Hope’s marriage might be in a steaming pile of wreckage, but her finances didn’t have to be. She would remove all her funds from the bank she currently shared with Archie. There would be no chance he could take what she’d worked for.
He was the past. Irish Hills and her own restaurant were the future.
She was taking bold steps. It felt right, even though it made her stomach feel a bit like it did when she did somersaults in the water.
ChapterThirteen
Hope
It wasn’t the first time she’d thought about opening a restaurant. It wasn’t the second time.
She’d thought about it over and over again from the time she was eighteen. Her dream glowed brightly at some points of her life and was barely an ember at other times.
But it was always there.
And it had started in Irish Hills with her grandmother. Grandma Benton encouraged her to dig in the dirt, pluck a tomato from the vine, and eat it with a sprinkle of salt. She learned if a fruit or vegetable was at its peak, there was no need to get fussy about how to serve it.
That was her foundation. That was the place she started with food.
Every meal she made, every recipe she invented, every cookbook she read, every morsel she ate, they were all filed away in her brain. Waiting for something. Maybe waiting for today.
She had honed her ideas, abandoned them, and then got them out again.
Now, finally, she could act.
Some people imagine what they would do if they won the lottery. Hope imagined what she would do if she had her own restaurant.
She’d never gotten this close to opening her own place. Here, in this moment, she felt confident in a way she never did at home.
The menu. The staff. The style. She was sure about it. She had a vision, a story to tell, and an experience she wanted to create for diners.
She wanted them to know the simple joy of eating foods grown right here, with recipes created to show them off.
Over the next few days, J.J. and Libby helped her with logistics and any questions she had.
Along with the perfect plates of food, Hope wanted people to feel joy at her table. She wanted to create for her guests, an atmosphere. She wanted the shared experience to glow in the memory of the diners, long after the meal was served.
As a practical matter, she decided she’d focus on dinner and lunch. Breakfast could come later if they succeeded.
Nothing about her restaurant would be fussy. Irish Hills wasn’t a fussy place. The summer people were here to enjoy summer at the lake. Elevated dishes, for certain, that was her goal, but pretentious, never.
And summer would be the entire ballgame. If she was going to make seasonal food in Michigan work, it could only be open in the season.
The weather and the peak ripeness times for the ingredients she wanted to feature told her that she could only be open from Memorial Day to Halloween. Five months of the year. That was it. The other seven months, well, she wasn’t sure about that. Maybe she’d cater back in Covington. Maybe in Michigan?
Hope didn’t want to overthink that. She worried her five month concept, would mean Libby would rescind the offer. Maybe Libby needed something there year-round, something more traditional? But when she explained it, Libby didn’t push, and Hope was grateful.
Five months of all out work. Five months during the ripeness of Michigan. Five months to give her everything to the restaurant.
If she could launch the restaurant her way, she’d improvise the rest. Without the responsibility of mothering her girls or being the backstop to Archie’s life, she would give herself the freedom to learn, to experiment.
And the menu for the restaurant started to form in her mind. She could see her customers. She could see what they had on their plates.
It had been two days since she’d committed to opening a restaurant. It had been a whirlwind two days.
She started each day with a morning swim. It was bracing this early in June, but it cleared her head. It sharpened her focus and gave her the zing she needed to work late into the night on the restaurant.
She took her swim, got dressed, and drove her borrowed old pickup to the restaurant. Libby had given her the keys to the building, and most mornings, Dean’s crews were arriving when she did. The sound of people working on the adjacent buildings filled her with energy. There was something exciting about to happen here.
