The receipt was quickly snatched off of the counter the moment I slid it across to him. “Have a good day, Mr. Nelson. The keys are in the ignition.”
He grumbled at me again before turning and walking out of my shop, slamming the door behind him.
Sighing, I sagged against the counter where I let my forehead rest against the cool surface. Honestly, if I wasn’t in this business to keep people from going bankrupt while trying to take care oftheir old beaters, I really would’ve contemplated selling out a long time ago.
All right, maybe that was a little dramatic.
I did actually enjoy the work I put into running this place, along with my customers who came and went along with their car needs. While Ellington Heights boasted plenty of the overly wealthy, Edgewood was a blue-collar working class population with not much money to squeeze out of the already relatively dry pockets.
Even if I wanted to stoop down to scum lord territory and start charging for my services like my competitors, there would be no point to. Not that I would in the first place, but dealing with people like Roger Nelson had me fantasizing quite heavily these days.
I supposed it was part burnout from work and part wondering if there was more to life than living in the back of my shop’s garage for twelve hours a day. Most people my age were out starting families and getting married while I was too stubborn to waste my nights down at the local bars trying to look for anything that wasn’t a casual one-night stand.
Instead, I buried myself in work like any normal habitual singleton and kept myself preoccupied in between periods of seemingly unending loneliness.
These days, I was finding myself more and more restless for reasons unknown. Though, I had a feeling that my sister’s constant badgering also wasn’t helping.
Back behind the door leading down to my office, the desk phone rang.
“Speak of the devil,” I muttered to myself.
Pushing off from the counter, I headed toward the back of the shop. With my lobby empty and no cars up on the risers to work on, there wasn’t really any excuse to avoid my sister’s lunchtime phone call like I’d been doing for the past few days.
I loved her but damn was she a pain in the ass sometimes.
Settling down into my swivel chair, I lifted the phone off of the receiver. “Carmichael’s Body Shop.”
She snickered. “Why do you sound like that every time you answer the phone?”
Frowning, I said, “Like what?”
“Like you’re trying to act all tough.”
I rolled my eyes. Leave it to my sister to have an insult geared up the second I picked up the damn phone. “It was nice talking to you, Lila. Have a nice afternoon.”
“No, wait! Don’t hang up!”
Smirking to myself, I said, “What’s that now?”
“Ugh, you’re such a brat.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“Real mature, Brandon.”
See, the thing about getting a sister later in life was that we never got to experience the sibling rivalry thing back when we were kids, on account that we didn’t even know each other. After my mom married my step dad, and along with him came a bratty teenaged girl and her three older siblings that were two years younger than me, I’d been met with the realization that getting picked on wasn’t nearly as bad when I had someone to dish it back to.
“So, what’s up?”
She huffed at me. “Did you get a chance to look at those dating profiles I sent your way?”
Holding back a groan was a Herculean effort.
While I appreciated my sister accepting me for who I was without question—to the point where she was constantly asking me about who I was seeing—since getting engaged, she’d begun to go into overdrive worrying about my plus one. Going so far as to have amatchmakercreate profiles for me to look at of all of the guys within a fifty-mile radius that had dating potential.
Never in my life had I ever thought I’d have someone trying so damn hard to set me up with someone because they were terrified I was going to die alone.
“No, I’ve been kind of busy.”
