Healed by My Second Chance

Chapter 18 — Melody

Jen's first chemotherapy appointment lasted four hours. We dropped the twins off at Grace's on the way, and I spent most of that time alone in the waiting room with three years' worth of business ledgers. They were the only thing Jen had given me before the nurse called her back.

"Start there," she'd said, dropping the heavy stack into my lap as if it weighed nothing. "You'll learn faster from real numbers than you will from listening to me lecture."

At first, the pages were little more than columns of figures in Jen's cramped handwriting. Some had been crossed out and rewritten. The notes in the margins read like a private language I hadn't learned yet.

Feldman's again. Ask about the invoice. Raise coffee 10 cents—nobody will notice. Don't order from Denny anymore. Three late deliveries.

By the second hour, the numbers had begun to form a picture. Costs on one side, revenue on the other, and the narrow margin between them that had kept a small business barely afloat year after year. Fern's had survived on Jen's stubbornness and a loyal handful of regulars, with very little room for anything to go wrong.

In the oldest ledger, beside an entry from three years earlier, I found the name of another produce supplier with a phone number and a question mark. Jen had never followed up on it.

I called from the waiting room.

The supplier was two towns over, and their current quote came in fifteen percent below what we were paying. I checked the calculation twice. Over a year, the savings would cover almost two months of rent.

I stared at the total for a long time, wondering how many more opportunities were buried in twenty-two years of handwritten notes that nobody had ever gone back to examine.

When Jen finally came out, she was pale and unsteady but still on her feet, waving away the wheelchair a nurse kept trying to offer her. I nearly forgot about the supplier. Then the same instinct that had made me reorganize her storage room without permission—the one Jen said I'd inherited from my mother—made me speak before I could second-guess myself.

"You're overpaying Feldman's by fifteen percent," I said before I'd even settled her into the car. "There's another supplier two towns over. I called them from the waiting room. Same order, better price, and they can start whenever we're ready."

Jen blinked at me, exhausted but faintly amused. "You did homework in a hospital waiting room."

"I had four hours and an old ledger. It was that or lose my mind."

"Fair enough." She leaned her head against the seat and closed her eyes. Her voice had the drained, distant quality I would soon learn came with chemo, a kind of tiredness sleep couldn't fix. "Switch, then. If you're right, switch."

"Just like that?"

"You checked the numbers. I trust the numbers." She smiled faintly. "And I trust you. God knows why, but I do."

I drove us home. For the first time since I'd arrived, Jen handed me the keys without an argument. It was another small sign that her body was setting the limits now, whether she liked it or not.

Jen didn't trust easily, and I felt the weight of what she'd said all the way home. Neither of us spoke much.

Chemo gave her weeks a pattern I learned quickly and hated just as fast. On good days, she moved through the café like her old self, sharp-tongued and impatient with anyone who held up the line at the register. On bad days, she had to stop twice on the stairs. Food tasted like ash, and she pushed away half-finished plates. Sometimes I found her sitting in the back room with her eyes closed, resting until she had enough strength to face the customers again.

Soon I could tell what kind of day it would be before she said a word. I watched the set of her shoulders as she came downstairs and the speed of her steps across the kitchen, then rearranged the day's work around whatever she could manage.

I took on more each week. Jen didn't have to ask; the work was there, and someone had to do it. I learned the suppliers and the margins, which vendors would negotiate and which ones wouldn't, and how to spot a bad month in the figures three weeks before it arrived.

After switching the produce supplier, I found two more expenses we could cut. Our coffee distributor was charging city prices to a café in a town that had never questioned the bill. Jen had also renewed the same insurance policy automatically for ten years without once shopping around for a better rate.

She never tried to hide how proud she was, though every improvement carried the same unspoken reminder: there was a reason I needed to learn this quickly.

"You're better at this than I ever was," she told me one evening as she watched me close out the register in half the time it used to take her. "I ran this place on instinct and stubbornness for twenty-two years. You're running it on instinct, stubbornness, and actual math. That's a dangerous combination, Melody Moon."

"I had a good teacher."

"You had a sick woman with a ledger and no better options." She tried to make it sound like a joke. Neither of us laughed. "Don't give me credit for something that was already in you."

I didn't argue. If she needed to believe that, I let her.

That night, after closing and after the twins were finally asleep, I sat at the kitchen table with the ledger open in front of me and began sketching out something Jen hadn't asked for and didn't know about yet.

A second location.

There was nothing solid on the page, only possibilities scribbled in the margins the way Jen had recorded her own private shorthand for two decades. Maybe somewhere on a busier corner of town, with a younger crowd willing to pay a little more for the same coffee, the same eggs, and the same warmth that had saved my life when I'd walked through the door of Fern's with nowhere else to go.

A second café wasn't an enormous dream, but it was more than I'd ever allowed myself to plan for. The fact that I could see it happening made me nervous in a way I didn't mind.