Waiting at Hayden's Read online

  waiting at hayden's

  For more love stories by Riley Costello visit

  sincerelyriley.com

  waiting at hayden's

  a novel

  riley costello

  Sullivan & Shea

  Publishing

  Waiting at Hayden’s is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 Riley Costello

  All rights reserved

  Published in the United States by Sullivan & Shea Publishing

  Costello, Riley, author.

  Waiting at Hayden’s: a novel / Riley Costello

  Oregon: Sullivan & Shea Publishing

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-7323033-1-7

  sincerelyriley.com

  Cover Design by Danielle Christopher

  eBook formatting by FormattingExperts.com

  Author Photo by Ryan Selewicz

  Videography by Define Motion

  Character Photography by Olivia Ashton

  This book is the first to be published in the new reading experience format: shopfiction™.

  First Edition: July 2018

  To Mom and Dad, for always believing

  waiting at hayden's

  waiting at hayden’s

  Waiting at Hayden’s is the first book to be published in the new reading experience format, shopfiction™. Throughout this book you will find links (underlined words) when characters’ clothes are described that will take you to a webpage where you can view a photo of the character and shop her look. In addition, at the end of several chapters you will see links that will take you to a page where you can watch key scenes unfold and shop the characters’ clothes.

  Please note that the basic web browser on certain e-readers might not allow for smooth web browsing. You can still enjoy the shopfiction™ experience by typing the links at the end of designated chapters into a browser on your phone, tablet or computer to watch the video highlights and Shop the Book™.

  PROLOGUE

  “YOU’LL BE THERE, right?” Jack asked, one last time.

  Charli stood in the street outside her house with her fingers curled over the rolled-down window of his truck. She wished she were leaving first.

  “Of course I’ll be there,” she said. “And you?”

  Jack lifted her hands to his lips, kissing them both.

  “No matter what.”

  “But if one of us isn’t there,” she said. “If you decide not to show . . . ”

  Jack’s eyes pricked with tears, and he turned away from her. The road ahead was dimly lit. Just streetlights and a sliver of moon. Soon the sun would rise, alarms would go off, and people would climb out of bed, brew coffee, drive to work. It would be a regular summer day for most.

  “This isn’t over,” he said. “I’ll see you in five years at Hayden’s.”

  Charli’s bottom lip quivered. “Are we making a mistake here?”

  Maybe, Jack thought. But what good would it do to say that?

  “This is the right thing,” he assured her. “This is the plan we thought was best.”

  Tears dribbled off Charli’s chin. “Five years isn’t really that long . . . ” Just yesterday they were a pair of seven-year-olds, playing in a sandbox. In a blink, teenagers, cramming for tests in Jack’s room. Now, twenty-two, crazy in love.

  Jack kissed her forehead, then jiggled his keys to start the engine, knowing that if he didn’t leave now, he never would.

  “The fireside table,” Charli said with a sniffle. “I’ll see you there.”

  He leaned in toward her. “If you get there first, order me six slices of the Chocolate Mint Cloud Cake.”

  She laughed through her tears, knowing it would be the last time she found something funny for a while.

  Jack breathed in all the moment had to offer: the crisp pre-dawn air, the smell of lavender on Charli’s skin, the banana nut muffins that Charli had baked for his long drive ahead on the seat beside him. A sob escaped from the back of his throat.

  “I love you,” Charli said, wiping her eyes.

  “I love you too,” Jack said and pulled away from the curb.

  one

  NOW

  GIANNA CHECKED HER phone for the hundredth time as she walked past the burly bouncer. Still, no text from Valerie.

  She’d been sure her childhood best friend would text her. She’d expected something like:

  I was kidding! Obviously, I was kidding. Why on earth would I want to celebrate turning forty at a dive bar? Let’s meet at Hayden’s! I hope you aren’t sold out of the Raspberry Gateau!

