The rest of the weekend went by in a blur.
After staying at the restaurant so long that the waiters gave us some serious side-eye, everyone made their way over to my house like I had expected. Our group of fifteen turned into thirty at some point in the evening, and we’d ended up ordering everything off the nearest pizza place’s menu. The Coopers spent a small fortune buying bags of chips and drinks from the gas station, I saw, after they had snuck off for a moment and come back loaded with bags.
I had been in such a good mood that it had only hurt me a little when my sister Lily had come up to me at some point, thrown an arm over my shoulder, and said, “Sugar tits, my friend’s aunt needs help at her restaurant in Galveston this summer, and she said she would hire us. Her parents have a beach house, and she said I could stay with them. She said the tips during the summer are really good, like more than I make now. A lot more.”
She hadn’t been asking me for permission, but she hadn’t been
telling me she was going to do it either.
I knew what it meant. Galveston was a beach town a little over an hour away from where we lived. She would be going to stay there. Making money. And while she listened to me, I wasn’t her mom. I was lucky to even be her guardian. Our relationship had always been this weird dance between me being the closest thing to a mom figure she had, and me not wanting to cross the line, balancing being a sister and… her caretaker.
I had never seen myself as being in any position to tell any of my sisters what they should do or how they should live their lives. I had made a thousand mistakes on my own. I was nobody to try and give them advice, much less be any of their role models. Unless something
was absolutely a crap idea, I usually kept my mouth shut over what they wanted to do.
I didn’t want her to leave for what I would figure was the rest of the summer.
But…
I had hidden my sadness and smiled at her. “That’s great, Lil. When do you start? Are you going to put in your two-week notice at the restaurant or just call and tell them you aren’t going back?” I asked her, referring to the waitressing job she’d had for the last almost two years.
She had said she was going to put in her two-week notice but claimed her boss would end up firing her when she did. It was what that boss always did, apparently. As long as that happened, then she would be leaving on Friday, she had told me, giving me a kiss on her cheek as she went on about how tan she was going to be and how I could come visit on the weekends and we could hang out on the beach.
Lily hadn’t been wrong. I had been sitting at home the day after her graduation, when she left for work and was still sitting at home when she had come back four hours later, telling me her boss had told her she didn’t need to bother finishing out her two weeks. So, she was leaving.
After spending the rest of Sunday at the house with just Lily, since Thea and Kyra had left early in the morning—one to Austin and the other back to Dallas—the next few days went by fast. I helped her pack a couple of boxes of clothes and went with her to buy a new bathing suit. We went out to dinner with Lenny and Grandpa Gus on Wednesday. And that very morning, on Friday, I had gone to wake her up before I’d left for work and given her about four kisses on her cheeks before we’d said goodbye, with her being half-asleep.
She promised to drive up every couple of weeks, and I had promised to go visit too, but I knew how that went. My other two sisters had promised the same thing, and now I barely saw them but three or four times a year. When I offered to go visit, they didn’t have time for that either.
So my seventeen about-to-be eighteen-year-old sister at a beach house in a party town coming back on a weekend when she probably made the most amount of tips?
I wasn’t going to hold my breath.
Lily would still text me every day. And she was only a phone call away.
So that Friday, a day where I had requested to leave early months ago for a gynecologist appointment, I was trying my best to cling onto every
little bit of happiness I could find, which probably explained why I was trying to be extra enthusiastic about decorating for my coworker’s going- away party that day. I had just finished taping up the last chunk of black streamer when a big figure stopped at the door to the break room.
With my arms stretched as high as they could go over my head, and with pieces of tape stuck to my fingers, I turned my head to shoot Ripley a closed-mouth smile. I hadn’t even been remotely surprised he hadn’t stopped by on Saturday. It wasn’t the first time I had invited him to something and he hadn’t shown up. It was no big deal.
“Hey, boss.”
The big man stood there as he looked around the room. “What’s all this?”
“Today is Rogelio’s last day,” I said, pointing at the cardboard letters that spelled out BYE BISH going across the bottom of the break room’s cabinets.
He scratched at his temple.
“I’m on my lunch break,” I threw in before he tried to say something about me not getting paid to decorate for someone’s going-away party. It had been a gray shirt kind of week so far, and I didn’t want to jinx it.
His eyes drifted to the sign and then the two black balloons directly beside them, and all he said was “All right” in that low voice.
Turning back to the streamer, I pressed my finger against the tape one last time to make sure it had stuck and then hopped off the top of the two-step ladder I’d had to drag from my room up here.
“Where’d all this come from?” he asked, surprising me.
I folded the ladder in on itself and propped it up against the counter. “I brought it from home. I used it for my sister’s going-away party two years ago.” I glanced back at him and gave him a smile.
“I have some blue streamer at home if you want me to use it for your next birthday,” I tried to joke around.
His snicker as he stood there made me smile even wider.
“There’s cake. If you want a piece, Rogelio said he’d come up here in—” I glanced at my watch. “—ten minutes.”
My boss didn’t move, but he wasn’t done asking questions. “What kind?”
“Angel food.”
One of those hands went up as he scratched at his throat, exposing maybe a millimeter more of it than usual. “You make it?” he asked in that calm voice that was probably my favorite of all.
“Nope.” With Lily leaving, I hadn’t wanted to waste thirty minutes I could have with her on something else. “I got it from the grocery store. I’ll save you a piece and put it in the veggie drawer if you aren’t around,” I offered before tearing my eyes away so I could finish picking up my mess. Everything had been so hectic, I’d barely gotten a chance to think about the last long-ish conversation we’d had—the one that included Rip telling me he still owed me.
I decided right then still wasn’t the right time to think about it. Maybe tonight when I got home. Maybe later in my room when I tried to zone Jason out.
