Kyle still felt a bit out of sorts the next morning, like he’d been shot down at the end of a date. It was weird, because what else had he expected to happen? Kyle had spontaneously invited Adam to dinner in the grocery store while his daughter and half the town had watched. If he’d wanted a romantic evening, he should have reconsidered his approach a little. It was very possible Adam had only accepted the invitation to be polite, and Kyle should have been satisfied with that. After weeks of only speaking to people who were related to him or a quarter of his age, it was a relief to talk to someone new. Olivia had said almost the same thing about eight months after Caroline was born.
“You’re never around,” she’d sobbed. “You work all day and you’re out at some function almost every night. I need to talk to someone with a vocabulary.” There had been dark circles under her eyes. He’d never seen her cry before, and the experience had shaken him. A week later, Kyle had started making changes toward taking his business virtual.
He thought he understood now what Olivia had meant. While Caroline’s vocabulary had expanded considerably in the last six years, her primary conversation topics were school and cartoon princesses, and there were days he hoped for one of Amazonia’s animal friends to rise up out of nowhere to drag him off into the jungle.
That was what he was feeling that morning, he decided. It wasn’t attraction. The night before hadn’t been a date. Maybe a parent-teacher conference in an alternative location? With a little coffee to get him jump-started, he could see that it was simply gratitude and relief at knowing his social skills hadn’t completely atrophied.
On Monday, Kyle had lunch downtown with Ben. They talked about their kids, sports, cars. Ben tried to reminisce about things that had happened when they were growing up, and Kyle dodged the topic. The difference between their relationship at seventeen and what it was now made him uncomfortable. Back then, their days had been full of adventures and half-baked plans to help Kirsten sneak out of her parent’s house so she and Ben could go make out in his car. Now, Ben seemed so settled and Kyle was starting all over again.
After lunch, he headed across the street to a café he’d seen when he’d pulled up. He didn’t remember it from his childhood, or from his visits to see his dad after he’d moved away, but a sign in the window said Free Wi-Fi, which was all he needed to know. He’d already eaten, but he ordered a coffee and a muffin anyway and sat down at an empty table. There were four new emails from Eva, two from Shannon, and a number of others from various publishers, lawyers, travel companies, and one from Shannon’s bank reminding him her credit card payment was due. Kyle worked through them.
His big project, the one that Shannon had called him about the night before, was to organize a long weekend in Vegas.
“I’m burnt out,” Shannon had said. “I need some me-time. Ted’s working eighty hours a week, and I’m sick of coming home to an empty house. Can you get me set up with a girls’ weekend in Vegas?” Because Shannon’s me-time never meant traveling with fewer than three other people.
Flights were easy, Shannon had enough miles to fly round-trip to Vegas once a month for the next decade. Hotels were trickier, since Shannon’s naturopath had diagnosed her with a sensitivity to most commercial laundry detergents. Kyle sent off a number of emails to boutique hotels on the strip to find out the type of laundry detergent their cleaning services used. They were not the weirdest emails he’d sent in his professional life. Two years ago, he’d taken on a client, a cardiologist from Portland, who was so afraid to fly that he wouldn’t get on plane without getting a detailed maintenance history from the airline. That had been a tougher assignment than finding out who used what soap.
Kyle was making a list of restaurants to contact about Shannon’s dietary restrictions when the chair on the other side of his table was pulled back and someone sat down. It was a woman with dark hair and blue eyes. She wore an apron with the café’s logo printed on it.
“You’re Kyle Fenton?” she asked, in the same tone she might have said You’re George Clooney? Kyle wondered where she’d come from.
“I am?”
“Gord’s kid?”
He folded his hands into his lap so she didn’t see him ball them into fists. In Red Creek, he would always be Gord’s kid. “That’s me.”
“I’m Rebecca. This is my café.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“I hear you’re an event planner.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t expected her to say that. Wasn’t she going to tell him how sorry she was to hear about Olivia? “I’m actually a—”
“I want to hire you,” she said. There it was. The other kind of pity.
