Page 1 of How My Fake Alien Boyfriend Learned to Cook and Saved the Family Business

Lola

Being from a small town, I’ve found, means being attached to a rubber band. The farther you try to venture off, the faster and harder you’re shot back to the place you were trying to escape.

For most of my early adulthood, I was a small-town girl in name only. If someone asked me where I was from, I would usually say Tennessee and leave it at that. Most people assumed Nashville, and I’d let them because I liked the air of culture it gave me. If pressed, I might say Knoxville, since that’s where I attended college with my best friend, Nat.

If really pressed, I would tell them I was from a small town near the Great Smoky Mountains and, predictably, they would ask, “Like, where Dollywood is?” And I would say, “Yes, just like that.”

But I wouldn’t be telling the truth. Except for the part about being from around the Great Smoky Mountains—that was true.

It’s just that most people, unless they were from my hometown of Roswell Falls, didn’t understand what it was like to grow up in a town like ours. They didn’t know what it meant to be a true small-town girl.

Everybody was in your business all the time. You’ve known pretty much everyone in town your entire life, and if you didn’t know them, you definitely had an acquaintance in common. Usually a second cousin, if not a first.

In Roswell Falls, the mountains created a dramatic backdrop to a downtown that was essentially a strip of small shops, a cafe, a florist, and a few restaurants. There was a town hall in the center. It was idyllic…ish. And I think living in my hometown as a thirty-year-old would have felt much more exciting if I were there willingly.

Okay, that’s not fair—let me back up.

I was in Roswell Falls of my own accord, but not of my own wishes.

I wished I could have stayed in Nashville and continued working in the trendy restaurant where I’d just landed a job. I wished my dad wasn’t affected by Parkinson’s disease, and that he hadn’t tried to keep his diagnosis from his eldest daughter for so long. I wished I didn’t have to move into the apartment over my parents’ garage, where the frogs sing so loudly in the summer months that sometimes I had trouble sleeping.

I certainly wished that our family restaurant, Southern Charm, hadn’t suffered in the last few years because my dad wasn’t able to take care of it like he used to.

And, of course, I wished I could wave a magic wand and make all our problems disappear all at once—the failing business, my dad’s health, and my life plan had gone to hell.

Maybe I’d wished so hard that I accidentally wished on a star. But I was too heads-down focused on fixing shit to realize how many wishes I was throwing into the universe. Because things were bad. And the proof was staring at me from the computer screen in the back office of Southern Charm.

I had spent several minutes simply blinking at the subject line of that most recent email. It would be either the answer to my prayers or the bad news I’d been dreading for months. Pretty much since the moment Dad handed me the keys and showed me the books.

Like every adult in their thirties facing something new and difficult, I wished someone else could deal with it. Open the email and read it, digest the news, and filter the information before it ever had to reach me. I desperately needed an adult to handle this.

Unfortunately, I was the adult. And I was terrified.

No point putting it off any longer, I thought, practicality finally winning out. I hovered the pointer over the message, took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and clicked.

Three…two…one. My eyes opened.

“We regret to inform you…”

My heart dropped and settled like a dry biscuit in my stomach. Exactly the news I’d anticipated, but not what I wanted to hear. Definitely not news I was ready to hear, either.

So that was it, I guess. The bank couldn’t do anything else for us. We had maxed out our business loan and the goodwill of the people who worked there. Begging and pleading no longer worked.

The bank manager hadn’t pulled any punches the last time we spoke, either. “We deal in money, not favors,” he’d said. They had given us enough breaks already, and Southern Charm was more liability than risk. He’d at least had the decency to feel sorry for me, handing me a tissue box to deal with the flood of snot and tears.

When I’d tried to hand the tissue box back, he’d placed a stubby hand on my forearm and looked at me in that way—the pitying way—before telling me to keep them. “They might come in handy.”

I suppose that should have been my sign to not put in a new appeal for a loan extension. What had I really expected? I’d always been too stubborn and optimistic for my own good.

Another pang of guilt and something sharper pinched my chest. Our family’s restaurant was more than a place for townsfolk and tourists to eat. It was an institution in Roswell Falls, established by my late grandmother. Right in the heart of downtown, fifty years running, passed down from Maloney to Maloney.

But it seemed our days were numbered now.

No, I shouldn’t think that way.

There was no way I could let Southern Charm close its doors. Not as long as I had breath in my body. But if I couldn’t figure out a way to bring in more customers and start turning a profit, I wasn’t sure just how much longer I could fight to keep the doors open.

I opened up our expenses and revenue spreadsheet to stare at it through watery eyes. We were barely going to make payroll again, and that was with me not taking a salary.