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That had my heart racing because the last time I’d taken a leap—getting married when my parents said I was too young—it had backfired.
The line eased closed to lunchtime, and I took the brief respite to wipe off the counters.
A woman came up to me. “Are you Brooke Langley?”
I smiled at her, my cheeks sore from the morning. “I am.”
“I’m Alisha Roberts, a reporter for theAnnapolis Times.” She held her hand out for me to shake.
Shaking hers, I said, “It’s nice to meet you.”
Outside, I was cool and collected. Inside, my stomach churned with anxiety.
“I wanted to talk to you about the new coffee shop in town. Bean Rush.”
Except for my opening, which received a brief mention in the lifestyle section, I’d never been asked my opinion by a reporter. Nerves had me straightening my clothes and running a tongue over my teeth, hoping there wasn’t anything stuck in them.
“I just interviewed Ben Monroe, the owner of Bean Rush, and I had no idea your rivalry goes back to childhood.” She scrolled through her phone, lifting it to show me the screen. It was a picture of Ben’s lemonade stand.
My heart thudded in my ears. “Ben gave you that picture?”
“He had it on the wall of his store.”
He did? I wasn’t sure what to think of that.
“Here’s yours.” She scrolled to the next picture on her reel. It was a picture of me at my stand. My hair was in a ponytail, and I had a bright smile. I was in my element, but I didn’t want that picture shared with the paper.
“My picture is on the wall at Bean Rush?” I wanted to be sure I’d heard her correctly.
Alisha nodded. “I think it’s so cute that you had competing lemonade stands as kids growing up on the same street.”
I grimaced. “I don’t know about cute.”
“It makes for a great backstory.” She looked up from her phone. “And here you are as adults. Still competing.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Ben left for years and only just now came back. I haven’t seen or spoken to him since high school.” I tried to create distance between Ben and me. Show her there was nothing there to dissect or to learn.
Her eyes lit up when I saidhigh school.“When you were co-valedictorians?”
I cleared my throat, very uncomfortable with this conversation. “That’s right.”
“Ben said you jockeyed for grades, a position on the debate team, and to be top of your graduating class.”
I wasn’t sure how much to admit to this woman. I didn’t know what Ben had said to her. Now that I was confronted with our history, I was overwhelmed with the need to keep it private. What happened between us didn’t need to be the story in tomorrow’s paper.
I took her offered phone and scrolled from Ben’s picture to mine. We both looked like sweet kids running a lemonade stand. It couldn’t be of interest to her readers.
“I’m not sure I see an interesting story here unless you’re saying we were destined to be business owners.” I kept my voice professional.
I wished Ben had warned me somehow or that we’d discussed it before the reporter showed up. I wasn’t sure how he felt about them running a story on us. I just knew I didn’t like it, and I wasn’t ready to explore why with a reporter standing in front of me.
“Some of the customers mentioned how you used to compete against each other with price wars and different marketing tactics. One woman said you used to give out stickers and sometimes toys, in addition to the lemonade to entice customers.”
Ben and I had actually kept a running tally of our sales and would meet up at the end of the day to compare. It was what kept us sharp, coming up with new and better ideas to market to our customers. It wasn’t about the money. It was about beating the kid down the street.
Finally, I said, “We were thinking about marketing strategies even back then.”
The reporter studied my face. “Were you and Ben friends?”
