Just One Day Read Online Free Page B

“real” restaurant, because the food would be healthy and worthy and the facilities would be clean. I’d teased him for years about his food snobbery, how one day we’d be Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat, him eating sushi while I licked the dripping ketchup from a cheeseburger.
    Somehow, we worked. Even being so different. In the beginning I wondered if I was just an experiment on his part, Brad Marcus being so out of my self-defined league and all. I was a boring working mom with debt and impending college tuition. Of all the cultured and refined and worthy women at his reach, why would I even be on his radar?
    So I asked him. He told me that I was like a complicated, beautiful flower. An intriguing puzzle that he needed to figure out. And that he loved a challenge. And then he told me that he loved me.
    I guess that trumped all the other bullshit, because I stayed with him after being called a challenging flower.
    And things got really good, I thought. Solid. Until last night. Now, as I sat in a dusty parking lot of a thousand-year-old building, running from a ticking clock and thinking waffles would bring world peace, I wondered. Was I still an experiment?
    Did he love me? I thought he did. It was there in his eyes that morning as he brought me coffee. I’d been divorced for a long time, but I was pretty sure that the love part shouldn’t be in question. And if he loved me, wouldn’t he hear all the other million little things? Like small, simple, classy, not extravagant . It was like he never heard a word.
    I opened my car door to get away from my thoughts, and the aroma wafted straight to me. I guess the dust cloud overpowered it the first time.
    “Oh, dear God, bacon,” I said, closing my eyes as the salivating began. I didn’t care about the evils of fried pork at that moment, or the fat content, or whatever else was surely on Brad’s checklist. He wasn’t there.

Chapter Three
     
     
    “Are you okay?”
    The raspy hollering to my left brought me out of my reverie with a jump and a gasp. The crusty-looking old man standing by my car did little to alleviate that shock. Where the hell had he come from? Still, furry eyebrows and all, he looked relatively harmless. I figured I could probably take him in a standoff.
    I laughed as I swung myself out of the car and hit the remote to lock the door. It made its usual chirping sound, which caused one of the furry eyebrows to wiggle a little.
    “Just sitting in there, talking to yourself, thought I’d make sure,” the man said, as if I’d answered.
    “I’m fine,” I said, giving him a smile. “Smells good already.”
    I made to walk around him, but he turned and fell into step with me so I slowed down.
    “Air’s thick,” he said, his scratchy voice giving in to just air at the end. “Sparkly.”
    I laughed. “Sparkly?”
    “You know,” he said, nodding toward where the darkness sat up ahead. “That there’s an electric storm, for sure. Don’t you feel it?”
    He was right, and that was the difference I’d sensed. Like all my hairs wanted to sit up just a little.
    “Weird, coming from inland like that,” I said, letting him shuffle up the old wooden steps before me. “Usually have storms like that coming off the Gulf.”
    “That where you’re coming from?”
    “Yes sir,” I said. “Baytown.”
    “I’m Jarvis,” he said as I stepped around an old wrought-iron bench to hold open the door. “My wife, May, sent me out here to stare at the weather. Like I can do something about it. But,” he continued, scratching his head, “today’s a different kind of day. I feel it.”
    I chuckled at his eccentricity. “You come here often?”
    “Oh, most days,” he said with an enthusiastic nod. “Love the smell of breakfast in the morning,” he said on a husky laugh. “Nothing like it. Especially at this place.”
    The mixed aromas of the aforementioned bacon and syrup and doughy bready things filled my senses, and I marveled at how rebellious I felt.