Healed by My Second Chance

Chapter 12 — Melody

The café was called Fern’s, after a woman who had died before I was born. Jen had owned the place for twenty-two years and never bothered changing the sign.

“Bad luck to rename a place that already has customers used to it,” she told me on my first morning.

She tied an apron around my waist. It was three sizes too large, so she knotted the straps twice before it stayed in place.

Fern’s wasn’t much to look at. It had six tables, a counter with three stools, and a menu that apparently hadn’t changed since before I was born either, judging by the laminate peeling away at the corners.

But it was warm.

It smelled like bacon grease and burnt coffee instead of floral air pumped through vents, and no one who walked through the door looked at me as though I were something they had stepped in.

A bell above the door rang slightly off-key. A crack ran through the front window, patched with clear tape years ago and never properly repaired. In one corner stood a jukebox that Jen said had stopped working sometime before she took over the café and that no one had ever had the heart to throw away.

Fern’s felt less like a business than someone’s living room that had accidentally started selling coffee.

I learned its rhythm quickly, faster than I expected.

The café opened at six thirty. The same four regulars arrived each morning and ordered the same meals, often before I had finished pouring their coffee.

The lunch rush wasn’t really a rush. It was a steady trickle of truck drivers and the two women who worked at the insurance office down the block.

We closed by seven most nights and earlier on Sundays.

“You’re quicker than the last girl,” Jen said at the end of my first week.

She watched me clear a four-top in under a minute while she counted the register.

“The last girl took ten minutes to figure out which fork went where.”

“There’s only one fork on the menu.”

“Exactly my point.”

I didn’t tell her that counting silverware felt like nothing after months of double shifts in a kitchen four times the size of Fern’s.

There were many things I didn’t tell her that first week.

By Wednesday, my back had stopped aching because this kind of exhaustion was different from what I had left behind. Kinder.

I sometimes caught myself humming while I wiped down the tables, something I hadn’t done in longer than I wanted to admit.

On some mornings, I forgot to think about Kane for several minutes at a time.

The scars didn’t forget, even when I did.

I checked them in the bathroom mirror every night, a habit I couldn’t seem to break. The two lesser marks faded a little more each week, softening from raw red to something closer to pale pink.

The first remained as vivid as it had been on the day it appeared.

I had stopped expecting it to change. Instead, I had begun living around it, the way you learned to live around anything permanent enough that you eventually stopped asking why.

Some nights, I traced its edge with one finger, half convinced that I could still feel the exact shape of the words that had put it there.

By the second week, I had rearranged the storage room without asking.

The flour was stored behind the canned tomatoes, and no one could reach either without undertaking a small excavation project first.

Jen said nothing when she noticed. She merely raised an eyebrow and continued working.

By the third week, I had suggested moving the register closer to the door so the morning regulars wouldn’t have to cross the entire dining room while still wearing their coats.

Jen moved it that same afternoon.

She didn’t argue or question whether I had any business making suggestions after only two weeks on the job.

“You’ve got an eye for this,” she said.

It wasn’t quite a compliment. It sounded more like an observation she was storing away for later.

“I just hate watching people waste steps.”

“That’s what most good business instincts amount to once you strip away the fancy language people use for them.”

Jen wiped her hands on her apron and studied me for a moment longer than the comment seemed to require.

“Your mother had that too. Not for business—she never had a head for numbers, God love her—but for people. She knew what they needed before they asked.”

It was the first time Jen had mentioned my mother without my asking.

I held perfectly still, afraid that any movement might make her stop.

“She used to reorganize my kitchen every time she visited,” Jen continued.

A small smile pulled at one corner of her mouth, the kind that came from a good memory rather than a painful one.

“Drove me half out of my mind. I’d spend a week putting everything back where I could find it, and she’d come by again eight months later and do it all over. Never asked permission. Never seemed to think she needed it.”

“That sounds like a fight waiting to happen.”

“You’d think.”

Jen shook her head, still smiling.

“But somehow it never was. She had a way of making you grateful for the interference before you’d even finished being annoyed by it.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You were young. She didn’t visit much after you were born. Your father didn’t care for it—having her out here without him.”

Jen’s mouth tightened for a second before she waved the thought away.

“That’s a story for another day, though. You’ve got tables to bus.”

I did.

I returned to work, but I carried the conversation with me for the rest of the shift. I turned it over the way I used to turn over four stupid words spoken by a man who had never deserved the importance I gave them.

This felt different.

This felt like something worth keeping.

That night, I lay in the basement room with my hand resting over the curve that had already begun to show.

It was happening faster than I expected, at least according to everything I had ever heard about human pregnancies. Jen said wolf pregnancies progressed more quickly and that this was probably normal, although she admitted that she knew no more about the details than I did.

I thought about my mother reorganizing a kitchen that wasn’t hers and driving her sister half out of her mind through nothing more than restlessness and care.

I wondered whether that was where it came from—whatever part of me couldn’t leave a badly placed stack of cans alone, the part that saw a slow morning rush and immediately wanted to improve it.

I wondered what else had passed down to me without my noticing, folded quietly beneath the parts of myself I actually recognized.

I fell asleep wondering what else I didn’t know about my mother.

When I woke, I was already making a mental list of everything else that needed to be moved in the kitchen: the coffee filters stacked incorrectly, the register drawer that stuck unless you jiggled it just right, and a dozen small inefficiencies no one but me seemed to notice or mind.