She wanted to be cool. Collected. Sensible.
“Oh my gosh, thank you,” she somehow said instead.
He didn’t seem to care about the gushing, however.
“Don’t thank me. Just let me get you a new sign.”
“Honestly, I think the money you put in my cash register will cover that.”
“That was for the books. Just for the books. You gave me, like, five of them,” he said. In a scoffing, sure-of-himself sort of way, too. Like he’d never bought anything before in his life, or didn’t understand money, or something.
It made her feel as if she had to spell it out.
“Yeah, and five of them cost around sixty dollars.”
“Well, I left about that number.”
“Sure, give or take a grand.”
“It wasn’t that much. And if it was, that wasn’t me.”
“So this was the plan, then. Just pretend you didn’t do it?”
He rubbed a hand over the nape of his neck sheepishly.
Tried not to meet her gaze.
“Let’s just leave it at you did me a service, and I paid for it.”
“So what do I owe you for all the services you did?”
“I didn’t do any,” he protested. Almost desperate about it now—as if she’d accused him of a crime instead of a kindness. “I didn’t do anything special for you. It was all just perfectly ordinary, platonic, normal things that any human person would dofor any other human person. And I need you to accept that and not suggest anything else out loud.”
“Then I should say it in a greeting card instead.”
“Yes. No. No, just. Let’s forget all about it, please.”
He practically had his hands together in a kind of haphazard prayer now. She couldn’t give in to him, though. She’d just seen what sat about fifty feet from where he was standing. “It’s kind of hard to when I can see my car parked down the street,” she said. Much to his deep and unending despair.
“So I got it towed, so what. It was in my way. It was on my road. I had to.”
“Did you also have to somehow get all the crumpled dings out of it? It looks brand-new. It looks better than before I rolled it. Did you get it washed and waxed?” She peered around him as he did his best to obscure most of it from view. In fact, at one point, he waved an arm in between her and the car. But that just made it easier to grasp the full extent of this. “Oh my god, didyouwash and wax it?”
“Of course not. Of course I didn’t. It must have been the towing company.”
“Well in that case, I’m very grateful to the towing company for everything.”
“There’s no need to be grateful to them. They’re fine with it.”
“Even if I gave them nothing in return?”
She frowned at him, incredulous. But it just seemed to make him madder. He had to walk away for a second, hands on his hips. And when he returned he took a calming breath before he started laying out his case. “You gotta stop thinking you owe anything for simple favors. This isn’t some business where you’re racking up basic decency debt. It’s okay to just accept the basic decency as something you should be getting as standard, on the regular, andthat’s the end of it. Done. No more discussion,” he said, one hand drawing a line under that last bit, as he did.
Not that it made anything more understandable. It just got her heart going, like it had the night before. As if all these almost angry words were as soft somehow as wound dressing. As soft, and as liable to make her insist on kindness in return. “But I’m pretty sure that would apply to you, too.”
“No. No, it would not. And I’m leaving now before you try anything.”
“Okay. Well, I’ll be right in here if you did want me to try something. Like, say, explaining any book choices I might have made. Choices you weren’t sure about. And had questions over,” she said, as he started to walk back to his truck. Almost calling after him in a way that felt embarrassing. Like in high school, grasping after people to talk to who didn’t want to talk to her.
