Little Cafe by the Lake

The coffee is good and the woman who makes it is already planning to leave.  Rae Lindqvist has opened four cafés in her life and owned none of them. Her method never changes: find a dead storefront, make it alive, hand it over, move on. She is very good at it. The boathouse on the east shore of Willow Lake has been empty for two years, she has it until the end of October, and then she sells the whole thing — the two-group machine, the eleven tables, the forty-one panes of glass — and takes the job in Seattle she has wanted since she was twenty-four.  She has told the landlord. She has told the girl she hires for the summer. She has written every part of it down, in order, in a notebook. She has not told the ranger.  Tomas Reyes has been on this lake six years, on a posting that was supposed to last two. He does not ask people for things. He measures instead — water temperature, clarity, ice thickness at twelve points — and keeps the lake in six logbooks. Every morning at 5:40 he ties his boat in the slip outside her window and comes in for a coffee he does not drink. He drinks tea. He has drunk hers anyway for seventy-nine mornings, half a cup each, and poured the rest into the lake when he thought she was not looking.  She saw him do it once, in July. She said nothing. Two days later she left a tea bag on his saucer. He said nothing either, and the next morning he drank the coffee again.  There is a reason he is at her window at 5:40, and it is not the coffee. The park's first sampling point sits at the mouth of the creek, directly across from her counter. For six years it was his last stop of the morning, around eight. On her third day he turned the route around and made it his first. He never mentioned it. She never asked — she assumed that was where a ranger was at 5:40. The proof is the times in his own hand, in six books she does not find until she goes up into the attic in August and opens one.  The Little Café by the Lake is the second Main Street Love Stories novel — a small-town second-chance romance about a woman who plans everything except the part where she tells someone, a man who has never once asked for anything he wanted, and one boat that either comes back to the slip or does not.