Page 34 of Rewrites of the Heart

“Yes, I’d like to talk to both you and Alex.” Blake shrugged as he and Alex slowly rose from their seats.

“Do you think we’re in trouble?” Alex whispered.

“I’m not sure, love. He doesn’t seem upset, just serious.” The owner led them to the kitchen. While not extremely quiet, the location did afford them some privacy from the crowd.

“I understand you’re JJ’s cousins.”

“I am,” Alex said brightly. “And Blake is my fiancé.” She sighed as she said the word.

“And we’re from Kansas.”

“And you’re taking courses at UNO and plan to stay a while?” Blake wondered where this line of questioning was headed.

“Actually,” Alex began.

“Yes, we are,” Blake said, “we like it here.” Blake heard Alex whimper.

“What you did here today with absolutely no preparation is remarkable.”

Alex looked puzzled. “What did we do?”

“You filled my café with paying customers in a matter of hours.”

“When you look at it that way, I guess we did,” Alex said.

“I’m impressed, very impressed.” He paused. “Do you think you can duplicate your text marketing technique?”

“Text marketing?” For a moment, Blake had no idea what Alvin was talking about. Then it hit him. “You mean texting a group of people to plan the creation of an apparently spontaneous event?”

“Exactly!” the café owner exclaimed. He waved his hands as he talked. “If you even think you can, I’d like to hire you both as the café’s new text marketing team.

“My partners and I are too busy running the café to get heavily involved in the marketing. But if you could produce this type of result, even once a month or so, I’d see to it that it was worth your time and effort.”

Blake and Alex stole excited glances, each nodding yes. “Of course, we’d be glad to do. There’s really nothing to it,” Blake said. He straightened his shoulders back and thrust his chest out slightly. “A piece of pie.”

“That’s cake, darling. A piece of cake.”

“Great.” Alvin turned on a heel.

“Ted, Simon? Got a minute?” He waved to the two men standing across from each other at the work station. One of them had just finished adding croutons to a salad. The other had put the final touches on a sandwich order, which Blake thought looked delicious.

They approached them, still holding the food they had prepared, as Alvin made the introductions.

“This is Simon Quigley and Ted Quinn, my partners.

“Meet Blake and Alex. They’re the individuals responsible for our tremendous business today.” He paused. “And they’ve agreed to do the text marketing we talked about.”

“That’s great. You guys have a real gift for it.” Simon passed the salad off to a food runner waiting to deliver it. Then he examined the cheesesteak sandwich. “Laura,” he said, “it’s ready to be de-particlized.”

Laura, slim, short with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, took the sandwich from him, placed it on the small work area in front of her and picked up what appeared to be a large super soaker water gun.

“What’s that?” Blake asked.

“That’s our de-particlizer. We use it on every Philadelphia Experiment Cheesesteak. We named the sandwich after the movie. You know the one. How the government attempted to de-particlize an entire aircraft carrier in World War II. One minute the ship was there, the next moment it was gone.

“Ted created this gun in his junior year of college. It’s obviously not strong enough to make an aircraft carrier disappear. But sometimes we get lucky. We turn it on the sandwich. It’s supposed to de-particlize the onions. It just doesn’t always work when we want it to. Sometimes there’s a delayed effect. If you get a sandwich with onions and they disappear while you’re eating it, you get a free cappuccino.”

Alex appeared a bit wary of the contraption, but Blake walked right up to the employee using it to get a closer look. “Any chance of trying this baby out?”

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