Kyle held up his hands. “Did my dad put you up to this? Because I haven’t really planned anything major in the last few years and—”
“But you could, right?” She smiled again. It was a toothy smile that said this woman might eat him alive, but the prospect of a real live planning job was very tempting. In front of him, his laptop showed new emails from Eva, each with an increasing number of exclamation marks in the subject line. He closed the screen.
“What did you have in mind?” he asked.
“It’s going to be big. Can you come back? I can’t talk now; it’s busy.” Sure enough, the café was full, and there were seven people lined up at the cash. “We close at six o’clock. Come at six fifteen.”
“Tonight?” He usually had dinner on the table at six. Rebecca smiled her big bad wolf smile again. “Sure,” he said.
“Great. See you then!” She pushed back from the table and hurried away.
The rest of the afternoon tripped by in a rush. He sent inquiries to restaurants in Vegas, crossed hotels off his list based on their responses to his laundry question, and emailed out blog posts for Eva’s book tour. At three o’clock, he packed up his things and drove to the school to pick up Caroline. His head buzzed with possibilities for Rebecca’s mystery event, and he practically made Caroline duck and roll to get in the van.
He was home before four and took a sweet potato casserole out of the freezer.
“I thought it was fish taco night?” Kyle’s dad didn’t look pleased with the change.
“It was fish taco night, but now it’s sweet potato casserole night.” Kyle turned the oven on. “Put this in the oven when it beeps to say the temperature is set. It will be ready at six thirty.”
“Yes, sir.” His father gave him a quick salute. “So organized. What did I ever do without you?”
“You lived on salt and butter and takeout, and you had a heart attack two years ago. As an employee of the health care system, even a relatively new one, you were expected to know better.” Kyle kissed the top of his head.
“Where are you off to? I take it you’re telling me all this because you won’t be here for dinner?”
“Nope.” Kyle pulled out a bag of premixed greens from the fridge. “Use the ranch dressing, not the Caesar. Caroline doesn’t like the Caesar. Sometimes she says she doesn’t like the ranch either, so ask her before you toss the salad.”
“Kyle, I know what to do. Where are you going?”
“I have to meet a client about an event!” He raced up the stairs to get ready.
In an hour and a half, Kyle put together a short portfolio with pictures of events he’d organized in Seattle. He did a quick internet search on the café, but only found their website, which said it was Under Construction, and a Facebook page that hadn’t had a new post in six months. He fidgeted in the desk chair as he continued to research, unable to keep still. This might be it. After a month at his dad’s house, his situation might be looking up.
He raided his closet. The shelves were stuffed with novelty T-shirts. His wardrobe had been reduced to Super Dad Kyle. Toward the back, he found two suit bags that contained his working clothes from Seattle.
He settled on a pair of charcoal trousers, white shirt, black vest, and a tweed jacket. The jacket had always made Olivia call him the professor when he wore it, because of the leather patches on the elbows. It had turned out that Olivia had a preference for the academic vibe, and Kyle had unapologetically used that fact to his advantage on the occasional time they’d had a night out. His throat tightened as he considered the jacket again. He slid it back into the closet and selected a pinstriped blue one.
There was a fight with the iron to get the shirt into wearable condition. He hung the jacket and pants in the bathroom while he showered to steam out the worst of the wrinkles. He took ten extra minutes to get his hair styled the way he’d worn it in Seattle. When he got downstairs, his father whistled.
“Wow, Daddy,” Caroline said. “You’re so different!” Kyle decided to take that as a six-year-old’s version of a compliment.
“It’s a whole new side of you,” his father agreed. “So what’s the event?”
“Is it weird that I don’t know? I got ambushed by this crazy lady downtown this afternoon. She said she wanted to hire me and told me to come back tonight.”
“It’s a surprise?” Caroline asked, eyes wide.
“Yes, Jelly Bean.” Kyle kissed her cheek. “It’s a surprise. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.” They wished him luck, and Kyle hurried out to his van to meet Rebecca at the café.