Love And Coffee: A Cup Of Grace Romance Series Book 1 (4 page)

CHAPTER SIX

              So there I was, at Java Juice sitting across the table from Matt, and staring into his eyes.  Did I tell you I could do that all day and never get tired of it?  Well I can.  I’m quite certain of it.  I know, I know, I was starting to build something up in my mind before I even had any indication at all from him that he was interested.  But I mean, why wouldn’t he be interested?  I was cute.  In a very serious, scholarly sort of way.  But lots of guys loved that.  Not any I had met in the past six months, but that’s beside the point.  Of course, Kathryn and Jillian were also sitting at the table, so it wasn’t like it was a date or anything.  At least not yet.

              “Did Tara tell you?” Jillian said excitedly to Matt.

              “Tell me what?” he asked, stirring his coffee.  Today he had chosen a double shot espresso.  An astute choice.  Not one I would have made, of course, I liked my coffee lighter and sweeter.  Like me.

              “About our new adventure.  I can’t believe you didn’t tell him!” she said, looking at me.

              “We’ve decided to do it,” I said proudly.

              “And what would
it
be?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

              “Become our own bosses.”

He looked at me curiously.

“Become proprietors of our own coffee shop.”

“Oh,” he said.  Only he kind of drew the word out.  Like he wasn’t quite sure what his reaction should be.

“Well, it’s a great idea, right?”  I said.  “I mean, no more fear of more layoffs.   Ever.”

“That’s true,” he said slowly.  “Have you ever done anything like this before?”

“Well, no.  We all pretty much started at The Daily News fresh out of college.  Although Jillian did sell stuff on eBay for a while before she got hired on,” I said, hoping it sounded more important than it was.  She had had some old DVDs, CDs, and books she wanted to unload for a few dollars after moving out of our dorm room.

“I see,” was all he said and he went back to stirring his coffee with the little plastic stir stick thingy.  We would need to buy plenty of those for our shop.

“Well, it’s a new adventure for all of us.  It will be fun!” I said enthusiastically.

“Yeah, and with my excellent selling abilities that I learned from selling on eBay, we are going to be rich!” Jillian said, taking a sip of her coffee.

“Not rich, but we will do okay.  I think,” I said, looking down at my mocha.  Why did I suddenly feel like I was making a mistake?

“Well, did you write up a business plan?” he asked. 

Business plan?  I had heard of those.  But I had never seen one.  What might they entail?

“What’s a business plan?” Jillian asked. 

Great Jillian.  Don’t give it away that we have no clue what we’re doing.  But she was.

“Yes, I’ve been working on one.  We need one to get business financing,” Kathryn said with a whole lot of confidence that I sure didn’t feel.  I looked up and narrowed my eyes at her.  It wasn’t like her to lie, so she must have been up to something without telling me.

“We do?” I asked after a few seconds.  She nodded at me.  “I mean, yes, of course we do.” 

“Sounds like you have everything covered then.  I wish you well on it.  It must be nice to have a direction to go in,” he said wistfully.

“Well, you could help if you wanted to,” I said hastily.  Kathryn eyed me and I added, “I mean, we’ll surely need someone to help with the building, you know, painting and such.  Have you painted much?”

“I have painted some.  My parent’s decided to remodel their house a couple of summers ago and I helped out quite a bit.”  He suddenly looked a little happier.

“Well then, maybe you could help us out when the time comes?” I asked.  We would need the muscle and it gave me an excuse to have him around.   

He smiled at the idea.  “Sure, I could always lend a hand.  I mean, it’s not like I have anything else going on.”

He had seemed a little bit down before I had mentioned the painting and I felt badly for him.  At that moment I wanted to ask him to be partners, but I knew Kathryn would have a fit.  Besides, we really didn’t know him that well.  Even though we had worked at the same company, we’d had very little interaction with him at all.  He could be insane or could run off with our startup money.  Not that he had shown any indication of being insane, of course.  Or a thief.  Perhaps we could start dating so that I could get to know him better and determine his trustworthiness. Hmmm…research.

“I’m going to be the shop’s official baker,” Jillian suddenly announced.

“Oh you are?  And what do you like to bake?” Matt asked with interest.

“Everything!  I can make a berry scone that will make you cry.  Not to mention any kind of cake or cupcakes or cookies,” she said smiling.  “Actually, I have a recipe for sugar cookies that my great grandmother gave me and no one bakes sugar cookies like I do.  Well other than my great grandmother.  But she’s dead.”

“Is that right?” Matt asked, taking a drink of his espresso.

