Darlene Gardner - Twice the Chance

“Be the best you can be, huh?” Matt said, avoiding his brother’s question. “Seems to me I’ve heard that on a commercial.”

Danny laughed and told him about a senior on the football team who was applying to West Point. By the time Matt paid the bill, his brother had moved on to the subject of the Faircrest High athletic director position.

“So the job’s not yours yet?” Danny asked.

“That’s what interim means,” Matt teased. “This is kind of like a tryout.”

Danny stood, lanky in his maroon Faircrest High football T-shirt and the baggy black athletic shorts that reached almost to his knees. “You’re a lock, man. Things always go your way.”

“They go my way for a reason,” Matt said when they were outside the restaurant. He’d been a full-time assistant A.D. at Faircrest for six years. It was time he moved on to the top job. “You heard what I said about setting goals. Once I set mine, I go after them hard.”

Matt hadn’t achieved today’s goal of running into Jazz, but she probably wasn’t even employed by Pancake Palace. Unless she had the day off, a possibility he had yet to rule out.

“How about meeting me at the car?” he told Danny. “I’ll be there in a couple minutes.”

Without waiting to see if his brother complied, Matt headed back into the restaurant. He spotted Sadie clearing away the dishes at the table where he’d sat with Danny. The older waitress, who reminded him of his mother, was closer, jotting down an order for a family of four.

Matt intercepted the second waitress beside an empty booth while she was en route to the kitchen. Her name was Helen. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” he said, “but does a woman named Jazz work here?”

Helen’s mouth turned downward at the corners and deep lines formed on her forehead. Up close, she looked nothing like Matt’s mother. “Jazz Lenox is one of our short-order cooks.”

That explained why Jazz hadn’t been waiting tables. “What days does she work?” Matt asked.

“She’s in the kitchen now.” Helen’s eyes narrowed, as though she were making up her mind about something. “I’ll tell her you’re out here.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Matt said, but he was speaking to the waitress’s retreating back.

He breathed in the scent of pancakes and syrup, not sure of his game plan. He was good on the fly, though. When an opportunity presented itself, he could make the most of it.

The interior door leading to the kitchen swung open. A woman emerged with a bandana covering her shoulder-length brown hair. Jazz, looking far different than she had at the park. An apron covered her toned limbs, her forehead was damp and her face flushed from the heat of the kitchen. Yet with her clear gray eyes and the freckles dotting her long nose, she had an appeal Matt couldn’t resist.

“Hey, Jazz,” Matt said. “Sorry to bother you at work. You look busy.”

“I am busy,” she confirmed, then went silent.

“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.” He decided to go with blunt honesty. “I’m wondering that same thing myself.”

Not a great opening but not bad, either, especially because he couldn’t pinpoint why Jazz had made such an impression on him. Unfortunately it didn’t seem as though he’d had the same effect on her.

“Matt Caminetti.” He introduced himself again. “We met at the park. I was with the twins.”

“I remember,” she said.

The same curiosity he’d experienced at the park hit him. Jazz was nothing like the chatty females at the high school. Or any of the women he usually came across, for that matter.

“You were wearing a Pancake Palace T-shirt. That’s how I found you. Not that I was looking exactly.” Matt made a face. “Man, I’m butchering this.”

“Butchering what?” Her voice competed with the hum of conversation in the dining room and the clattering of dishes from the kitchen. She lengthened her vowels like a Southerner but her accent didn’t sound Charlestonian.

“I think I’m asking you out.” He’d checked out her left hand for rings at the park and found none. When she didn’t respond, he checked again. Nope. No ring: wedding, engagement or other. But that didn’t always tell the full story. “Unless you’re dating someone?”

“No,” she said. He wasn’t sure which question she was responding to.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to be getting back to work.” She glanced over her right shoulder toward the kitchen and winced.

“Have you seen a doctor about that shoulder?” Matt asked.

“It’s fine.” She repeated the phrase she’d used at the park, inching backward as she talked. “I really need to go.”

“Of course,” Matt said, taken aback by how eager she was to get away from him. Even so, he felt compelled to ask another question. “So when you said no, that was to the date?”

She nodded. “But thank you very much for asking.”

She disappeared through the swinging kitchen door. He grimaced, feeling as stunned as if the door had hit him in the face. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so summarily dismissed by a woman, if ever.

The people at the nearby tables weren’t paying attention to him. His luck ended there. Danny stood beside the empty hostess stand, his mouth hanging open while he waited for Matt to reach him. “Did you just get shot down?”

Matt frowned at his brother. “Weren’t you supposed to wait in the car?”

Danny ignored the question. “Who was that, anyway?”

“Just some woman.” Matt walked past his brother out of the restaurant and into the sunny August afternoon, where it became glaringly obvious he hadn’t told the truth.

If Jazz Lenox were just another woman, her rejection wouldn’t sting so much and Matt’s goal wouldn’t be to turn her no into a yes.

AN HOUR LATER Jazz slid a plate of chocolate-chip pancakes through the pass-through window, turned back to the griddle and methodically flipped over the apple streusel pancakes arranged in a neat row.

“These are supposed to be cherry, not chocolate chip.” Helen Monroe’s pinched face appeared through the opening in the window. “And where’s the order for table seven? Some of us work for tips, you know.”

“Sorry,” Jazz muttered, grabbing the plate, annoyed at herself for making the mistake. “Table seven’s coming right up, then you’ll have your cherry pancakes.”

“I can only hope,” Helen said before disappearing.

“Don’t be nice to her.” Carl Rodriguez, the other short-order cook, had also done time in prison. He didn’t say much in the course of a shift, but Helen, who had complained to the owner several times about his hiring of ex-cons, was a hot button. “She makes many mistakes.”

Jazz set a couple of plates beside the griddle. “That doesn’t mean I have to.”

“You don’t usually.” In his thirties with dramatic dark hair and eyes, Carl was of medium height with a slender build. He quirked a black eyebrow at her. “You okay?”

Jazz had been fine until Matt Caminetti made his surprise appearance. More than two weeks had passed since she’d met Matt and the twins at Ashley Greens Park. She’d altered her jogging route and schedule, although she’d nearly convinced herself that they couldn’t be her birth children.

Then again, she considered it likely that children were placed for adoption in a different part of the state from where they were born. Jazz had been arrested in Florence and given birth in Columbia.

One thing, however, was certain. If the twins were her biological children, she never wanted them to know they had a mother who’d been locked up.

“I’m kind of tired today.” Misleading, but not a lie. Four nights a week Jazz worked as a telemarketer selling magazine subscriptions. Last night she’d finished at 10:00 p.m., which took a toll considering she hadn’t been sleeping well and her shift at Pancake Palace started at 5:30 a.m. “It makes it tough to concentrate.”