TUESDAY TALES - SNIPPET FROM "THE RENOVATED HEART"

Here is a snippet from my WIP, soon to be subbed.

 Last week we learned that Kit had been dumped by her husband of twelve years. She has come to Willow Falls where her daughter is in boarding school to break the news of their divorce. After a rough day with her daughter, Kit goes out to her first restaurant dinner alone. This is a picture of the center of downtown Willow Falls.

She had always been a devoted wife and mother, putting Johnny and Zoe before herself; She liked being a wife and mother, she was good at it and had tried to talk Johnny into having another child. But he refused. Now she had no one to care for, to cook for, and to plan for…no one to miss her.  She didn’t know where she belonged. She couldn't have felt worse if Johnny had cheated on her. Kit shivered, not due to a cold breeze, it was August, but because she had never felt such gut-wrenching loneliness in her life. The silence surrounding her was deafening. She had no place to go and no one to turn to, except her friend, Sarah. Hunger gripped her belly so she walked into town and went to Bon Appetit, the only restaurant she knew.

****

Don Rosen, the co-owner of Bon Appetit with his wife, Sunny, was tending bar when Kit arrived. (Bon Appetit is on the first floor of this brick building on the right.)

“Good evening. Looking for a table?” he asked Kit.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Just one,” she said, cringing inside, unable to look him in the eye.

“We have a big group here tonight, so we’re packed. How about sitting at the bar? We serve dinner there, too and I can seat you here right away,” he said, motioning to one of two empty chairs. Kit nodded at him and sat down. She pulled out a small pad and pen. Time to make a what-to-do-with-my-life list.

“What are you drinking?”

“A Cosmopolitan?” she asked.

“Coming right up,” Don said.

Kit sat with her pen poised, but she couldn’t think of anything. How do you make a list for putting your life back together? There were so many things she had to do; Kit stared at the empty page, unable to organize the mess that was her life into a neat to-do list. She felt paralyzed. She took a sip of her Cosmo and put the paper and pen down on the bar.

“Writer’s block?”

She looked to her left and directly into a pair of warm brown eyes looking at her with an amused air. There was a man sitting next to her in the previously empty seat. She didn’t even see him sit down. Kit looked at him but couldn’t find her voice. He was gorgeous with dark brown hair to match his dark eyes, broad shoulders and a wry grin turning up one corner of his sensuous mouth. He wore a white long sleeve shirt open at the neck that emphasized the darkness of his hair and eyes and a blue striped tie, loosened to indicate the end of his work day.

“Is he annoying you?” Don asked her, his eyes twinkling, “Because if he is, I can have him thrown out of here in two seconds. He comes in here every day hitting on pretty, single women and I have to shoo him out of here.”

She gave Don a quizzical look, as if she didn’t understand he was kidding.

 

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