the upper management at theForumhad company meetings. Erica had seemed concerned when she’d called to tell Lindsay to work from home, like perhaps this was at last a harbinger of the layoffs everyone had been expecting. It seemed likely the owners would do some reorganizing or would try to streamline the office to decrease costs. Lindsay didn’t know, but Erica had assured her that as long as Erica had a job, Lindsay would have a job, too.
That was reassuring, but Lindsay had spent too much time wondering what would happen if Erica no longer had a job.
So she needed a change of scenery. Evan liked to work in the cat room at the café on some afternoons, and indeed, Lindsay found him and Paige sitting together at a table in the corner.
“Ah, hello, stranger,” Evan said as Lindsay sat.
“I saw you a week ago,” said Lindsay.
Evan laughed. “You never come here anymore was what I meant.”
“I’m not avoiding Brad anymore.” That was only partially true, though. They’d texted a few times over the last few days, but Brad’s responses had mostly been monosyllabic and noncommittal.
And, of course, after months of Brad trying to win her over, now that he was giving up, she’d realized that she wanted him back. The trick now would be to convince him that she was serious about it, that she trusted him, and that she wouldn’t bail this time.
“Is he here?” she asked now.
“Yeah, in the back,” said Paige. “The lunch rush was a little nutty today. Apparently a magazine moved into the office space across the street, and their staff just learned we serve lunch. So they’ve been coming over here and invading our space between about noon and one a day or two per week. So Brad has had to make more sandwiches than usual.”
“They sit with the cats?”
“Yep,” said Paige. “I think they like having the break.”
Brad walked into the room then. When he saw Lindsay, his eyes went wide. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
