I finished the last of the hot dog and folded the paper wrapper into a small, neat square. Outside, the sky had gone fully dark, the gas station lights reflecting off the wet asphalt.
"He's working something out," I said finally.
Collins nodded slowly. "He does that. Takes him a while." He crumpled his own wrapper. "When I first started working for him, I did something really stupid."
"How stupid?"
He winced. "I borrowed his truck."
"Without asking."
"Without asking." He paused. "There was this girl. She needed help moving some stuff and I thought, you know, show up in a truck, that's a whole thing. Women love a truck." He looked at me. "Do women love a truck?"
"Collins."
"Right, okay. So I borrowed it. And I was trying to parallel park outside her building and there was this concrete pillar and I genuinely thought I had more room than I did and—" He made a sound like an explosion. "Rear panel. Tailgate. Both taillights. The whole back corner basically. And a little bit of the car next to me." He held up a finger. "Which was also not mine."
I set down my hot dog.
"And then when I got out to look at the damage I kind of—" He stopped. "I kind of reversed into the building a little."
"You reversed into the building."
"The bumper," he said. "Just the bumper. Mostly."
"What about the girl?"
"She watched the whole thing from her window." He was quiet for a moment. "Then she texted me that actually her friend could help her move and she was all set." He picked up his coffee. "We never spoke again."
"Oh, Collins."
"I know." He held up a hand. "I know. I was twenty-one and I was an idiot and she wasn't even that impressed, for the record." He shook his head. "I came in Monday morning and Ben was already there. He just looked at the truck, then he looked at me. Didn't say a word."
"What did he do?"
"Sent me home that afternoon. No explanation, nothing. Just— go home, Collins. See you." He laughed, short and humorless. "I thought I was done. I went home and updated my resume and called my mom and told her I'd screwed up the best job I'd ever had." He picked up his coffee cup. "Spent a whole week like that. Certain it was over."
"But he called."
"Sunday night. 'Monday, seven sharp, don't be late.' That was it." Collins looked out at the dark parking lot. "Nevermentioned the truck again. Never docked my pay for it. Just—" He shrugged. "Moved on."
I looked at my coffee cup.
"He's like that," Collins said, quieter now. "When he decides something, that's it. He doesn't go back on it." He glanced at me. "Takes him a while to decide. But once he does."
He let the sentence sit there, unfinished, the way the best sentences sometimes had to.
Outside, a truck pulled away from the pumps, its taillights fading into the dark. I thought about Ben standing in the clearing this morning, not quite able to look at me. I thought about the way he'd come after me, tried to do the right thing, and ended up doing the wrong one.
He was deciding something.
"He's a good man," I said.
"Yeah." Collins stood up, crumpling his cup. "Dumb as a post sometimes, but yeah."
He tossed his trash, zipped his jacket, and headed for the door. Then he stopped, hand on the glass.
"For what it's worth," he said, without turning around. "The truck looked fine after. You'd never know."
