Page 40 of The Fall Classic

This isn’t the same thing.

I’m not making Georgie do the work for me, and I’m not asking her to take away my yips. I’m not taking anything from her.

I pause, evaluating every word in my head.

It’s all true.

Except for the part where I’m thinking about her when I’m stressed. Looking to her—even in my mind—when I want my problems to disappear.

Oh, crap.

CHAPTER NINE

Georgie

Normally, I think about Logan the entire drive from Mullet Ridge back to Sugar Maple.

But today, I know I’m rushing back to slide under a microscope.

“I just came by Sugar Maple to visit you,” Marlowe told me on the phone. “Imagine my surprise when there was no you!”

She laughed, but it didn’t feel funny. She wasn’t cold or mean, yet I felt like I was disappointing her and myself. She came by to visit me—something a mother does when she’s thinking about her daughter—and I wasn’t there.

If I’m being honest, I doubt she was really thinking about me. She was thinking of my dad. They probably FaceTimed this morning or he sent her flowers or some sweet texts that made her remember that making an effort with me scores her points with him.

Oh, Dad.

He’s currently in Atlanta, working a territory for a medical-device company that only cares about one thing: closing deals.

He may be terrible with money, but he can close deals, all right.

My father can walk into a room full of surgeons and walk out with a contract, because he’s so vibrant and exciting, when he pays attention to you, you feel chosen. The company lets him set his own schedule, so he works in concentrated bursts—three weeks of intense, dazzling effort—and then disappears for two, not because he’s lazy, but because he’s already spotted the Next Big Thing. A franchise opportunity. A development deal. A friend of a friend with a concept that only needs seed money and the right person at the front of the room. My father is always that person, in his mind, and he is never wrong about his ability to sell the idea.

He’s simply always wrong about the idea.

He’s as susceptible to flattery as he is to giving it, which is a dangerous combination.

My parents took loans out against the shop when Mama was diagnosed. My dad was working a sales job as a contract employee, not a salaried one. It paid better but meant no insurance, and he couldn’t switch to salaried because the company wouldn’t pay medical bills for something that was already diagnosed.

That medical debt had to be paid.

I get that.

But after she passed, Dad was making real money. Instead of paying down the loans at all, he funneled the money into a crappy restaurant in Columbia that someone assured him would be huge but that only lasted six months before going under. Then when I needed dental work, he once again took out loans against the shop as trustee instead of paying for the work himself, because he was still paying off the failed restaurant.

It took Marlowe finding out about all of this when I was in high school to make anything change at all. She’s spent years trying to dig us out of the hole my dad pretended didn’t exist. She made sure I knew about it, too. After she explained why I wouldn’t be inheriting a thriving shop yet when I turned eighteen and graduated high school, she laid the debt on the line.

The numbers were staggering.

I stared at them in shock.

“Just think about where you’d be without me,” she told me, making me too desperately, painfully grateful to ask any questions.

“Your mother never wanted you to inherit the shop until it was paid off,” Dad added then, putting one hand on my shoulder and one on Marlowe’s. “Once Marlowe tells us it’s paid off, Meant to Bean will be all yours. And you’ll do big things with it, Georgie Girl.”

“She is always sketching in that little notebook of hers,” Marlowe said, looking at my dad and then me. “You are your father’s daughter.”

The thing that scares me is that, sometimes, I get my dad. It’s exciting—almost addicting—to get a vision of something that doesn’t exist yet and be filled with a hunger to bring it to life. I’ve known it since I was fifteen and accidentally put cayenne pepper into my hot chocolate instead of cinnamon and loved it so much more. I started mixing spices and syrups and researching regional flavor combinations, and suddenly, I envisioned Meant to Beans all over the country, each one serving drinks that wouldn’t exist anywhere else, making each more than a coffee spot, but a destination⁠—