“Coming to my house. Being around my mom. That’s different.”
“It’s not that different.”
I took another step back, toward the door, water still dripping through my fingers. “It’s my house.”
“Technically, it’s your mom’s house, right? I’d like to help.”
“I don’t need help from you.”
His eyebrows popped up. “Ouch.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You punched me in the face, Sutton, and I let you help me. Let me help you.”
“That makes no sense. Ipunchedyou in the face. You’ve done nothing to warrant owing me a favor.”
“I let you help me. That’s what I did. And I’ll let you help me with this spreadsheet thing. Now I owe you a favor.”
“Fine,” I spat out, surprising myself.
I think I surprised him too because he immediately grabbed a pen from the jar on the desk and a scrap piece of paper and said, “What’s your address?” like he knew I was going to change my mind if he didn’t write it down as fast as humanly possible.
I was already regretting it as I told him the address.
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“You don’t work tomorrow?”
“I have some flexibility, being the son of the owner and all that.” There was a darkness to his words when he said them. A story there. I didn’t know what. I didn’t need to.
CHAPTER 15
“Have you been a server before?” I asked the young man on the phone.
“Not technically,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, define the wordserver.”
I got the feeling he meant for that to be a rhetorical question, but I answered it anyway. “Someone who takes food orders and then delivers said food.”
“I’ve never done that,” he said. “But I have worked fast food.”
That wasn’t nothing. Fast food was hard. “How long did you work there?”
“Like two weeks.”
“Right. Okay, well, I’ll be in touch, Timothy. Thanks for your time.”
He was the fourth phone interview I’d done today and the fourth one I didn’t feel I could advance to the next stage. Rayawould take pity on the Timothys of the world, and soon we’d have a staff full of incompetent people. I had to at least get some good candidates in front of her.
I sent Presley a quick text, asking her how she was doing. It was one week into my promised two-week fix, and although the staff was using the app consistently now for schedule changes, I was afraid not much else had changed and she was still feeling overwhelmed and dissatisfied.
The bell rang from the other room along with the words “Sutton! Refill!”
I closed my eyes, took a calming breath, and stood. I sucked in some air. I was sore. I hadn’t thought I’d used every muscle in my body the day before, but apparently I had.
