Olivia
The millwork guy had been very sorry.
He'd said it four times, which was three more than I needed, and he'd personally walked me to the loading bay and shown me the correct spec sheet and stood there while his guys pulled the right cabinet doors one by one and loaded them with a care they probably didn't extend to every order. I'd stayed until the truck was sealed and the paperwork was signed and there was nothing left to oversee.
Then I'd gotten in my car and driven east on Route 9 with the grinding frustration of a woman who had spent four months trying to outrun her dead husband and still couldn't quite get clear of him.
I was maybe ten minutes from the site, almost back, when the low fuel light came on.
The gas station appeared on the right, one of those standalone places with four pumps and a small mart that sold lottery tickets and beef jerky and coffee that had been sitting since morning. I pulled in.
I was standing at the pump, collar up against the wind, watching the numbers tick over, when a familiar truck pulled in on the opposite side.
Collins.
He climbed out, saw me, and did that thing where he briefly considered pretending he hadn't. Then he raised a hand in a wave and started pumping his own gas.
We stood there on opposite sides of the pump island in the cold, and I thought that might be the whole of it. A nod, a wave, back in our cars.
"Long drive," he said.
"Two hours each way."
"Worth it?"
"Ask me when the cabinets arrive."
He grinned, looked down at his boots. He was still in his work clothes, dust ground into the denim, a smear of something on his jacket that might have been caulk.
"You eat?" he asked.
"Not since this morning."
He jerked his head toward the mart. "They have those hot dogs that have been rotating since like 2019. I've had three of them and I'm still alive, so."
I laughed, which surprised me. "Sure."
The hot dogs were terrible. We ate them standing at the narrow counter along the window, looking out at the pumps, and Collins talked about the upper cabinets they'd gotten installed before the light went and how Walt had found a level issue in the run above the refrigerator space that would have driven the countertop template completely sideways.
"Good catch," I said.
"Walt catches everything." He took a massive bite. "Slowly. But everything."
We ate in silence for a moment. Outside, a minivan pulled up to the pump I'd vacated. Collins watched it with the focused attention of someone who had nothing important on his mind.
"I listened to this podcast once," he said. "About communication. Or maybe relationships. It was a long drive." He chewed. "Anyway the guy said that when someone's acting like an idiot, it's usually because they're scared. Like, the idiot behavior is just the scared behavior wearing a coat." He paused. "I think that's what he said. I might've been half asleep." He looked at his hot dog. "Could've been a bumper sticker."
I waited.
"Are you mad at Ben?" He said without looking at me, chewing with the studied casualness of someone who had definitely been thinking about how to ask that.
"Why?"
"He was weird today. Weirder than usual." He glanced at me sideways. "And then you left. So."
"I had to sort out the cabinet order."
"Yeah." He didn't sound convinced.
