Page 5 of How My Fake Alien Boyfriend Learned to Cook and Saved the Family Business

Biscuits were a staple at Southern Charm—something we set down on every table after seating customers. To make biscuits, we needed flour. But looking at the shelves then, after a month of poor business and low traffic, I wondered if I had just wasted money on things that would only end up getting tossed out. Without customers, we didn’t make nearly as many biscuits, which meant we didn’t really need that extra flour after all.

I stared at the wire shelves and blinked away tears. Any bravado I still had from when I put in that bulk order was spent trying to get through the day.

Just add it to the list of things I’m fucking up lately.

I could hear loud, screeching music coming through my brother Jacob’s headphones from where he was seated behind the office desk. He bobbed his head, eyes closed, and wiggled his fingers as if playing an air guitar. Rolling my eyes, I kicked the chair’s armrest and sent him spinning.

“Hey!” Jacob shouted, lifting the headphones from his ears.

“Stop messing around!” I pointed to the stack of napkins and pile of utensils in front of him. “Start rolling.”

“Geez, who pissed in your cornflakes this morning?”

There was no point in dignifying his question with a response. Jacob was being a little shit because he was at that age where being a little shit came as naturally as breathing. I couldn’t blame him for being a normal teenager. But I did shudder at the thought of being thirteen again—moody and pimply, and convinced I belonged anywhere but our small mountain town of Roswell Falls.

I’d had people ask me before if it was weird to have a brother seventeen years younger than me. The answer was yes, of course. It was pretty weird. But they usually assumed it was weird because of the age gap. That I didn’t know how to relate to Jacob, or that I was jealous because my parents had him right before I went off to college. Actually, the weirdest part was how much I could still relate to the angsty teenage years.

I think now, I would have paid a large sum of money (that I didn’t have) to trade spots with my little brother. I would have loved to spend my afternoons listening to garbage metal and doing menial tasks while my older sister figured out how to juggle saving the family business and dealing with the reality of being an adult.

But Jacob was struggling, too, and I couldn’t forget that. I knew it couldn’t be easy to be thirteen with a sick parent. I mean, it wasn’t particularly easy as a thirty-year-old woman, but I couldn’t imagine dealing with what Jacob was having to deal with at his age.

When I was thirteen, our dad was full of life and always whisking Mom and me off to camp or hike. There wasn’t a weekend when we weren’t on some new adventure. But with Dad’s poor health and Mom’s ever-present worrying, I wondered if my brother ever felt angry or jealous of what I got to experience as a kid. Anytime I tried to bring up the topic, Jacob would shut down completely.

That felt like another thing I was failing at—being a good big sister.

The list kept growing longer and longer.

“Got any homework?”

Jacob shrugged and focused his attention on placing a set of utensils into a napkin and rolling it tight. I could tell he was avoiding the question.

“Jacob…”

“Yeah.” He sighed, tossing the rolled napkin into the basket next to him. “I’ve got a book report due on Friday.”

“How’s the book?”

“Um.” He was silent for a moment. “I haven’t started reading it yet.”

“Jacob! Come on, don’t tell me that. Your grades are already slipping, and Mom’s going to flip if she thinks I haven’t been helping you with your homework.”

“But you haven’t been helping me with my homework!”

I narrowed my eyes. We both knew that anytime I tried to help him with homework, it ended in a shouting match. Jacob and I got along well most of the time, but I was not a very patient tutor, and Jacob hated when I was “breathing down his neck.” At a certain point, we both agreed that we would lie to Mom. I would tell her that I was tutoring him as long as Jacob kept his grades up. Which would have worked pretty well if my little brother could have actually held up his side of the bargain.

Jacob held my gaze, eventually relenting. “Fine,” he huffed. “I’ll start reading it tonight.”

I smiled and ruffled his hair in exactly the way he hated, which made Jacob flap his arms at me to get away. He tried to act annoyed, but I knew he was holding back laughter. Despite everything, I couldn’t help but feel grateful. That we got along. That we could be together in a difficult time. That we still had love and laughter on our side.

Yet, I couldn’t forget that today had been one of our worst in recent memory. Barely any customers all day, and none for dinner service. It was my last straw—the sign I needed to make a decision I had been putting off. We simply couldn’t stay open for dinner anymore. At this rate, it was too expensive, especially when our best business came in at breakfast and lunch.

But I wasn’t making the decision lightly. It would be the first time Southern Charm didn’t operate for three meals a day since the day the place opened. I knew my Grandma Gladys would have been disappointed if she were still alive. And my dad…I hadn’t figured out how to tell him how badly the restaurant was doing. Would he understand, or would he regret turning the place over to me almost a year ago?

I promised him I could turn it around. I was so confident that I could. And then I didn’t. I somehow made it worse.

As much as I was dreading telling Dad about cutting dinner service, I was doubly worried about telling our head chef, Julian. He was a total dick, and always had been, but since he was a holdover from when my dad was in charge, I kept him around. Julian always threatened to quit on bad days, but never had the guts to go through with it—though he loved to tell me how much of a hot commodity he was. According to Julian, every restaurant in this town and the next wanted to poach him for their own kitchen. Have at it, I thought whenever he complained. But I’d never worked up the nerve to send him packing myself.

With a hand to my lower back, I shoved the empty mop bucket back into its rightful place, making sure to prop the mop the right way to keep it from tipping over. Then I kneaded my back muscles with my knuckles and let out a huge sigh. Part of me wondered if I should have been concerned about the alarmingly loud crack that erupted from my spine, but another part of me (the one without health insurance) chose to ignore it.