Part One: Connections
Mornings were Nell’s favorite shift. She’d come in around the time Colton finished filling up the bakery, clocking in right before he clocked out and sharing a wave or a nod but not words. Colton didn’t talk much ever, and Nell didn’t talk much during her first couple hours awake, so that was fine. She checked the cases, and the till, and started the drip coffee, and scanned the walls, and flipped all the chairs back onto the floor, switching the music over when Colton left and she unlocked the front doors.
Mornings started out slow, and that was just how Nell liked it. She was alone for a couple hours, which meant she didn’t have much time to chat with customers even if they were awake enough to try to start a conversation. Most people only popped in to grab a drip coffee, anyway, dropping their crumpled bills on the counter and filling up their personal travel mugs, eyes at half-mast and speech barely up to grunts.
In the mornings, Nell didn’t have to clarify that yes, the café was called Pending, and one of the walls held plastic tags that meant the food and drinks had already been paid for. She didn’t have to argue with people that yes, fine, other places called those suspended coffees and whatnot, except that wasn’t the name of the place, because the other wall was where people could post their pending connections, and yes, those were often called missed connections, but Art hadn’t named the place Suspended/Missed, now, had he? He’d picked the broader gerund to unite all the purposes of his dream café, and if you didn’t get it, stranger, you were welcome to travel another twenty miles and hit up a Starbucks. Nell didn’t think she was a coffee snob, but she’d probably turned into a Pending snob.
She felt her smile turn real when a woman with frizzy gray hair and a long coat, worn all seasons, shuffled in and frowned at the section of the wall labeled sandwiches. A number of the hooks held brightly colored plastic tags, but Nell grabbed a purple one from under the register. “Mary! There was only one, so I pulled it in case you wanted it.”
Mary turned, still squinting—Nell suspected she really needed glasses—and grinned broadly, showing off the gaps between her remaining teeth. “Double tips today!” she crowed, shuffling a bit further along the wall in a pair of slippers that, like the coat, was part of her all-weather look.
Nell hooked the tag—Roast Beef—back onto the peg board behind the counter and got out the proper sandwich while Mary selected a plain bagel with cream cheese and a large coffee. “Staying today?” Nell asked, taking the two other tags and handing over a to-go cup.
“I think I’ll dine in the park this morning,” Mary sniffed, straightening imperiously. “But toast that bagel anyway.”
Nodding, Nell went to slice and toast, thankful that there weren’t any through-travelers here to sneer and act uncomfortable and so darn superior. As though the whole point of the pending food wasn’t to provide for people who didn’t have ready access to it. It was weird how some could come in and make loud excuses for their own splurges and still look down on others, dismissing them as millennials wasting money on fancy lattes and avocado toast. Pending had some fancy lattes, but Art didn’t get the appeal of avocados.
“Same bag or different ones?” Nell asked, because the sandwich was cold and had to last until whenever Mary decided to eat it. The local shelter provided dinner, but there were strict hours when the doors were open, so everyone had to be out on the street before they were locked in the morning and got grief if they lined up too early before dinner.
“I’ll put the roast beef in my pocket.” Mary came back to the counter for a drink sleeve, setting the cup down and flexing her hands.
“Aspirin?” Nell offered. It looked like it was going to be a lovely spring day, but that didn’t mean Mary’s arthritis wasn’t acting up.
But she shook her head. “I got some better stuff, but I can’t mix it, and they’ll frisk me.”
Nell wasn’t entirely sure the frisking part was the truth, but she also wasn’t sure it was pure exaggeration, so she nodded. “Come back in if you need a warmup.” She nodded at the coffee, but she meant Mary herself, too.
Mary smiled at her as she tucked the sandwich in her pocket and hooked the plastic handles over her wrist. There were paper bags, but those weren’t always the easiest for people to carry. “You know you’re doing enough, don’t you, dear?”
Nell supposed her expression was a little rueful, and maybe Mary needed reading glasses, but she just nodded when Nell shifted her weight and didn’t answer, because … well. Feeling like she was doing enough certainly wasn’t Nell’s factory setting.
The bell over the door jingled as Mary nodded and picked up her cup. “Have a good day, Nell.”
“You too, Mary.”
Art nodded and held the door for Mary, who nodded back but didn’t pause to say anything to him. Mary didn’t particularly like interacting with men, which was part of the reason she came in when Nell had her shift.
Art didn’t seem to mind. He hardly ever seemed to mind much of anything. He was tall and overweight with thinning brown hair and glasses that were too small for his face, but most people—the best people—noticed the sparkle in his brown eyes and the warmth in his smile. He scanned the wall as he came to the counter, combining his “Morning, Nell” with “Throw some roast beefs and sausages up there, will you? Did Mary get hers?”
“Yeah, I pulled the one we already had.” Nell took some purple and red tags and passed them over.
Art set down his tote bag with a heavy thump and scattered the new tags among the old ones, making it look like they’d been purchased by customers instead of added all as a group out of the goodness of his own heart. He didn’t take down any of the other tags, though. It was rare that things didn’t even out but, if they didn’t, Art covered up the deficit out of his own pocket. He was the type of guy who cared more about people having choices than … well, almost anything else. Dignity, he’d once lectured Nell, back when he thought she was still the sort of person who needed such a lecture. It’s hard enough for people to take handouts, and worse for them to have no choice whatsoever. Nell didn’t know if Art had ever been unhoused, but signs pointed toward yes.
