Page 19 of A Novel Love Story

“And that’s why we love you. And coming in with agirl?” she added, pressing a hand over her heart with a mock gasp. “Andie with a friend, I never thought I’d see the day! What’s your name, friend? Got an eye for what you’d like?”

They both looked expectantly at me. I was still staring at the waitress, my mouth agape.

Anders cleared his throat.

That was—the waitress was—

Anders pressed the heel of his shoe over my toe, and I yelped. “Ow! Oh, I mean—uh—” I snapped my attention back to the menu. “Um …”

My mind had gone completely blank. What had I wanted?

“This is Elsy,” Anders introduced. “She stayed in the loft last night. She got a little lost in the rain.”

The waitress snapped her fingers. “Oh! Gail said something about that this morning. Well, welcome to our little town. It isn’t much, but it’s home.” She had a thick Tennessean drawl, just as I imagined it. Her hair was long and glossy and blond, her eyes brown, her white skin tinged with a bright summer sunburn. She had a kind heart-shaped face and a tattoo on her wrist in the shape of a compass, to remind her that she was the captain of her own life,and to navigate it well. The name tag on her apron readBECKA, but her name was—

“Ruby!” someone called from the back. Frantic. Followed by a lot of little somethings falling to the floor. “The ice maker!”

Ruby, to match her bright red lipstick.

“Oh shit,” she cursed, taking my drink order before shoving her pad and pen into her apron. She said apologetically, “I’ll be right back!”

Then she was gone, and suddenly I was back in my last semester of grad school, stress-eating my way through the spring, while Pru lay on the floor and readUnrequited Love Song. She had decided to skip the whole grad school thing and go to work at her parents’ printshop, so she usually came over to my study sessions for moral support. Rain drummed against the window, and it beckoned both of us onto a cozy couch to finish the book—butsomeof us had critical theory to pass.

“Oh my god, I love her already,” Pru kept saying, flipping the pages as fast as she could read.

I glared at her from the shitty kitchen table in our shitty apartment. It was only a few blocks from the campus, so it made walking to class easy, but the toilet ran most nights, and Pru could swear there was something living in the walls. “Can you stop torturing me with that book?”

“You’re the one who’s studying when it’sraining,” she replied, then licked her fingers, and turned the page. “You know the rules.”

“I’m going to fail this class,” I muttered, flipping back into my notes. “When the hell did we talk aboutHeart of Darkness?”

“Come join meeee,” she pleaded, patting the carpet beside her. “Eileeeeeen.”

I studiously ignored her. “Roland Barthes … ‘Death of the Author.’ Maybe my death, too.”

“Pity,” Pru said, “I’m reading about a great little death right here.”

“You’re the worst.”

“You love me.”

I highlighted a passage in my notes about genre theory.

And from the floor, she began to hum the one song that I hated more than I hated anything else in life—and that included my visceral hatred for the rubber smell that comes with Halloween, and men who crop dust on dates.

She started to hum “Come On Eileen” and shimmied her shoulders. The more I resisted, the louder she got until she was singing the words at the top of her lungs, and mimicking a rope to lasso me over to her, and what else could I do but melt out of my chair and join her on the floor, and read about Ruby Rivers and her second-chance love songs?

I passed the exam, but mostly I just remembered the feeling at the end of Ruby’s book, when she traded her dream of spotlights and glitter and world music tours for a small café in the middle of nowhere, and I hated that she had to choose.

7

Like a River Runs

RUBY RIVERS CAME BACKa few minutes later.

“Figured out what you’d like yet, friend?” Ruby asked, delivering our drinks, and pulling out her scratch pad.

I knew how to talk—really, I did—but the only thing that came out of my mouth was … nothing. My mind was blank. This was Ruby—theRuby. The woman who punched her ex-boyfriend in the face, who made out with Jake in the rain, who sang soft lullabies to the café’s possum when it was her turn to close for the night. I knew her. I knew her so intimately, it was like we’d been friends for years.

---