Page 6 of Working for the Single Mom

Sadie's supposed to be at the shop by eight. I find myself excited about that prospect.

I climb into bed, and for the past couple of years, it's the emptiest room in a house that's full of them, but for once, it doesn’t feel the way it normally does.

Tomorrow, there'll be somebody else in that shop besides me.

I fall asleep faster than I have in months.

four

. . .

Sadie

"C'mon Vince, we've gotta go," I encourage my son. "Mommy starts her new job today."

I don't necessarily expect him to understand what that means, but I need him to know that we don't have time to fuck around.

"You're still going to pick me up this afternoon?" He questions, his eyebrows moving together in question. His words are slightly mumbled with a small lisp.

"I'll be there. My new boss knows that you're the most important thing in the world to me," I tell him, booping his nose with my finger.

He grins at that, the gap where he lost his first tooth last month showing, and grabs his backpack off the kitchen chair without me having to ask twice. Small miracles. I load him into the car, get him buckled, and pull out of the driveway with my coffee wedged between my thighs because I never remember to buy a cup holder that actually fits my travel mug.

Daycare drop-off goes smooth, which feels like a good sign after yesterday. I kiss the top of Vince's head, tell him I'll see him at four thirty, and watch him run off toward a table of blocks without looking back once. That part always stings a little, even though I know it means he's happy there. I get back in the car and point it toward Beau's shop, and by the time I pull into the gravel lot at five till eight, my nerves have caught back up with me.

I don't know why I'm nervous. I've done this job before, just for a worse man in a worse mood most days. But there's an anxiety about walking into somebody's business on day one, not knowing where anything is, not knowing what they expect, that puts a knot right in the center of my chest.

Beau's truck is already there when I pull in, parked at an angle that tells me he got here in a hurry. I grab my bag off the passenger seat, along with the travel mug of coffee I definitely need more of, and head for the shop.

He's already got music going when I walk in, a rock song with a lot of heavy guitar in it, coming from a speaker balanced on a stack of two-by-fours. He's bent over a workbench in the middle of the main room, sanding down something long and flat, and he doesn't hear me come in until I clear my throat.

"Hey." He looks up, wipes his hand on his jeans before he sets the sander down. "You made it."

"I said I would." I hold up my bag. "Where do you want me?"

"The office, where I showed you yesterday. I cleared off part of the desk this morning, figured you'd need somewhere to actually set a laptop down that isn't buried under invoices from March."

I’m touched that he at least made an effort. "You cleared off the desk. That's a start."

"Don't get too excited,” he warns with a laugh. “I put everything I moved into a different box." He grins. "You’re still gonna have to go through it, but we’ll deal with one problem at a time."

I head into the office, and it's exactly as bad as I remember it from yesterday, minus the small cleared square in the middle of the desk. I set my laptop down there, pull the chair out, and it wobbles when I sit in it, one leg clearly shorter than the other three. I make a mental note. New chair, somewhere on a list that's about to get very long. I have a feeling there’s a lot this damn office needs to be sustainable.

I start with the boxes closest to me, because I've got to start somewhere, and alphabetical order feels like the only sane way into a mess like this. I sort receipts from invoices, invoices from estimates that never got sent, and estimates from what looks like personal mail that somehow ended up mixed in with years of business paperwork. There's a birthday card in here from somebody named Aunt Carol, unopened, dated two Christmases ago. I set it aside instead of tossing it, because he probably needs to open that himself.

The office phone rings around nine thirty, and I answer it before I think twice about it, because it’s muscle memory for me at this point. "Beau's Hand-Crafted Goods, this is Sadie."

There's a pause on the other end, like whoever called wasn't expecting a person, let alone a new one. "Uh, hi, this is Marion Cole, I've got a built-in bookshelf ordered, was just calling to check on the timeline."

I don't have the faintest idea what Marion Cole's timeline looks like, but I pull a legal pad toward me and start writing anyway. "Let me pull that up for you, Marion, one second." I don't have anything to pull up, not really, not yet, but I flip through the box closest to me until I find a folder with Cole scrawled across the tab in handwriting that looks like it was done with the pen held wrong. Sure enough, there's an order in there, dated three weeks back, with a due date that's already come and gone. "Looks like we're a little behind on that one. Can I get back to you by end of day with a firm date? I want to check with Beau directly instead of giving you a guess."

She's fine with that, more than fine, actually, sounds relieved somebody picked up the phone with an actual answer instead of going to voicemail, which I'm guessing is what usually happens around here. I hang up and immediately go find Beau.

He's not sanding anymore. He's over by the table saw, running a board through it, and he's taken his shirt off somewhere between when I walked in and now, and tossed it over a sawhorse. I stop in the doorway between the office and the main shop, and I'm not proud of the fact that it takes me a solid three seconds to remember why I walked out here in the first place.

He's got muscles that come from actually using your body for a living, not from a gym membership. His large shoulders fill out his frame, arms flex every time he guides the board through the blade, and a line of sweat is working down the middle of his back that I have absolutely no business tracking with my eyes the way I'm tracking it right now. It’s been a really long time since a man fucked me, and it shows.

Get it together, Sadie.