  Gianna wasn’t, of course. She’d had her pastry chef, Jill, make an extra of Val’s favorite cake that morning just in case she changed her mind about her party venue. She had also asked her hostess, Rosie, to reserve the back table close to the fireplace for an hour or so.

  “I’m sure we’ll end up here,” she’d told them both, as she had hurried out the back door fifteen minutes ago to catch an Uber to the dive bar Valerie had chosen instead.

  She swept the room.

  It was crowded—unusually crowded for nine o’clock on a Thursday. Didn’t people have jobs they had to be at bright and early tomorrow morning? Maybe not. Remote Fridays. That’s what her young, hip servers said was the trend these days. Lots of their friends apparently worked remotely all the time—Instagramming, tweeting, doing other social media for companies.

  It was why Gianna always saw them popping in and out of Second Story Tea Room, the tea shop wedged inside an old Victorian across the street from her restaurant. They’d work some, then smoke pot on the street corner with their remote-working friends some, then back to tweeting.

  Listen to her! She sounded like an old person. She was only thirty-seven, still relatively young. She liked to smoke pot too, on occasion. She was just an “old soul.” Her first-grade teacher had written this about her in her first-ever report card after Gianna spent all of one recess inside asking the teacher if she’d ever stood in front of a mirror and asked herself the questions, “Am I really here? What if none of life exists, and it’s all just in our heads?”

  Maybe the weather was actually responsible for the crowd that evening. For the first time in months, the sun had come out in Portland. All of her staff and her customers had been in such a good mood earlier—even Lemon Meringue Larry, the eighty-five-year-old widower who came in every afternoon for a coconut chocolate chip cookie and coffee with a mood as sour as the mouth-puckering treat. Gianna liked to match all her customers up with a dessert on her restaurant’s menu. It helped her remember them.

  “Oh, it’s a glorious day, isn’t it?” Larry had said, and Gianna had been so shocked she’d spilled his cup of coffee all over his crisp, white shirt. He hadn’t cared though. The sun was shining!

  She imagined all the single women who were hovering around the bar now had been sitting at home earlier that evening with their windows open when a warm breeze smelling of cherry blossoms and promise had blown in and rippled through their hair. For the first time all year they’d thought, Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a summer fling? Maybe I should go to a bar. Maybe tonight will be the night I’ll meet someone who gets me and who I get, too.

  Gianna remembered indulging in those fantasies before she met Peter Clark. Those fantasies were the only reason she had ever subjected herself to this late-night, loud-music scene. Valerie, as well. They had always much preferred girls’ nights in—homemade cocktails, comfy clothes, feet kicked up on the butter-yellow ottoman in the apartment they’d shared for years until Valerie and Richard got married three summers ago.
>
  The weather wouldn’t last though, just like most of the connections that were made tonight. The paper was calling for a storm tomorrow evening. Gianna had been trying all day not to read too much into the forecast.

  She’d always imagined it being stormy on March 24, 2017. Every single time she’d thought of that day for the past five years, she’d pictured it being stormy—at least when she allowed herself to imagine both Charli and Jack showing up. It was because storms were romantic. It seemed much more likely they would both make The Reservation if there were rain pounding down on Hayden’s roof and thunder echoing down Northwest 23rd Street. It was silly. She knew it was silly. She’d seen too many romantic comedies.

  There, by the band. She spotted Val. She was sipping champagne with six other women. Champagne! A happy drink. As if this were a happy place where Valerie had happy memories. The very last time they were here, Gianna had found Valerie in the bathroom, complaining to a complete stranger as she washed her hands about how some guy had grabbed her ass while she was waiting in line for a drink and how she wished she could meet someone while sitting at home in her pajamas. Ironically, she ended up doing just that, after Gianna discovered Match.com, and they both began online dating.

  How could Valerie have forgotten? Forty was a little young to have amnesia, wasn’t it?

  Too young to have amnesia. Too old to have a baby.