“Yes it is.  I like to make them heart shaped because when you eat them in a heart shape, it brings you good luck in love,” she said oh so very seriously.

Matt chuckled.  “It does, does it?  Well maybe you had better bake me up a batch and quick.  I could use some luck in the love department.”

Oh hold on.  This sounded very much like flirting.  While it was true I hadn’t exactly staked my claim on him with the girls, it seemed like it should have been obvious that I had an interest in him.  And wait, did he just admit to being single?  Like completely single with no one lurking in the shadows? 

“Well I am going to do just that.  Tonight.  As soon as I can figure out where I put all my baking supplies.  I’m sure they are in the apartment somewhere,” she said, reaching across the table for the cocoa powder.  She removed the lid from her cup and sprinkled generously.

I cleared my throat.  “Oh Jillian, you don’t need to go through that kind of trouble.  I’m sure we can get Matt a sugar cookie here.”

“Yes, but they won’t be heart shaped,” Matt said.  “And it sounds like the heart shape is very important to my future love life.”  This sounded serious.  He was getting very flirty, and it wasn’t with me.

Jillian giggled.  “Nope, regular shaped cookies won’t do anything for your love life.”

I kicked her under the table.  “Ouch!” she said.   Then I stared deeply into her eyes, willing her to understand that she needed to back off of Matt.  Okay, yes, I was behaving very junior highish, but I just felt so strongly about him.  He might be ‘The One’.  Sure, I had thought that about the last three guys I had dated, but I had a six month dry spell going on that I needed to hydrate and quick.

“Are you okay?” Matt asked.

Jillian looked away from me slowly and answered, “Yes, I just got a Charlie horse in my foot.”

Good girl.

Kathryn was eyeing me as she lifted her cup to drink.  I could see a smirk on her lips from behind the cup and I looked away.  Yeah, so I was obvious.  But not to Matt, because he didn’t seem to notice a thing.  Hhmmff.  Men. 

I sighed.  “I guess it’s time we got back to moving.”

We all squeezed into Matt’s 1989 Ford Bronco and headed back to the apartment.  The Bronco was a novelty of sorts.  It sounded and felt ancient.  And it was.  But there was something very masculine about it, too.  The seat belts were stiff with age and I wondered if they would still do their job if they had to.  I was riding shotgun and I hung on to the little strap above the door, just in case. 

“Don’t trust my driving?” Matt asked, glancing at my hand on the strap. 

“Uh, no, I was just stretching my arm,” I said and put it down by my side.

“That’s okay.  My feelings aren’t hurt.  Much,” he said with a grin.

Oh Matt, you
are
a flirt.  “Well, in that case,” I said and grabbed the strap again.  I tried not to smile, but I wasn’t very successful.

CHAPTER SEVEN

              I could not believe the information that’s needed to write a business proposal.  I mean, I get it.  We needed the proposal in order to get a loan.  But there was an
executive summary
we needed to write.  Um what?  It’s a coffee shop.  We intend to make money at it.  What else is there?  But no, Kathryn said we needed specifics expressed in professional terms.  Okay, time to put my
professional
hat back on.  It had been a while since I had worn it.  With the few free days I had from acting professional, I was kind of loving casual and carefree.

              “There’s a
local market
and
competitive landscape summary
,” Kathryn said, flipping through the documents she had printed from an online site. 

“Now that one sounds scary,” I said.

  Quite frankly, there were a lot of coffee shops around.  I kept waffling between, ‘oh, we can do this, we can be so successful’ and ‘oh no, there’s too much competition, we are going to fail and lose all of our money.’  I’ll be honest and say that failure looms over my head every time I go to sleep.   Maybe I should work on positive thinking.  Sure, I was praying, and that does help, but it’s still scary.

“We have to think these things through carefully,” Kathryn said.

              Then they wanted to know about our management team and how we were going to market the business.  Wow.  We were flying by the seat of our pants on the marketing thing.  We could take out some ads in the local paper.  You know, the one that fired us.  Or we could do flyers.  That would be more within our budget.  And I had 456 friends on Facebook.  If just half of them came in every day and bought a coffee, I think we’d do okay.  Yeah, okay, I’m reaching a little bit on that one.

              After working our way through the forms and documents, we were finally sitting in the lobby of your local friendly neighborhood bank, waiting to meet with a loan manager.  It took us less than forty-eight hours to put the business proposal together and download the loan application and fill it out.  It felt too…rushed.  I suddenly felt a little like I was suffocating.  But Kathryn and Jillian were so confident.  And excited.  I mean, I was excited too, don’t get me wrong.  But this was a big step.  A huge step.  And we were moving along at a pretty quick pace.

