I remind myself she’s trying to get my blood pressure to do its thing and take another long drink of water.
She leans over to grab the water carafe from the table next to us, then gestures something to someone behind me.
“I called your grandmother because I found a picture of her with my grandpa in his college yearbook,” she says without ceremony.
My jaw comes unhinged. I snap it back shut.
“I can show you too, if you want. They looked friendly. And my grandpa’s been lonely since my grandma died, so since you were here, and everything I could find online suggested your grandmother was a widow, I called her to see if she remembered him and if she wanted to come see both of you.”
“You…called my grandmother…to set her up…with your grandfather.”
She frowns. Squints up at the ceiling. Taps her finger to her chin while she wiggles her head back and forth like she’s debating if she wants to tell me that’s exactly what she did, or if she wants to stretch her story closer to whatever it is if I’m wrong.
And then she shrugs. “Sure. Close enough. In the interest of honesty, yes, I also called her to see if she can talk you out of converting my café into a kombucha bar. But a big part of it is that I hate seeing people lonely. I don’t care if they become friends or if they do something romantic, I just thought it would be nice to connect two old people who I thought might like to see each other again in a time when they’ve each lost someone important to them. I’m sorry about your great-aunt, by the way. She sounded like a lovely person.”
“You looked up my aunt too?”
“No. Zen was telling me about her. Anyone Zen adores has to be a good person.”
“Time!” rings out while someone replaces the water carafe at our table.
Sabrina refills my water before I can move to do it myself.
I don’t push back from my chair.
She doesn’t wave me on.
“You gonna finally move, you old bastard?” Chandler Sullivan says entirely too close to my head.
Before I can react, Sabrina’s out of her seat and in his face. “Leave.”
“Make me,” he replies.
“The quiet way or the loud way?”
I shove out of my seat too.
I amnotletting someone else fight this battle for me, and I amnotletting him get away with any more shit like he pulled last week either.
And that little voice in the back of my head telling me that this isn’t fake hatred that Sabrina has for the man who bullied my scrawny ass in college can shut up.
Not the time.
Chandler turns to me.
Takes a step back.
Looks up.
Up.
The asshole is lookingupat me.
Didn’t used to be like that.
“Fuck, dude, you got tall,” he says. “Couldn’t see that when you were sitting down. You wanna tell this bitch—”
I have him lifted to eye level before he can finish that sentence. The prick’s not light, but I have rage operating on my side. “You will walk out this fucking door, then walk out of this fucking town, and never fucking come back if you don’t want every single person in this room to find out every single way you’ve ever been a complete and total shit in your entire life. Go fucking bully someone else. Better yet, go fucking bully yourself and leave the rest of the world in peace.”
