Episode 10: Homesick

In which Alessandra finds there's no place like home

Jun 07, 2025

∙ Paid

Alessandra takes a photo of Ralph, and makes flyers and posts them around the Village, but no one responds, and she finds herself hoping no one will. He is, for the time being, her dog.

The building renovations take shockingly little time. (It seems to be an unwritten rule that contractors must exceed their estimated time by a month or two or twenty-two.) It helps that there’s very little that needs doing to restore the building to its former glory as a restaurant.

By early July, the restaurant is ready to open.

Recap and Reminders

Alessandra has tried her whole life to get away from tame, predictable Looser Island, starting with a bid to join the Junior Foreign Aide Brigade (JFAB) by announcing to the Board that “it takes more than sunshine, soil, and rain to make a flower grow.” She moves several times, each time suffering disillusion and, most recently, a broken heart. She returns to the island to recover, and while she’s home, she is found by a Dachshund named Ralph, and by Cody, a Seattleite who hires her to run The Flower Shack, after he reconverts the building into a restaurant.

Find the Cast of Characters on this Substack or on the home page of the Looser Island Dogs website: alaughingdog.com

And now back to Episode 10: Homesick . . .

In preparation for her new role, Alessandra reads Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, and decides to run an organic vegetarian restaurant. Notably, she does not read any cookbooks. Nor does she consult with—or even talk to—the island’s resident gourmet chef. Gloria would have been glad to help (competition isn’t something you worry about when you serve the best food known to man- or woman-kind, and you run the only “fancy” restaurant on the island). But Alessandra is certain she can do this thing, and just as certain it is temporary, so why go to the trouble of learning to cook?

The islanders are the poorer for her certainty.

Ralph sleeps in the bed with Alessandra every night. The last thing she sees before drifting to sleep are his warm and slightly worried eyes; the first thing that greets her in the morning are the hopeful ministrations of his tongue. Ralph personifies joy—fierce, purposeful joy, and that joy is just a little bit contagious. Breakfast and suppertime are revelations. Walks delight him. A casual pat on the belly makes him swoon with happiness.

Every day Alessandra gets up, walks Ralph, sits in companionable silence with her parents and her ready-made coffee, and then heads to the restaurant, with Ralph in tow. Every day she thinks what a nice interlude this is, something to fill the time until she’s ready to leave the womb again.

That’s how she puts it to Ralph on their way to work. “This is a nice interlude,” she says, “until I’m ready to leave the womb again.”

Ralph looks at her with unabashed adoration, and wags his tail. Alessandra reads in his tail-wag that she is a brilliant conversationalist, or she’s made the right decision to work for Cody, or both.

At the restaurant, Alessandra makes omelets with local free range eggs and organic peppers and onions, and organic home fries. It all sounds good on paper but the reality is almost inedible. She is overly-mindful of her budget, and the fact that the American diet contains far too much fat and salt, so she serves dry potato chunks, and overcooked eggs, with no salt or seasoning of any kind on either eggs or potatoes.

No one ever complains to Alessandra directly—that wouldn’t be the Looser Island way—and they keep coming back because, quite by accident, she makes the world’s best fresh fruit and yogurt smoothies. The secret is blackberry honey, and a splash of real Mexican vanilla.

Unfortunately, customers are not allowed to buy only a smoothie. Alessandra is unaware that a restaurateur who places unreasonable demands upon her customers will soon find herself out of business, and the menu simply states that when ordering a meal customers may choose one of two in-season smoothies. Occasionally, someone tries to order a smoothie without the entrée. Alessandra says if that was an option it would have been on the menu.

So people come in and order unseasoned oil-free home fries and chokingly dry house-made whole-grain salt-free bread and flavorless soups, and enjoy their smoothies and pat Ralph and quietly toss the rest of the meal in the garbage. (Alessandra’s wisely asked customers to refrain from giving Ralph their leftovers, otherwise sausage-dog won’t just be a nickname for this Dachshund! she says.)

The place is almost never busy, the restaurant is only open for breakfast and lunch Wednesday through Sunday, and the dining area is tiny, seating a maximum of twenty. As a result, Alessandra is able to run it without any help. She says vaguely, from time to time, that when business picks up she will hire more staff. In the meantime, Alessandra’s friends—the people she knew from high school and who, inexplicably to Alessandra’s way of thinking, never left the island—hang out in the restaurant and pitch in on those rare occasions when there is a “rush” i.e. more than a few customers.

