“No.” Dad shook his head, cracking an egg into the bowl with one hand. “I didn’t need to. Lolly, we can’t make big changes to this place. Your mother had a vision, just like her parents before her, and it’s up to us to carry out that vision. It’s your legacy.” He cracked three more eggs with swift, economical motions.
“But if we don’t make some big changes, we could lose it all,” I blurted out, frustrated by his blind loyalty to an ideal that was growing staler with every passing day. “Dad, the restaurant business in Seattle is getting tougher. Lots of places are going under. Most people don’t want to spend money at a place like the Eatery. Nostalgia just isn’t cutting it anymore. Almost nobody eats this heavy Danish comfort food now.” I pointed to the heaping bowl of ground meat waiting to be formed into egg-size meatballs and then fried in butter. “They want farm-to-table, organic, sustainably sourced food. It’s just the reality of the current restaurant scene.”
I gripped the edge of the table, leaning toward him in my urgency to be heard. We had all poured our lives into this diner, my grandparents and parents and now me. We couldn’t lose it all just because we failed to adapt to changing times. This diner symbolized so much of our lives and history. It was our heartbeat, more home than any house we’d ever lived in. It was place and family and legacy all rolled into one. Behind me, Glenn Frey softly wailed “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” which felt ironic considering I was so agitated I was practically vibrating. “We have to make some changes before it’s too late,” I urged him.
“This diner has a reputation, a legacy. You don’t mess with legacy,” Dad said firmly, with finality. He sprinkled a cup of bread crumbs and a cup of flour across the ground meat and stirred.
I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths through my nose, trying to tamp down my panic and frustration. I’d been fighting this same losing battle about the restaurant for the last few years, but Dad refused to listen to reason. “We have to do something,” I pressed. “This isn’t working anymore.”
“Okay, let’s bring the fiskefrikadeller special back on Sundays.” Dad twisted the cap off a plastic bottle of seltzer water and emptied half the contents into the bowl with the ground meat. “That’s always a crowd-pleaser,” he said in a compromising tone. “That should help get the numbers up.”
I sighed hopelessly and stepped back. He just didn’t get it. He didn’t understand the precarious nature of our situation. We could lose everything, and his solution was to bring back cod fish cakes? He’d learned to cook in the navy and then polished those skills with my own maternal grandmother, learning how to make all the meals at the diner before my parents took it over, but he was an old-fashioned cook, with a limited repertoire and a resistance to change. I suspected the idea of change scared him.
I opened my mouth to press my point, then took another look at his exhausted face—the stubborn, stricken set of his jaw as he methodically mixed the seltzer into the ground meat—and swallowed my words. He had never recovered from my mother’s death, but had soldiered on to take care of Daphne and me. It had cost him everything—any semblance of a life of his own—but he had not once complained. It wasn’t his way. He had simply served us with a quiet, steady devotion, with no thought for his own happiness or comfort. I looked at the tendons straining in his scrappy arms as he mixed, then at the top of his head, the white of his scalp peeking through histhinning hair, and my heart softened. He was doing his best. We were all doing our best. I hoped with everything in me that it was good enough. I suspected one day soon it would not be.
“Okay, Dad, I’ll put the cod cakes back on the menu,” I said finally, acquiescing once again. It didn’t matter what I wanted the diner to be, what I dreamed of and knew it could be. I had a pile of sketches in a drawer in my office, a whole notebook of ideas that, with a few dollars and a little elbow grease, could turn the Eatery from comfortable and a little shabby to the kind of hipster cool that Seattle was famous for.
I could see it in my mind’s eye so easily—a Mason jar of succulents at every table, old travel posters from the fifties in simple white frames, a record player in the corner with a collection of big-band-era hits by Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington, and a menu that focused on fresh and local offerings. We could make the shabby into retro cool, but Dad could not seem to imagine letting it change even that much. I’d had to wheedle hard just to get us to switch to paper straws and compostable take-out containers last year.
Dad carried the bowl of frikadeller over to the fridge and set it on a shelf to chill. “Julio, hombre, how are those potatoes coming?”
Apparently, our meeting was over. Dad paused next to me. “Don’t worry, Lolly girl. We’ll figure it out,” he said, chucking me under the chin and giving me a tired smile. “We always do.”
I nodded and gathered up my papers, frustration churning like an eggbeater in my gut. I was so tired of standing here week after week and having the exact same argument. It was grinding me down. I didn’t want this to be the sum total of my life: struggling to keep a floundering diner afloat, barely scraping by week after week, utterly stuck in a life that seemed smaller with each passing day. Something had to change.
