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“Yeah,” she said.
And then they didn’t talk after that. Which was evenmoreawkward.
SO, THAT NIGHT, Niles and Dahlia were alone in the store.
Will had this idea that the counter needed to stay open really late on Fridays and Saturdays. On weeknights, they closed around 6:00 p.m. But on the weekends, Will thought they should be open late for people who were leaving the bar and wanted something to sop up all the alcohol they’d drunk and get a sandwich.
Which meant that a bunch of sandwiches had to be made midday on Fridays and Saturdays and that there were two shifts of bread being mixed and risen and then baked into sandwich buns.
It was complicated.
Anyway, if Will had his way, they would have stayed open until after the bars closed, like 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.
But due to the fact that Will could not find people who would work that late, he had compromised and now, they could close the shop at midnight.
Dahlia wouldn’t say they did brisk business that late, but it wasn’t no business at all. Shepherdstown was a college town, and there were a lot of people keeping late hours. However, it was always really sporadic. There was a lot of downtime.
That night, it was the night of the Sour Suckers show. That was Tommy’s band. Tommy played bass guitar, and he had been at her about how she was going to miss the entire thing, because even when the shop closed at midnight, what with all the things she ended up having to do, it usually took at least another half hour until she was free and clear. She would do as much shutdown as she could while she was waiting to close the store, but there always ended up being about a half hour of things leftover.
The truth was, Niles wasn’t even technically supposed to be there.
Niles never scheduled himself for the late shifts anyway, and besides, considering that it was such a sporadic shift, there didn’t need to be two people there. One person could easily bag up sandwiches and ring them up. Even if a big crowd of drunken people stumbled in, it was not a two-person shift.
But Niles was there because he was trying to work up this thing he wanted to show to Will. It was a plan for some kind of brunch for Sundays. He had talked to Dahlia about it a few times, how he thought it was criminal that the kitchen back there wasn’t being put to good use and that he thought brunch was a perfect fit for Shepherdstown and that it could be really great.
And she could agree the kitchen could be used for more than what it was used for now (apparently, Will and Gordon someday hoped to start a catering business, but they were too busy breaking up and getting back together again to get that going) but she didn’t really agree that there was anywhere for people to eat brunch here. So, it was going to have to be a to-go brunch? Which? Not great.
Anyway, she didn’t say this to Niles, though. He was excited about his idea. Why burst his bubble?
That night, he was cooking things for the brunch, and he kept bringing stuff out for her to try.
She tasted eggs and pastries and quiche and fruit salads, and they were all delicious.
“You’re really a good cook,” she said to him. “How come you don’t work as a cook for a restaurant in town?”
“I didn’t study that at school or whatever,” he said. “Most people with those kinds of jobs around here have, like, culinary arts school training or whatever.”
“Oh. What did you study in college?”
“Lot of things until I dropped out,” he said with a grin.
She grinned back.
“What are you studying again, Ms. Graduate Student?”
“Social work,” she said.
“Really?” He was surprised. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for that.”
“I want to help people,” she said with a shrug.
“Sure,” he said.
“Don’t I seem like someone who wants to help people?”
“It’s only, uh, it seems…” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You don’t think I should be a social worker?”