  For a brief moment she heard her therapist, Linda: “Now, Gianna, let’s try to avoid that type of black-and-white thinking. Every woman’s life is unique. And age is just a number.”

  But women didn’t typically get amnesia before forty. Linda would have to give her that. Or have babies after forty, as she’d pointed out in their last session. Linda had gotten sort of quiet when she said that, because it was the truth, and she couldn’t argue with the truth. She preached that all the time: “No black-and-white thinking! No arguing with the truth!” Gianna sometimes walked around her house parroting these Linda-isms. It didn’t really help. Maybe because she didn’t really have a problem.

  She caught the eye of a woman at the bar who could have been her identical twin—average height with striking dark features and trendy, stylish clothes—Gianna loved trendy, stylish clothes. She was currently wearing a new dress by one of her favorite brands, Winston White, and had paired it with flats and a bamboo clutch. The woman at the bar was speaking with a man twice her age, who Gianna imagined was feeding her lines as greasy as the gel he’d used to slick back his hair that evening.

  The man whispered something in her ear, and she laughed, even though it probably wasn’t funny. Gianna had been there, so many times. The lines were rarely funny. Now he was likely asking her if she wanted to share a cab back to his place.

  Don’t go home with him! Gianna wished she could somehow subliminally send the woman this message. She’d had a one-night-stand once and decided right after it was not for her. It hadn’t left her brokenhearted or anything—she’d hardly known the charming doctor from New York with devilish good looks who had been in town visiting for a conference, though she did remember having such a lovely conversation with him on the balcony of the rooftop bar where they’d met. So lovely, in fact, that for a moment she’d thought, soul mates? Again, silly. But afterward, she had felt empty and was sort of befuddled that random hookups appealed to so many. “What is the draw,” she’d asked a friend who had them all the time, “about waking up to an empty bed and a torn-open condom wrapper on your pillow?”

  “Look around, Linda!” she would have said, if she were here, thinking maybe this was where they needed to have their next session. “The reason I’m anxious about not getting married is not because of some deep-rooted problem with me; it’s because of the way it is today.”

  Linda had met her husband in the eighties at church, so she didn’t get it. She said she got it, but there was no way she really got it. Gianna sometimes wished she were religious. How easy it would be to meet a nice, sweet guy at church. Or better yet, she wished she’d been dating back in the eighties when men knew what the word “chivalrous” meant. Or at least how to spell it. So many men these days couldn’t spell! She once got a text message from a man she’d met online that read, What kind of restraint do you own? In the age of spell-check. Was he so busy texting other women he couldn’t take the time to proofread his messages to her? Did he not care enough to at least try and put his best foot forward before they met? His profile said he’d gone to UCLA, so she couldn’t blame his intelligence.

  Then again, somehow Val and all of her friends here tonight had found men to marry. So maybe there was something wrong with her. She watched them now from the bar where she was waiting to order a cocktail. She wanted something stronger than champagne. Much stronger. They were flirting with the men surrounding their table.

  Was that what this night was about?

  Gianna recalled something Val had said to her just last week. “Richard’s been a bit of a bore, lately.” Was Val feeling like she needed to spice up her life? The comment had saddened Gianna, as she always hoped for the best for her friends’ marriages—and any marriage for that matter. She was a hopeless romantic to her core. And possibly to a fault, according to Linda. But she couldn’t say it surprised her. Richard had always bored her. Gianna made sure she had a coffee before going out with the two of them. “Two shots of espresso, please!” she was sure to tell Jojo, her barista at Hayden’s.

  She would have never married Richard. Or any of the men her best friends had settled down with, for that matter. Except for maybe Eric, who was married to her pastry chef, Jill. Gianna found him hilarious, though Jill was always telling him he was taking it “too far.” His jokes were a bit raunchy at times, but Gianna still found them amusing. Though, if she lived with him, she could see how they might get old . . .

