Page 2 of A Breeze Over Rosewood Beach
Time to get to work,she thought briskly, beginning to rifle through her desk for some bills that she needed to pay.
She usually turned to work when she was trying not to think about being lonely. When she was at the café, it was easy to keep herself occupied. When she was at home, she usually started to deep-clean her house. She had been doing a lot of deep cleaning lately.
After paying a few bills, she opened the top drawer of her desk and sighed in resignation when she saw a stack of papers that she would have rather avoided. It was her budget for the café, and it was becoming trickier than it had ever been before.
She rolled up her sleeves, both literally and metaphorically, and got to work. She needed to find new ways to cut costs when it came to supplying the café with the freshest, healthiest foods. Prices were going up, but she was determined not to skimp on the quality of her café’s food. She also hated the idea of raising her own prices. She knew that finances were tricky for a lot of people, and she didn’t want to raise the cost of an avocado bacon melt by two dollars.
I’ll figure out a way,she thought, biting her lip.But I’ve got to turn over a profit. This is making it trickier than ever to do that.
She sighed. She’d hoped that once she’d gotten the hang of the restaurant business, things would become easier and easier for her. She’d imagined that once she learned the ropes, she’d be able to swing from tree to tree as easily as Tarzan. The jungle was full of surprises, however. Things were always going wrong, and she simply needed to learn to roll with the punches.
Howto roll with the punches was a whole other question, and one that she was still figuring out the answers to at the moment.
She clicked her pen open and began to scribble down ideas on a notepad. She didn’t like any of them very much, but she was hoping that later on, once she looked at them again, they wouldn’t seem so bad.
She was in the middle of sighing with reluctance again when there was a soft tap on the door of her office. She looked up with surprise and then smiled when she saw her friend Vivian Owens standing in the doorway.
“Hi! I hope I’m not interrupting anything.” Vivian’s eyes shone affectionately.
Sally thought that her friend looked very nice that afternoon. Vivian’s short brown hair was streaked with gray, just like Sally’s, but it always seemed to look elegant even though it was styled in a low-effort haircut. Vivian was wearing jeans, and her winter coat was unzipped, revealing a cozy-looking light blue sweater that Sally guessed Vivian’s daughter Hazel had knit her for Christmas.
Vivian owned The Lighthouse Grill, another extremely popular place in town. Sally’s café was more of a coffee shop, but The Lighthouse Grill was a full-blown restaurant, and Sally hadalways admired the grace and determination with which Vivian had run her business.
Sally laughed, gesturing to all of the papers in front of her. “I was actually hoping for a distraction. Thank you for your service. I can’t stomach the thought of all this nonsense right now. Would you like to sit in a booth with me and have a slice of key lime pie? It’s from yesterday, but it’s still to die for. What do you say? It’s on the house.”
“Sounds incredible.” Vivian grinned. “I’m glad my interruption was just what you needed.”
The two friends made their way into the kitchen, which was much quieter now that the lunch rush was over. Practically giggling, they made their way over to the cooler and Sally took out a half-empty pie tin.
“Just look at it,” she said with a proud flourish. “I made this one myself yesterday. It turned out so well. I used cream cheese in the filling for the first time, and mm!”
“Oh, I can’t wait.” Vivian grabbed a couple of plates from the shelves on which the clean dishes were stacked. “Where do you keep the forks?”
“There’s a bin on the left-hand side—there, you’ve got it!”
Vivian held up the forks triumphantly and the two friends ducked out into the café to locate an empty booth.
Once they were seated and had both spent a couple of minutes sighing with delight over their pie slices, Vivian smiled at her friend with a curious expression.
“So,” she said, setting down her fork. “What was it in there that you were trying so valiantly to avoid?”
“Oh, budgeting.” Sally shook her head. “I’ll manage it somehow, but it’s getting trickier than ever with food prices going up the way they have.”
“Oh, tell me about it,” Vivian groaned. “We’re running into those same issues. If you come up with any good strategies, let me know, would you?”
“I will.” Sally smiled, grateful to have a friend in the middle of her mess. It helped her to feel less worried about it, knowing that she wasn’t alone. “You let me know if you come up with anything too, okay?”
“Of course,” Vivian assured her, and then scooped up another large forkful of her slice of pie with an impish grin.
It’s funny,Sally thought happily,that we bonded over the fact that we’re both business owners and we’ve been helping each other figure out the ups and downs of owning a restaurant. But we don’t act all serious and professional with each other—she makes me feel like I’m a teenager again, goofing off with my friends after school.
Sally felt incredibly grateful for Vivian’s friendship. The owner of The Lighthouse Grill had taken Sally under her wing recently, and neither of them had ever looked back. They’d always been on friendly terms, but now their friendship had blossomed into something truly fun and supportive. Sally thought to herself with a smile that all women needed friendships like that in their lives—someone they could go to when things were rough and who would support them and lift their spirits when they needed it.
Sally knew that her friendship with Vivian was one of the greatest blessings in her life, since she’d sorely needed it. Although she was on friendly terms with her employees, they were usually teenagers who soon left Rosewood Beach for college, only to be replaced by other teenagers who remained strangers for a while and left soon after they felt like friends. Sally had filled her life with her work and didn’t have much of a community outside of Ocean Breeze Café. Although the community of Rosewood Beach was close-knit and supportive,Sally had always seemed to live on the fringes of it. Despite being a warm and friendly person herself, she wasn’t good at inserting herself into social groups. She usually hung around at the edges of her community, being kind and cheerful to those she met but not forming any lasting bonds with anyone.
Vivian, however, had changed all that. Sally was feeling the joys of friendship so much that it made her want to reach out and become closer to more of the people around her. She’d realized that there were so many wonderful people that she could get to know if she put in a little more time and effort.
For now, though, she had all the community she could need. Vivian had welcomed Sally into her inner circle, which included Terrence Rawlins, the persnickety but tender-hearted health inspector who was dating Vivian, Vivian’s second cousin Faith Talbot and her boyfriend Ryan McCormick, and of course all of Vivian’s children and their partners. It was a warm, genuine, caring group of people, and the dinner nights they shared together were always the highlight of Sally’s week.
