I was fine.
I had more than I ever would have let myself hope for.
I wasfine.
I was really glad my little sister could sleep through anything. Otherwise telling her why I’d woken up crying my guts out would have been a real pain. While I went long periods of time between thinking about them, about those times in my life, my youngest sister had decided just never to think about them at all in the first place—at least not that I knew of. I had tried before to get her to discuss it, just to make sure she was fine, but she’d refused.
Knowing all that I had and reminding myself of it hadn’t helped much, but it had done enough. It got me to take a deep breath, climb out of the bed I’d had to save six months for, and shower in my own bathroom in a house I had a mortgage on—a mortgage I paid every month and even managed to put in a little extra for the principal. I grabbed my lunch bag from the refrigerator, filled with food Lily had bought that weekend, and somehow managed to remember to grab the cake I’d made the night before while Lily had made our lunch. I had fought her for so long about how she should just buy food at the school, but she’d insisted it tasted like crap and she could make something ten times better herself. After all that, I drove to work in a car that I had bought with my own money and headed to a job that I loved most of the time.
I was loved. I had a roof over my head. Food to eat. A bed to sleep in. I had an enormous bag of Skittles in my desk at work. Had an oven to bake cakes in and money to actually buy the ingredients to make them.All on my own. All because someone had given me a chance, a little love, and let me work hard to have all the things I did.
Andthatmade me feel better more than anything else—the knowledge that I wasn’t vulnerable and didn’t have to rely on someone else for basic things.
So, more than on any other day, hearing my two bosses argue weighed me down like a hundred-pound sack of flour on my shoulders. I needed to make some coffee to wake up and get to the booth where I worked so I could pretend like I hadn’t woken up upset. I didn’t feel like trying to be subtle and break up an argument between anyone.
But I knew I would. I hated people arguing, especially when I loved one of them and cared too much about the other.
“When were you going to tell me?”came the voice that was all gruff, hoarse, round edges dipped in chocolate. It was such a nice voice, even if he did wield it like a freaking sword to chop people and their feelings in half. But at least he did it with everyone. He had high expectations and didn’t let anyone at the shop get away with things. Me—and my screwup—included.
Regardless of how he’d been with me on Friday, I had still made a nice, big birthday cake for him yesterday. I made one for everyone, even the ones I couldn’t stand at CCC. I didn’t have it in me to be mean and single them out by not bringing something for them too. But my favorite people at the shop got their favorite cakes. Everyone else got whatever box mix was on sale.
“Ripley, give me a break. I didn’t think you would care,“the other voice, the one I’d been listening to for nearly the last ten years of my life, responded. It was softer, lighter,patient.
The exact opposite of Ripley’s in more ways than one.
“You think I wouldn’t care about who you hire to work with me?”
“Of course you’d care about that, but all I did was post an ad for the job opening. I didn’t think I needed to check with you about posting one. Come on, son,”Mr. Cooper said.
“Don’t fucking call me that. I’m not your son.”
If I had a dollar for every morning that I’d come into the break room and overheard them disagreeing over something in one of the two offices, I would have had enough money to go on that vacation to Greece I’d been promising myself for forever.
The first time I’d heard them fighting, it had worried me. It had been an argument over payroll and how the shop had too many employees the day after he had put me through his random test over how much I knew. I’d been worried for days that a lot of us at the shop were going to get fired. I was one of the youngest employees. If anyone was going to get the boot, I’d figured it would have been me. They could always contract out to a business that only did paint. I was fully aware of that.
Luckily, no one had gotten fired. It had taken two months of waiting around and eavesdropping almost daily to figure out that Mr. Cooper had put his foot down and wasn’t letting anyone get axed.
At least, no one got fired unless they deserved it.
Now, I just accepted that the man with the voice I liked listening to—and the face I liked looking at—picked arguments with Mr. Cooper for no reason at all. The sky was too blue? He’d blame him. There was some part that he needed that hadn’t been ordered? He’d blame him.
I didn’t get it, and I doubted I ever would; Mr. Cooper was great. Greater than great. I would give him any organ in my body if he needed it.
As much as I eavesdropped, I hadn’t been able to figure out what had happened to make them the way they were. If I really thought about it, there were a lot of things about them I hadn’t been able to figure out. None of us had, and we had tried. I had spent a lot of time listening to Mr. Cooper and Rip because something about their arguments felt… weird.
I was pretty sure there was some serious resentment, at least on Ripley’s part, but I couldn’t figure out why. Why Mr. Cooper would bring someone into the company—hiscompany—who he didn’t get along with?
There had to be a reason why a man had shown up one day and become our newest boss, almost without warning, without anything more than a strained smile from the owner of the business and a “I’d like you all to meet Ripley” in the break room.
Ripley, this man who constantly kept his skin covered with long-sleeved shirts. I hadnever, ever seen him wearing anything else. Not when we worked until midnight. Not when we worked until two o’clock in the morning. Not at seven in the morning. Not even on a Saturday. He constantly hid whatever tattoos he had.
At first, I had wondered if they were ugly or old, but he didn’t strike me as the type to care what other people thought. Plus, wouldn’t he have just gotten them redone if that was the case? Mr. Cooper had never been slumming it financially, and the business had only boomed in the years since it had expanded into the restoration business—specifically with the cars Rip bought, restored, and then sold. I couldn’t think of a single car he’d worked on that hadn’t been flipped in a matter of weeks for a lot more than he had invested in them. He could have easily afforded getting tattoos redone if he didn’t like them. The only reasonable explanation I could think of was that some tattoos were intensely personal to people. I didn’t walk around flashing the one I had around.
A part of me was holding out hope that one day he’d slip up and tug his shirt up his forearm or something. He could accidentally pull up his shirt too if he wanted, and I wouldn’t complain. Knowing him, that day was never going to come. If he hadn’t shown them off already, I really doubted he ever would.
Then again it wasn’t my business what they were. If I wanted to know bad enough, I guess I could have used the favor he owed me to get him to tell me, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t, either.
Focusing on that moment though, I decided to do the same thing I always had when I overheard them. While I was at it, I could drop off the cake that I had made for Rip. Up until last year, I hadn’t even known what day his birthday was; the only reason I found out was because he’d tossed his wallet at me one day so I could grab his credit card and buy his lunch, and his driver’s license had been right there.