  She could hear her mother now telling her, “You’re too picky!” Gianna tried to remember how her mom spent her afternoons before she used them to call Gianna up and yell at her for being “too picky.” She meant well. Gianna knew she meant well. But Gianna was an only child, and Erika Hayden was desperate for grandbabies.

  For years, Gianna had argued with her mom. She just hadn’t met a stand-up guy. Once she met a stand-up guy, she’d marry him. But Peter was a stand-up guy. And there she sat on Linda’s blue overstuffed couch every week saying, “I’m not sure if he’s The One.”

  “Let me guess, an apple martini?” She was being checked out by a gentleman in flannel with a five o’clock shadow who might have been a nice guy. Gianna didn’t think all men at bars were bad guys. She wasn’t a total pessimist.

  She used to drink apple martinis—sucked them down, actually, to quiet that little voice in her head that was always screaming: “I hate this scene! I hate this scene!” But she couldn’t even handle apple-flavored candies anymore. She wondered if she might have a bit of apple martini PTSD. She would have to ask Linda if that was a thing.

  Her phone vibrated in her purse.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, fumbling for it in front of the man who seemed to be hitting on her. “My boyfriend.”

  She stepped aside, happy to take the call. She loved when she was happy to take Peter’s calls. It wasn’t always the case, which was a bit of a problem.

  “Please say you’re in a car outside, ready to whisk me out of here,” she said, covering her ear with her hand to stifle the noise.

  “Actually, I’m currently cheating on you,” he said. “I watched the next episode of Lost without you. I’m sorry! I just had to find out if Desmond kept pushing the button!”

  Gianna laughed. A real laugh. Peter was genuinely funny.

  She loved that the only form of cheating she’d ever have to worry about with him was that he might watch an episode of a TV series they’d been binge-watching together without her.

  “Do you want to come over after?” he continued. “I know it’s a Thursday, but . . . ”

  Gianna had implemented this rule—that they didn’t spend the night t
ogether on Tuesdays or Thursdays—in the early stages of their relationship. Initially, it had been an attempt to try and maintain her independence in case things went south, but she still insisted they follow it, even now, six months into the relationship, because . . . well . . . she simply didn’t have the desire to see him every day.

  “Because you’re independent.” Linda had offered, as a possible explanation.

  Yes, Gianna thought, as she accepted his invitation. Maybe that was all it was.

  —

  TWO COCKTAILS AND two hours later, and Gianna was in an Uber, en route to Peter’s condo in the Pearl District. Her ears were ringing from the bar’s oh-so-loud music. Why so loud?! But at least she’d gotten a quiet Uber driver. So many liked to yap-yap-yap the whole time they drove. Gianna yapped-yapped-yapped all day. It was nice to just be sometimes. She relaxed her head against the headrest and thought of Val. Val seemed as if she’d had a good time.

  “We must do it again soon!” she’d said, as she hugged Gianna and the rest of the partygoers out on the curb.

  “Yes!” chimed in the others. “That was a ball!”

  Maybe Gianna would find the scene fun, too, once she had a husband. Once there was no longer a fear in the back of her mind that she might have to one day go back out there and date again. For her, the night had done nothing other than reinforce that fear, if she and Peter ever broke up.

  She thought of him now as her driver fiddled with the stereo.

  “Any requests?” he asked.

  “Whatever you want is fine,” she said, not because she didn’t have a preference, but because she didn’t want to open up a line of communication. Thankfully, he settled on exactly a song she would have chosen, “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. Soothing. Feel-good lyrics.

  She imagined Peter listening to something similar on his surround-sound speakers, the lyrics echoing off his vaulted ceilings. Odds were high he was humming along as he stood over his kitchen sink peeling an orange, his nightly ritual before bed. Odds were also high he still had on his lucky gray collared shirt and navy trousers that he’d been wearing that morning. He’d had an appointment that evening with potential clients looking for a real estate agent to list their five-bedroom Willamette River waterfront home.