“Too good to be true? What do you think you’ve gotten yourself into?” he laughed. “I didn’t read the ad myself, but I figured they must have put quite a spin on things to get any applicants at all.”
As far as I knew, I had taken a job as the new manager of a beach side café. There was a building attached to the back which would allow me to live on site for free and there had been all sorts of information about the finances of the place, the popularity with the locals and its desirable location for passing trade. Well, passing trade for the tourists that were already on the island, obviously that was a limited crowd.
Back in Virginia I had owned two cafes and had been expanding slowly. My dreams had been enormous but the reality of it all was much more difficult. There were so many setbacks, issues with suppliers and extortionate costs associated with owning the buildings that I wanted to make a fresh start.
When things went South with Justin I just wanted to get out of there.
I had dived down a rabbit hole of looking for obscure locations to start again, somehow I had come across an ad for a café that was for sale on a distant island and it sounded perfect. ‘The Sand Witch’ was available for a reasonable price and I already had a vague awareness of the island from my last visit. What could go wrong?
“Are you saying the café is a disaster?” I asked. Wes smirked as he navigated the bus around a corner which allowed terrifying cliff side views to open up to my left. Seagulls swarmed the skies and screeched as the bus hummed quietly along the road. The occasional house was passing us on the right and then they got closer together as we began to reach a business district. We must be getting close.
“Not at all, The Sand Witch is the place to be, man!” Wes replied. “You’re planning to keep some of the staff on, right? Those folks are the heart of that place, you’d be hard pressed to find replacements that could keep the same quality that people are used to.”
“I haven’t thought about it much. I tried to call once or twice but the connection was always so bad that I could barely hear the answers to my questions,” I sighed. Of course, I had wanted to speak to the staff, but I could only communicate via email and that lacked the personal touch.
“Where are you staying?” Wes asked. “I can recommend a hotel for the night if you haven’t made arrangements yet.”
“I was planning to stay in the house at the back of the café,” I answered. I watched the skin on Wes’s arms prickle like goose flesh, had he suffered from a sudden chill, or was it in response to something I said?
“There’s a good reason that the house at the back is empty...” he muttered to himself. I felt like he had spoken out loud but not with the intention of me hearing him. It had been a long day of travelling and stressing that I was going to get here and immediately get lost. I just wanted to relish in the fact that I had made a bold decision and followed through with it, I didn’t need a superstitious bus driver trampling on my good mood.
The water was so blue from up here and as the bus followed the road down to the seaside town, I found that the colors grew more vivid. It was as if nature could really thrive in a way that it couldn’t in the concrete nightmare of my last hometown. Ocean air and greenery are supposed to be good for your health, or so a cheap women’s magazine once told me.
Wes and I had travelled in silence for several minutes and I didn’t want to be the first one to break, even though I clearly had a million questions.
“Are you excited to meet up with some family? They must be stoked to have you moving to the main island,” Wes finally said.
“Oh, I don’t have any family here, it’s just me,” I smiled. I didn’t have family anywhere, not anymore. I was the string-less puppet, free to uproot my life and move wherever caught my eye. There was a small voice in my head saying the things I didn’t want to hear, like, ‘you’ve made a reckless decision as a result of a bad breakup’, and, ‘you did this to get his attention.’ I didn’t like that voice. “What do you mean main island?”
“You really are from another world aren’t you,” Wes chuckled. “Hallow Haven is the main island, but there are islands around this one where the locals live. They commute here to work and then get back on the boats to head home. A few people swim back to their islands, any excuse to get a dip in that blue water!”
“Oh yeah, I think someone mentioned that they rowed to work in an email to me,” I said. I must be tired. It had been such a long time since my one prior visit that everything felt brand new. Had I been foolish to move my life here without doing some research first? “Where do you live?”
“I’m over on Port Wayvern. It’s not the biggest or the smallest of the extra islands around the Hallow Haven. We have our own bakery over there so we’re one up on Tivercana. Stupid place to live if you ask me.” I had only just met Wes and hadn’t had the time to learn much about him, but still felt surprised by his outburst.
“…I should get myself a map,” I smiled. I wanted to defuse the tension, but it seemed Wes had his own issues with Tivercana, and I wasn’t going to be able to address them before it was time to disembark. I could see the sand of the beach merging with the end
