The Grand Reopening Of Dandelion Cafe. Jenny Oliver
about her brother, raised as high as the family pedestal would allow without him bashing his head on the ceiling, with his perfect family and his degree from Oxford and his PhD from Cambridge and his GP practice and his comments about how Dad should never have had to bail her out.
Her one regret was not being able to pay that money back. She’d had these fantasies of buying her dad another Jaguar and leading him over the bridge to see it parked by the river, sparkling like the sun catching the waves.
‘You OK?’
Annie jumped when she heard the drawl.
‘Shit! Sorry, you startled me. I was just erm—’ She pointed to the cherry trees. ‘Just, you know, looking.’
The guy from the bar was standing in the doorway. Matthew. She noticed in the daylight how tanned his face was. The lines of his cheekbones rusty with sunburn and his nose freckled. His hair was pushed back from his face, like it was held back with salt water from the sea, brown with dirty-blond streaks.
He didn’t say anything and the silence made her nervous.
‘I just needed a…’ She pointed again to the cherry trees and then, not wanting him to think that she was talking about needing to go to the loo added, ‘I just needed a break.’
‘Understandable,’ he said.
‘I should probably go back inside,’ Annie said, pulling the sleeves down on her sweater and wishing she went to the gym a bit more given the lines of muscle down his arms and legs.
He strolled over to where she was standing looking over the wall at the trees. The slight breeze was making Annie shiver and the branches rub together like little animals were tapping at the bark.
‘So you own this place now?’ he said after a moment.
‘Yeah,’ Annie said with a laugh. ‘Yeah. I’m not sure anyone’s too happy about it.’
He shrugged. ‘They’re just scared.’
‘Of me?’ She shook her head as if the idea was preposterous.
He turned around so his back was leaning against the crumbling wall and raised a brow to suggest she was deliberately misunderstanding him.
Annie looked from him down to her shoes and then out across at the orchard. She spotted one of the trees that was about to burst. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, it would be full colour.
‘You gonna close the place?’ he asked.
She sucked in her bottom lip. A fat wood pigeon landed on one of the branches in front of her making it bend almost to the floor. The pigeon grappled to hold on.
‘I have no idea.’
‘Well you’d better come up with something quick,’ he said. ‘There’s people depending on you.’
Annie was surprised by the sudden queasy feeling she had in her stomach at that comment. As if someone had sliced through her and she’d just fallen to the ground.
‘Have a word with my brother,’ she said, adding a self-deprecating laugh. ‘He’ll assure them that that’s the worst situation to find themselves in. Get new jobs quick!’
Matthew put his hands in his pockets and pushed himself up from the wall with his shoulders. ‘I have very little time for your brother. As far as I can tell it’s his fault there’s that horrific development on the island. On land he’d agreed to sell to me,’ he said before walking away, back towards the door of the kitchen. He paused on the step, turned her way, hands still in his pockets, and he added, ‘I think we’re all hoping you might be a little different.’
Annie refused her mother’s invitation to stay for dinner. They’d taken a family walk around the island and been back to her mum’s for another cup of tea and now all Annie could think about was going home. Gerty wanted her to go to their house so she could show her her new trampoline but Annie politely declined. Although the look of horror on Suzi’s face at the idea of an un-arranged pop-in had almost been enough to make her take her niece up on the offer.
‘When are you coming back?’ Her mum asked as she stood on the doorstep in her slippers, wrapping her cardie round her against the afternoon chill coming off the river.
‘I’m not sure. I’ve got to tie up some stuff with work. You know?’ Annie ran her hand through her hair, trying to save it from frizzing up in the moisture.
‘I like your hair like that,’ her mum said. ‘Very modern.’
Annie rolled her eyes, reached up self-concisely to touch the shorn edges of her hair. When she’d finished the shareholder document and presented the mortgage company with her stupidly large cheque, she’d decided that maybe now was the time to celebrate. She had finally achieved what she set out to do. No longer would she have to scrimp and save, squirrelling away money, in an attempt to prove herself. When she couldn’t pay her dad back her loan, it seemed vital to put that money into something else. To prove that she wasn’t the flake they all thought her. That she could create a business, she could be a success. She could invest as her father invested.
Why she never mentioned it to anyone still confused her. Especially when Jonathan’s every success was flaunted on the family WhatsApp group. But it felt like this was her little secret that none of them could take from her. She was triumphant. And none of them could tarnish it with their set-in-stone views of her character.
Sending over her finished files she wasn’t ‘Oh, Annie!’, she was Annie White, owner of White Graphics and Illustration, home-owner. For the first time she hadn’t felt like she was masquerading under a flashy title that she’d made up. It actually felt like her. Like she could relax and believe it. So, to celebrate, she’d bought herself a latte from Caffè Nero, one glossy magazine and one trashy one, a whole big round chocolate orange, and then as she was perusing a new scarf in the window of a far-too-expensive boutique she’d seen a girl walk out the salon next door with dip-dyed pink hair and she’d thought, I want pink hair. Or at least new hair. She felt like suddenly she was allowed to let a little bit more of herself back in. She had paid for her mistakes.
‘I’m all yours,’ she’d said to the hairdresser. He’d waffled on about side-swept fringes framing the face, textured ends and on-trend jagged cut layers transforming a traditional pixie cut. When he’d said that white-blonde streaks were very now she’d nodded and told him to go for it.
And when she’d left the salon, the man from the deli had wolf-whistled and given her a free cannoli.
But now, embarrassed by her mum’s attention, Annie lied and said, ‘It’s been like this for ages.’
‘Well I haven’t seen you for ages.’
‘It’s a teenager’s haircut,’ her brother called out as he came from the living room to the door and stood just behind her mum. ‘I don’t know what your clients think.’
Annie sucked in a breath. He could make her feel tiny. Like a snail on the doorstep looking up at his looming figure.
‘Anyway, look, Annie, before you go, you need to sort that business out. It’s just haemorrhaging money.’
‘Jonathan, I’ll deal with it.’
‘You can’t just ignore it, Annie. Get it sold. Better yet, tear it down.’ He crossed his arms in front of him and leant against the door jamb, talking as if there was no other possible opinion than his. ‘It’s not listed, it’s not a conservation area, they’d let you knock it down. If anything it’d be a blessing ‒ give a better view of the cherry trees. I mean, that’s why people come here, isn’t it? There’s better food at the pub, better views of the river. Flog them the cherry pie recipe and your hands are clean. I can do it for you if you want.’
‘Oh yeah, right,’ Annie