The rest of the time the friends sit around and talk of grand theosophies and baggy pants, debate whether German chocolate is superior to Belgian, and play at hooking up but never seriously. These twenty-somethings aren’t looking for commitment, and besides, no one wants to risk the sweet, sweet cup of friendship they’ve nurtured for so long.

Cody-from-Seattle continues to check in sporadically, and reminds Alessandra that she needs to choose a name for the restaurant, which still bears the sign THE FLOWER SHACK over the door. The business name on the credit card is CBO LLC, short for Cody’s Business Operations, he says. Of which there are many, he adds, intimating that whether this particular business succeeds or fails is of minimal importance to him. However, he says, the restaurant still needs a DBA. After a quick search on the internet, Alessandra figures out that DBA stands for doing business as, and she likes the concept, the suggestion that a business can remake itself to fit its name. She, Alessandra, is doing business as a restaurant manager. Alessandra dba Looser Islander, at least until she can find a way to be a Defender of Mankind, befitting the etymology of her name.

She believes herself to be a reasonably creative spirit, but she comes up blank every time she thinks about a new name, so she turns it into a contest among her friends, offering free smoothies for a week, or the part of the week the restaurant’s open anyway, to whoever comes up with a good name.

Her friends Jade and Cassie and Dominic show up the next day, more than a little high, and start playing with words that sit happily in their befuddled brains: Revelation Restaurant, Alessandra’s Aerie, Sassy Smoothies, Island Itinerant Eatery. For reasons no one can ever afterward remember, other than the pleasing alliteration, they settle on Barbara’s Breakfast Bar, even though there has never been anyone named Barbara even remotely connected with the building, the restaurant serves lunch as well as breakfast, and the place is neither a bar in the sense of serving alcoholic drinks nor does it have a traditional diner’s bar or counter for sitting at.

In August, Ella and Markus and Jim Perkins come in with a man who speaks English haltingly. With only time for a quick glance from the kitchen, Alessandra places the man as Latino, but when she emerges and takes their order she realizes that isn’t right, and then she feels an unexpected pang of longing, a frustrated hope that he would speak to her in Spanish, and resurrect for her the arid cliffs and bright adobe of her Change Now! days.

(He’s from Syria, she later learns, and she is alternately offended on Pelabo’s behalf and gratified at the familiar syllables of “Paulo,” after Jens Jensen renames the poor man.)

It’s just as well, right? she says to her friends. She left Change Now! and the tiny pueblo for a reason, she says. Right?

As good friends will, they nod, even if they privately believe she’s a little flaky and should really figure out what it is she wants to do and then just do it, for god’s sake.

In spite of her assurances that she can handle basic financial records, Alessandra is never quite certain the restaurant is making money. She dutifully records income and expenses, and regularly deposits the revenues into the bank, but she has no knowledge of the expenses Cody’s handling—the cost of the renovations, payroll taxes and workers’ compensation premiums and unemployment taxes, franchise taxes, utilities, etc. Every two weeks a paycheck arrives in the mail, and the company credit card continues to cover the basic costs for which she’s responsible, so she assumes her work must be satisfactory.

Anyway, it’s only temporary. If Cody comes back and fires her for doing a poor job, well, then, that will be her sign it’s time to move on.

In October, a few months after what is now known as Barbara’s Breakfast Bar opened and earned a reputation as the place to go for smoothies and nothing else, Alessandra’s parents receive a letter from a lawyer in Italy stating that Alessandra’s grandfather has died. Grandfather Otis lived just outside Siena, in Italy, where he ran a sizeable vineyard and olive orchard. He had refused to speak to his daughter (Alessandra’s mother), though she was his only offspring, after she married an American, but now he is dead, and he’s left everything to the granddaughter he never met.

“This is your chance,” Jade says.

“You’ve been waiting for an excuse to escape again,” Cassie says. “Here it is.”

“Your parents don’t even like to travel,” Dominic points out. “They haven’t, like, left the island in, like, eons. Except for, you know, doctor’s appointments and shit.”

“And when you graduated from college,” Cassie adds.

“You should go,” they tell her.

Their words surprise an unexpected ambivalence in her. They’re giving voice to what she believes she wants, but just now, suddenly, she’s not so sure.

After consulting with postmistress Jenny (who advised her to listen to the wind, the spirit of mother earth will show her the way), she decides the universe must be trying to tell her it’s time to go. Again. And she’d be a fool to ignore the universe, right?

Which is why, at the age of not quite twenty-six, having had the good fortune to have her destiny land in her lap (with apologies to the warm circle of dog that is actually sitting in her lap), she leaps into the abyss.

Again.

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