              “Hello ladies,” a nice middle-aged lady with hair graying at the temples said as she approached us and held her hand out to shake.  “I’m Ann Green, your loan officer.”  She smiled brightly and I liked her instantly.

              She pulled up an extra chair and we all took seats in front of her desk.  “Now then, what have we got here,” she said as she began looking over the documents that Kathryn handed her. “Hmm.”

              I didn’t like the sound of that.

              “Is there something wrong?”  Kathryn asked, glancing at me.  I shrugged my shoulders.

              “Tell me, ladies, what kind of business experience do you have?” she asked, taking her purple rimmed glasses from her face and laying them in front of her on the desk.

              “Well, we all worked at The Daily News up until a few weeks ago,” I said.

              “And that’s a business,” Jillian said.

              My eyes got big when she said that. Mrs. Ann Green was going to think we were idiots.

              “Yes, but what about experience in running a business?  Have you owned another small business before?” She asked, laying the papers down beside the glasses on her desk.

              “We all have college degrees,” Kathryn said.  “We are all educated and we understand what it means to work in a professional manner.” 

              I kind of cringed at that.  I could tell that we were not impressing Mrs. Green.  No, not even a little bit.  I smiled bigger, hoping that would somehow help things.

              She smiled back, but it was kind of a tight-lipped smile.  One of those, ‘I’m tolerating you as best I can’ smiles.  “Ladies, I am going to submit your loan application to the board for approval.  But let me be frank with you.  You don’t have much experience and from the looks of it, no collateral.  Is that right?  You have no collateral?”

              I nodded.  What had we been thinking?  We were not getting this loan.  We just weren’t.  I could feel my cheeks get a little pink.  We should have stayed home and taken a nap or something.  Anything.

              “I’ll let you know,” she said.

              We stood up, shook hands, and took the walk of shame across the bank lobby.  I half expected the loan manger to make an announcement of our loan rejection as we slunk out, our tails between our legs. 

              Once inside my car, Kathryn said, “Well, that went well.”

              I turned to her.  “Were you in the same meeting that I was in?”

              “What?  She’s going to submit the application to the loan board.  That’s what we wanted.”

              “Yes, but didn’t you see the way she looked over the paperwork?  We are not getting that loan,” I said and started the car.

              “You don’t know that,” she said indignantly.

              “I think I do,” I said pulling away form the curb.  “We just made fools of ourselves.  We should have done more research and prepared better.”

              “We did not make fools of ourselves, Tara!  We are going to get the loan.  I just know it!”  She said, trying to sound enthusiastic.  She could say what she wanted.  She did not feel the enthusiasm that she was trying to exude.  I just knew she didn’t.

              “Now you two, let’s all try to get along,” Jillian said from the back seat.  “Besides, when one door closes, another opens.  I’ve been praying and God will make a way.”

              I sighed and eased onto the freeway.  Jillian, at least, was showing true enthusiasm.  She always did.  Kathryn leaned against her car door and looked out the window.  I suddenly felt bad for snapping at her.  “I’m sorry,” I said.

              “Me too,” she said sullenly without looking at me. 

              “Besides, if we don’t get the loan, we can always borrow from our 401K’s,” Jillian said.

              Kathryn and I glanced at each other.  It was an idea.  But a really risky one.  I mean, I believed in our plan.  But what if we failed?  All that money we had been putting away for our future would be gone.

              “Well, there are three of us to contribute to the business.  It’s not like just one of us would be risking it all,” Kathryn said.

              “And if we’re all investing the same amount, it would make us all work really hard to make this thing succeed,” I said.  I sighed and we rode home in silence, each thinking her respective thoughts.

              At the apartment I dropped my bag and splayed across the sofa.  What had I gotten myself into?  Did I really know what I was doing?  I was beginning to have real doubts.  I mean, I had been thinking about this coffee shop off and on for years.  But I sorta had it in the back of my mind that this was something I would do in my mid-forties.  You know, after the kids were grown, I had empty nest syndrome, and had tired of the paper.  And had that cute little Victorian paid for.  I wasn’t letting that one go yet.

              “So?  Is it agreed?  We all borrow from our 401K’s?” Kathryn asked, sitting on the arm chair.

              “Yes, let’s do it!”  Jillian said.  “We don’t even have to leave the apartment to get the money.  We can do it online.”

              “Tara?”  Kathryn asked when I didn’t respond.

