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"Every morning when your mother would get her coffee she would chat awhile with the owner, and most times after she walked out, there would be some guy drinking his coffee in the café who would ask him, 'Who was that?' So I handed this owner a one-hundred-dollar bill and he made me a coffee just the way she liked it."

"Wow, one hundred dollars!" Nicholas marveled. He never got over how much money it seemed. It took him a year to make just eight dollars by searching the floors around the drink machines at the tennis club for dropped coins. And he had to suffer his mother all the while nagging him to please, please get off the floor.

"That's the way the real world works, little buddies. You've got to have money to be in the game."

"Evan..."

"All right, all right, your mother's getting cross with me now. So I stood in front of her desk and handed her coffee to her and asked would she join me for dinner. She seemed a bit shocked at first, and then she regained her composure and said with the most beautiful smile, 'Hi, my name's Nora. And you are?'"

"I know what you said then, Dad," Thomas said in a rush to beat his father to it. "You said to Mom, 'I'm your future husband.'"

"That's right, little buddies. It had seemed to me when she stepped out of that elevator that first day like she was a delicate little bunny rabbit popping its head out of the burrow, and I was damned—"

"Evan..."

"There was no way I was going to let any of the foxes out there snare her."

"So you snared me yourself!" Nora laughed, and although she made fun of him, she was recalling how her first reaction to him had been similarly overwhelming, and not just because of the way he looked, or because of his charm and dynamism. Though she had never resolved the question of whether certain souls were fated to join for some higher purpose, the elation Evan effected in her being had brought her then closer to an answer.
From The Summer Kitchen by Karen Weinreb. Copyright © 2009 Karen Weinreb. Available wherever books are sold. All rights reserved.

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