After a moment, he started to shake his head. “Start all over again” was all he said.
Then he turned around and walked out.
Life was a choice.
You get to choose how you handle things. You get to choose how you deal with those things. You get to choose if a rose is beautiful or if its thorns are a menace to your fingers.
What I chose was to not let Rip ruin my day. I was going to choose to not stay mad or hurt over this.
So, I balled up my anger toward Rip and I threw it in the trash.
He was my boss.
He was going with me to San Antonio, I was going to assume, and that was all that was going to matter to me. Something was wrong with him, and I’d just had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or something like that.
Whatever had just happened hadn’t been my fault.
But he’d still been a jerk. An unfair jerk to be specific.
I had a job to do though. I had money that needed to be made. That’s what I had to do. Ripley wasn’t my friend and wasn’t trying to ever be my friend. He was my boss.
I accepted that with a sigh, and then I got to work.
Chapter 7
When I gotto the shop the next day thirty minutes earlier than usual, I told myself I was doing it because I had a lot of work to do.
Not because I was holding a grudge toward Rip.
And most definitely not because I’d had another bad dream including my dad that had me waking up sweating. I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened in it, only bits and pieces, but the dread and the nausea had been there. Live and present even after so long.
I had tossed and turned the rest of the night, trying to avoid the tiny bit of heartache I had felt because of it. Of how real it felt. Maybe because what I did recall was so similar to things that had really happened. The stupid-ass. Being called the wrong name. The drunkenness… That fear.
What the dream didn’t continue reminding me of was how I had grown up. Of how I’d gotten the hell out of there and gotten my sisters out too, the only way I’d known how.
Since that moment, that decision, I had clung onto every moment of happiness that I could.
So just like I had for the last going-on ten years, when I had felt more helpless than ever, I went to the one place that always took my mind off things I didn’t want to think about. I went to the shop.
I told myself that it worked in my favor because I hadn’t exactly had the most productive afternoon the day before thanks to the hours I’d spent fixing “my mistake.” Miguel had come over and helped me for about an hour, telling me all about how Rip had chewed him out for standing in his way.
But even with his help, I still hadn’t gotten enough done. It didn’t help that I had left work right at five o’clock. Rip hadn’t looked at me when I had walked by him with all of my things, but I had been ready.
Ready to pretend like I hadn’t heard a single word he might have said since he was going to pretend like I hadn’t called him to ask about the one thing he’d blown up at me over.
Ugh.
I couldn’t say my day had gotten better once I made it home.
My sister had been home, and that had been great, but the second I told her about the phone call I had gotten days ago—not that I admitted that part—it had gone downhill real quick. Specifically the part that involved me going to San Antonio had been like pouring gasoline on a small fire.
“Why are you doing this?” Lily had wailed. She had stood up the second I had mentioned the name of the city I’d be visiting for the first time in six years. “You know what they’re like!”
Of course I knew what they were like. How could I forget?
That conversation had spread wide and far to include a three-way call on speakerphone with our other two sisters, who had gotten tense and quiet as Lily ranted for fifteen minutes about how dumb it was for me to go.
I had a feeling they were all going to give me the cold shoulder for a while, even during the weekend when everyone came down for Lily’s graduation, but they weren’t going to change my mind. I knew the best thing I could do for my sanity was not to think about going in the first place so that I wouldn’t get more nervous or start second-guessing myself more than I already had. I needed to go. It was the right thing to do.