              I sighed and reached for my laptop.  “We need to make a real plan.  Not just one thrown together in a hurry for a loan we’ll never get.”

              So we got a notebook and started making notes of what we would need.  I Googled things like business plans, stocking a coffee shop, and where to get equipment.

              “A professional coffee maker is expensive!” I said after Googling them.  “Maybe we could just get a couple of regular coffee pots and make do,” I said.  I wasn’t serious about it of course.  We were planning on having lots of customers and that would take a lot of coffee pots if we just bought regular ones.

              “I think I should start practicing making pastries,” Jillian said and jumped up from her place on the floor.  She trotted into the kitchen and began opening cupboards, and closing them.  “How does pumpkin bread sound?” she called after a couple minutes of searching. 

              “Sounds good to me,” I said and my stomach growled in anticipation.  Jillian was the best baker around.  If it weren’t for her, I would never have packed on the freshman fifteen in college.  It had been heck getting them off, and I was suddenly worried I might find a business owner’s thirty now that I was going to be around her fabulous baked goods on a daily basis again.  I idly wondered if Matt liked curvy girls.

              “All right, let’s get this list going,” Kathryn said.  We will need cups, spoons, stir sticks, sugar and creamer.  Wow, tons of stuff.”  She looked at me with a light in her eyes.  “I’m getting excited about this.  Aren’t you?” 

              “Yeah, me too.”  I did not answer with her excitement and she looked at me again.

              “What’s wrong?”

              “I don’t know,” I said, sitting up on the couch and putting my laptop on the coffee table.  “It’s just that there are so many coffee shops around here.  We need something to make us stand out.  But I don’t exactly know what.”

              “Yeah, you’re right about that.  And what are we going to call it?”

              “Oh I know!  Jillian’s delicacies!”  Jillian called from the kitchen.  I heard the oven door close and I knew we would be munching down on pumpkin bread within the hour.

              “Yes, but that name doesn’t exactly tell people that we are a coffee shop,” Kathryn called back to her.

              Jillian harrumphed and headed back to the living room.

              “I want something different.  At least something different than the shops around us,” I said, trying to force an idea from my brain.

              The doorbell rang and I jumped up to get it.  I was delighted to see Matt standing there.  He smiled at me.

              “Hello,” he said.  “I picked up your newspaper for you,” he said and grinned.  It was The Daily News.

              “Great,” I said, taking it from him and tossing it over my shoulder.  “I doubt there’s anything I want to read in there,” I said.  “You want to come in?  Jillian put some pumpkin bread into the oven.”

              “Sounds good,” he said and followed me back inside.  “So, any progress on the coffee shop?”

              “Not exactly.  We went to the bank to see about getting a small business loan.  And it doesn’t really look very promising,” I said.

              “We don’t know that for sure,” Kathryn said, and then looked at me.  “But yeah, we probably won’t get it.”

              “It’s all right, we’ll figure it out,” Jillian said.

              I smiled at Matt.  “We’re sitting here trying to figure out an angle.  Something that will make our coffee shop really stand out.  We just aren’t sure what it should be.”

              He plopped down in a side chair.  “Well, think about something you all have in common.  Or something you all really enjoy, or how you met.”

              “We met in college.  We shared a dorm room,” Kathryn said.

              “That’s it, we could give the coffee shop a college atmosphere and cater to the younger crowd,” I said.  But as soon as I said it, it didn’t seem like that great of an idea.

              “Yeah, that’s not bad,” Jillian said.  “College kids always have their parent’s money to spend on frivolous things.”

              “We could get pennants to hang on the walls,” Kathryn said.   “And maybe a stuffed school mascot or two.”

              “You could make it retro college themed, and have a juke box and records on the wall,” Matt said.

              “Oh I like that idea,” Kathryn said.  “I bet we could find lots of cool black and white college themed pictures to frame and hang on the walls.”

              “Yeah, and we could have those old yellow Peechee folders on the wall,” Jillian said.

              I listened to their ideas, my own mind spinning.  And all of a sudden I knew what it should be.  “Hey guys, the college thing is great.  It really is.  But what about a Christian themed coffee shop?  You know?  Maybe people would want to do Bible studies there and hang out and buy coffee and pastries.  We could call it something like, Cup of Grace.”

              They all looked at me without saying a word for a minute.  I could feel my face turn pink.  I had missed it.  Was it that dumb of an idea?

              “That’s an awesome idea,” Matt finally said.

              Kathryn nodded her head.

              “I love it,” Jillian said, clapping her hands.