Late that night, already tucked into bed wearing my most comfortable pair of flannel pajama pants and an old, faded green-and-white Portland State University sweatshirt, I remembered the lemon drops. The clock read one a.m. I was bone-tired, but the thought of facing Aunt Gert tomorrow morning and admitting I had not kept my promise was enough to propel me out of bed again. She’d already asked me first thing this morning if I’d taken one, and I’d sworn that I would remember tonight. She had a gimlet eye that could shrivel you with just one look. And, to be honest, I was just the teeniest, tiniest bit curious. Of course, I didn’t believe dime-store candies could magically change my life. It was absurd, unthinkable, something found only in fairy tales. But that didn’t mean I didn’t wish it were true.
A small part of me, the childlike part, wished there really were some magic in the world. What if I could actually turn back the days and months and years and make a different choice, taste a different life? How remarkable would that be? What a gift—to start afresh. To follow my bliss, whatever that turned out to be.
My joggers were slung over the back of a chair, and I fished one of the lemon drops from the pocket. In the dim glow coming from my bedside light, I examined it, turning it over in my palm, licking it tentatively. It tasted different from the candies of my youth, not the standard fake lemon flavor but a brighter, more... puckery flavor. Like real lemonade. It reminded me of my mom, of how her hands always smelled. Perhaps these drops really did contain a little bit of kitchen magic. The thought made me smile.
I popped the candy in my mouth and got back into bed, then lay there staring up at the ceiling of my tiny dormer room, sucking on the hard ball, waiting for it to dissolve so I could go to sleep. It was the best lemon drop I’d ever had, the flavor just straddling sour and sweet. It tasted of bright July afternoons, of lemonade stands and paper cupsand crunching ice cubes, of wading in the frigid water of Puget Sound, of laughter and a fizzle of joy in my chest for no reason at all.
I lay there sucking it as the minutes ticked by. Finally, it was just a sharp little sliver on my tongue. As I reached over to turn off the bedside light, I paused. What had Aunt Gert told me? I had to say aloud one of my regrets in life, a decision I wanted to change. I glanced at the unicorn diary sitting on my bedside table. I thought of the frustrating conversation I’d had with Dad that morning and how hopelessly stuck I felt at the Eatery. I thought about the first two life goals on the list that felt so impossibly out of reach now. I thought of being an object at rest.
1. Live in another country
2. Own my own restaurant somewhere amazing
Two for one, inextricably linked in my mind. As I turned off the light there was only one word sitting on my tongue, fondness and regret as sharp as that sliver of lemon candy.
“Toast.”
10
A harsh beepingroused me from a deep sleep. I sat up with a muffled groan, blinking in the pale gray light of early morning, and scrambled for the source of the horrible sound, nothing like my usual alarm, which played the June Carter Cash version of “Keep on the Sunny Side” every morning at five a.m. And then I froze, looking around in blurry confusion. This wasn’t my bedroom.
I was sitting in a double bed with an old-fashioned carved wooden bed frame, wearing a pair of beige silk pajamas that were certainly not what I had been wearing when I’d fallen asleep. Heart pounding, I fumbled for the cell phone on the bedside table next to me and silenced the incessant beeping, then glanced around for my glasses, panic fluttering in my throat. Where was I? I found a pair of frames next to the cell phone, sleek round tortoiseshell ones with gold accents, not really my usual style. I tried them on hesitantly. The room sprang into focus. They were my prescription.
It was a small gabled room, outfitted with a comfortable-looking overstuffed armchair, a ponderous antique wardrobe, and a wornPersian rug. Curiouser and curiouser. I crawled on hands and knees to the foot of the bed and peered out a small French-paned window to the street below. It was a picturesque narrow lane flanked by small, brightly painted buildings crammed together cheek by jowl. A striped awning advertisedCream Tea and Homemade Sconesfrom across the street. The name of the tea shop looked familiar. And suddenly I knew.
“Brighton.” I sat back down on the bed with a thump, stunned. “I’m in England.”
I’d always intended Toast to be located in Brighton, a charmingly quirky seaside resort town on England’s south coast. Brighton had captivated me from my first visit, with its jaunty holiday air, shingle beach, and ornate Victorian pier. I’d even located the perfect building to house the café, an old converted factory in the North Laine area that was abandoned and for sale. But then my mother’s death had put an end to all those aspirations. I’d never returned to Brighton and Toast had faded into a long-dormant desire. Until this morning.
I shook my head. Surely this was a dream. I’d fallen asleep thinking about Toast and my time in England, and now I was dreaming it. But somehow, in my gut, I knew that explanation, tidy as it was, wasn’t entirely true. This felt all too real, vivid and solid, not fantastical like a dream. I felt down to my cold bare toes that I was actually in Brighton. How was it possible?
Suck on one of the lemon drops before bed and say aloud a thing you wish you could change, a regret from your life.Aunt’s Gert’s instructions came back to me.Then go to bed, and when you wake up, you will live one day of your life as it might have been...