“Check that out, by the way,” Art invited, tilting his head to indicate his bag. “I just got the mail.”
The mail for the café wasn’t usually interesting, so Nell lifted the edge of the bag a bit warily and then frowned. The thing that made the bag thunk was … a book. An uncorrected proof copy, according to the words across the top, but the cover was strange. It was done in shades of blue, apparently a building with mostly dark windows, except one had a yellow cone of light going from a desk lamp to the silhouette of someone writing with a pen, and a second, down one and over to the right, had the silhouette of a woman with her chin on her hand, looking away from the other lit window. Nell had to open it to find the title: Since You Went Away, a novel by C. J. O’Connell. She raised an eyebrow at Art.
“Okay, so this”—he came back to the counter and tapped the book with one finger—“is apparently getting major buzz. All these actresses are fighting over it for their book clubs and this guy’s going to be on all the talk shows, that kind of thing.”
That explained nothing.
He tapped it again, more firmly this time. “It’s about a lost love, which he’s calling a missed connection, but his agent heard about us and wants to put us on his reading tour.”
Nell looked out at Pending, which wasn’t really all that big.
“Nell, it’s perfect,” Art insisted. “The whole conceit of this book, okay, is that the narrator’s writing it as a sort of open letter so he can track down the one that got away. And the whole marketing thing is O’Connell being a coy bastard, you know? Like is it true or isn’t it? Is Rosie real or is it all just a novel and O’Connell’s a publicity genius?”
She tried not to wrinkle her nose. “You’re the kind of guy who says conceit now?”
“Look, it’s all in the letter.” He closed the book and pushed it across the counter at her. “So I need you to read this and let me know if there’s a reason I should say no to all the free publicity that’s going to come our way.” He gestured behind him—to the food wall, not the connections wall. “We could really use this.”
She tried not to sigh. “And you want me to read it because …?”
He wrinkled his nose. “It’s a romantic literary something. Those two words I definitely don’t do. But I need to know if it’s, like …”
“Spicy?” Nell suggested.
“Is that what you call it when they have to use synonyms for body parts?”
She tried to control the giggles, but Nell had never seen Art reading anything, and she didn’t know if he’d ever had a sex life. “That is, yeah. Well, spicy and open door. You call it closed door if it pans to the curtains or fades out once they get started.”
“Yeah, so …” His hand twitched like he wanted to push it even closer to her. “Ask Kent, too. I think it’s a good idea, but I don’t want any surprises.”
Nell wrinkled her nose, because romantic literary something wasn’t really her thing, either. “Is this a favor for a friend?”
“A friend who’ll pay you two bucks for every page you read.”
Her look changed.
Art laughed, holding up his hands. “You’re a fast reader! And it’s like two hundred fifty pages! I’m desperate, but mostly I’m poor!”
Sighing, she fanned the pages to double-check the font size. “Two bucks for every page I finish. I’m not guaranteeing I’ll read the whole book.”
He held out his hand and they shook on it.
from Since You Went Away by C. J. O’Connell (Penguin, 2024)
I am not the sort of man who’d star in a Hallmark movie. Kalamazoo’s not really a small town, for one. I’ve got the jeans and plaid shirts and work boots, sure, but no big-city woman’s going to move back home and fall for a facilities manager at an apartment complex. A carpenter’s sexy, sure, but a jack of all trades? No hope.
That didn’t matter until today.
She’s not some big-city woman moving back home to help out a sick mother or whatever other plot device Hallmark scriptwriters are allowed to pick from the list. She’s a college student. A college senior, mind, so I’m not a creep. That makes her maybe three years younger than I am. College, though. Not Western, either—K College. The one where you have to be rich, or smart, or both, to get in.
I didn’t go to college, I’m not rich, and my smarts aren’t book-related. So.
Okay, stop it there, Cal. Repeat what Mom always says: I’m smart. I’m a reader. A voracious reader, and that’s probably the biggest word she knows.
My mom exists in this bubble of if she says it, it’s true, but that one happens to be anyway. These days it’s a brag, but she used to worry about it. Say it quietly over the backyard fence: Cal doesn’t have any friends. He’s always at home with his nose in a book.
It was the lack of friends that bothered her. Once she realized a library card was free, she was all in on the books. I could pick up as many as they’d let me, as long as I knew it was on my head if I lost any or returned them late. These days libraries are getting rid of fees, so they aren’t quite as scary to little kids who only have a tiny allowance and parents who aren’t more than half-supportive of their larvae bookworms, but back then I was very careful to always know the date. I kept the books in a specific pile in my room, which she didn’t enter—I was supposed to keep that clean, too, and bring out all my dirty laundry, even if I didn’t have to run the machine yet.
She wasn’t going to raise a kid who couldn’t handle life on his own once he hit eighteen. As soon as I was tall enough to reach all the way down into the top-loading washer, I did my own laundry.
These days kids who aren’t prepared to handle life on their own pay my salary. They call me for the strangest things sometimes. The smallest things.
Like today, for example. One of the students moving in—yes, this late, because K’s on the quarter system, which they all feel the need to explain as though I’ve never heard of such a thing before—called because of a stuck cupboard door. You would’ve thought a small child had accidentally locked itself in behind it. I was at one of the other properties for an actual issue—leaky faucet—but drove over as quickly as I could, and it turns out it was just in time.
I was there to hold open the door when Rosie walked in.
Rebecca Frost 