“Thank you, Lila.” Tom turned his mug between his palms. “That would mean a great deal. I’ll tell Linda in the morning.”
Lila nodded. She picked up her toast and ate the last bite. Tom watched her hands for a moment and then made himself look at his own plate.
He thought about Eleanor. He thought about the way Eleanor had walked into his old family bakery all those years ago, his stepson and stepdaughter were young teens. Taken the help-needed sign from the window and told him that she’d help get this bakery back to what it once was. Tom had fallen in love with her on the spot. Hired her. After that, Eleanor quietly looked at his menu, his front window, and his coffee setup, and said very gently that there were a few small things she would like to try if Tom would let her. Tom had let her. Eleanor had changed every single thing about the bakery over the next two years: the menu, the hours, the way the front room was arranged, the small chalkboard behind the counter where she had begun writing out a daily special in her elegant looping hand. Every change had been the right one. The bakery had only become what it was because of Eleanor’s clear eye and her gentle hands and the small, relentless love she had poured into the place.
Tom thought about Lila. About the small, quiet suggestions she had been offering him for two months now. A new mango pastry she wanted to try. A different way of laying out the morning rollsin the front display so customers could see them better. A small chalkboard for the daily specials. An afternoon flatbread service that the marina lunch crowd would buy out before two o’clock. Tom had been polite and appreciative each time. He had not yet said yes to a single one of her suggestions.
Tom thought, and pushed the thought firmly away, that perhaps it was not the changes he was afraid of.
They finished the meal. Lila stood and gathered the plates. Tom rose with her and reached for the teapot. They moved together to the deep porcelain sink along the back wall of the kitchen, Lila washing, Tom drying, the small movements they had already done together a hundred times across six months, but somehow this evening shaped differently in his chest.
Lila finished the last plate. She rinsed the sink and dried her hands on the small linen towel beside it. She untied her apron and hung it on the hook beside the kitchen door. She turned to Tom with a soft, warm smile.
“I should go home.” Lila smoothed the front of her dress. “Five o’clock comes so quickly.”
“I’ll walk you over,” Tom offered.
“Tom. It’s only next door,” Lila began to decline his offer.
“I know it is, but I need to stretch my legs and my back after being cramped on the terrible plastic chair at the hospital, so it will do me good,” Tom insisted.
Lila looked at him for a beat longer than she should have, and Tom watched her decide not to argue.
They walked together out of the back door of the bakery into the soft, warm dark of Shell Street. The streetlights had comeon. The day’s heat lingered in the pavement under their shoes. The scent of the bay drifted up the street between the small shopfronts, salt, jasmine, and the faint sweetness of someone’s nearby garden in early summer bloom.
They crossed the few short paces to the side entrance of the hardware store building, where the narrow staircase to Lila’s small apartment ran up alongside the brickwork. Lila stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned to face Tom.
For a long suspended second, neither of them said a word.
Tom looked at Lila in the soft yellow of the porch light above the side door. Her hair was a little loose at the temples from the long working day. Her eyes were warm and tired as they stared into his. Her small hands were clasped lightly in front of her, with her fingers gripping her keys.
A small, foolish pull moved behind Tom’s sternum.
Tom shoved his hands into his trouser pockets to stop the sudden urge to reach out and pull her towards him.
He was seventy-five years old. He was not a teenager with a crush. Tom’s heart twinged hard against his ribs. The realization that the evening had felt almost like a date lifted his eyebrows half an inch before he could stop it. Guilt arrived behind the realization, the way it always did, the moment Tom caught himself whenever he saw Lila.
“Well,” Tom said, and his voice came out rougher than it had been all evening. “Thank you again for closing up. And for the dinner. It was very kind of you.”
“Of course.” Lila’s smile turned softer at the edges. “It was nice to have dinner with someone again.”
The small wordagainhung warm in the air between them.
Tom nodded. He cleared his throat.
“Goodnight, Lila,” he said a little stiffly.
“Goodnight, Tom,” Lila echoed.
Tom turned and walked back along the short stretch of pavement to the bakery. His heart was doing several stupid things in his chest. His emotions ran a strange, fast loop between guilt and a quiet longing he had not let himself name. He gave himself a mental shake as he reached the back door of the bakery. Tom admonished himself with a stern talking-to as he reminded himself that Lila was his employee. He had no business at all looking at her or thinking about her the way he had just been looking at her at her door.
“Lila works for you, Tom,” he muttered aloud just to ensure it sank in.
But as he opened his door and stepped inside, the voice at the back of his head spoke before he could stop it.Eleanor was your employee, too.
LINDA
The first soft light of morning had only just begun to lift the dark off Bay View Drive when Linda let herself into the back hallway of Hearts Hotel and walked the small private corridor to Uncle George’s office.