In the meantime, I stashed all the bags I’d brought from home and took the cake out of the fridge to set it on the counter. I’d barely stacked up the paper plates—because I sure wasn’t going to wash them and none of the guys would either if they were real plates—when Miguel came into the room and claimed, “You didn’t decorate for my birthday.”
I slid him a look. “It’s Rogelio’s going-away party. You know I don’t put up decorations unless the birthday ends in a zero. And you’ve got what? Five more years until your fiftieth?”
The older man slid me a look. “Don’t remind me.” I laughed.
He finally laughed too as he made his way inside. “What kind of cake did you get?”
“Angel food, but hold your horses. Ro gets the first slice.”
“He’s leaving, and you know he’s going to want half of it, Luna. You know how he is,” Miguel tried to reason, even as he opened the fridge and started poking around inside.
Rip, who had warmed up his food while I’d been cleaning and talking to Miguel, pulled a chair out from the table and dropped into it, setting a container in front of him.
Done, I picked up the last lunch I might ever get from my little sister and took a seat down the table from him. I’d been eating it in bits and pieces as I decorated. Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and steamed spinach. Man, I was going to miss her.
Miguel took the seat beside mine, opening up his lunch bag and pulling out a sandwich and a bag of chips.
I nudged him. “Isn’t it your wife’s birthday today?”
He froze, and then he looked up so slowly, straight at the wall ahead, that I knew the answer. “Today is the sixth?” he whispered.
I glanced at Rip, and even he was looking at Miguel curiously. “Yes.”
Miguel cursed long and low in Spanish before glancing at me with a horrified and panicked expression.
“I wondered why she was giving me a dirty look this morning.” He muttered almost thoughtfully, his eyes wide. “She’s gonna kill me. I thought her birthday was tomorrow.”
“She’s not going to kill you,” I tried to assure him, not fully believing the words myself. I’d met her. We were friends. She really would kill him.
The face he made said he didn’t either.
“Okay, maybe, but I know what you can do. Did you buy her present already?”
He hadn’t. He didn’t need to say it, I could tell. “I was going to take the kids with me tomorrow to get it.”
“Okay, good.” I forked some more food into my mouth. “I know this florist that can deliver flowers by three if you order them soon.”
That had added some coloring to his face. “The same ones you ordered for Owen last month?”
I nodded and got a nod in return. This wasn’t the first time the same thing had happened with one of the guys at the shop. I had half the guys’ credit card information saved on my phone. I usually helped them buy Christmas presents for their wives and girlfriends too since they were such slackers.
“What are her favorites?” I asked him. Silence.
“Miguelito, what flowers does she like?” He was back to staring blankly.
We both laughed.
“What do you like?” he asked me like that was help. It wasn’t. “Oh, I don’t care. Don’t ask me.”
Miguel blinked. “Luna, what have your boyfriends sent you?”
Boyfriends. Like that was really plural. I gave him a funny face before pulling my phone out of my pocket and looking through the contacts for the florist that some of the other guys had used before. “They didn’t. Thanks for reminding me,” I said, trying to say it lightly and playfully, like it wasn’t a big deal.
Because it wasn’t.
If I wanted flowers, I could buy them myself.
“None of them?” my coworker asked, not letting it go.
I found the contact and set my phone on the table between us. “Nope.”
“Not even the old one?”
I snickered and shook my head. “Stop.” I pointed at the phone. “Call and order the flowers.”
He grinned and brought out his phone too, dialing the number quickly and then, putting his phone over the receiver, asking, “What about your sisters?”
I wasn’t exactly sure why I shot a look at Rip, but I did, and luckily his attention was down on his food. So I shook my head.
“Your high school graduation?” he threw out next.
“Ah, I got my GED. I didn’t… finish high school the… normal way.”
Miguel blinked, and fortunately the florist answered, because he started rattling off a request and then an address.
I managed to eat the rest of my steak by the time Mr. Cooper made his way into the break room, one hand rubbing his stomach like he was starving, his eyes sweeping across the room. He shot me a big smile. “Looks nice.”
I smiled back at him just as Miguel hung up the phone and let out a big sigh.
“He said he can drop them off at her job by three.” “See? She’ll only kill you a little now.”
Miguel slapped me on the back twice. “Thank you, Lunita. You’re a lifesaver.”
“You would have figured it out yourself.” But freaking Miguel wasn’t done. “Luna?”
I tipped my chin up at him as I ate some more mashed potatoes.
He took a bite out of his own sandwich. “I think we need to find you a boyfriend.”
I stopped chewing at the same time that Mr. Cooper started laughing and set what looked like a chicken salad sandwich in the spot in front of where I was sitting.
I shook my head. “Ignore Mr. C, Miguel.”
Unfortunately, this conversation interested the man who had known me for five years. “What? Why you laughing, Mr. C? You think she needs to find a boyfriend too?”
I jumped in before Mr. Cooper could. “We had this conversation on the weekend. All I agreed to was maybe going on a few dates. Maybe. That’s it.”
Miguel nodded thoughtfully, popping a chip into his mouth. “I know five—no, three—”
“Oh, no. I’ve been to your family reunions.”
The other man started laughing.
I was going to use that moment to change the subject. “Anyway, what ended up happening with the guy you interviewed that you liked? Are you hiring him?”
I regretted the question the second it was out of my mouth.
Especially when Mr. Cooper’s eyes slid to Ripley’s direction. The much older man smiled anyway, his nostrils flaring just enough to tell me it wasn’t totally genuine. “He came in today. I think it went well, but we’re going to talk about it.”
“Is he nice?”
Mr. Cooper’s smile turned into a genuine one. “You think I’d hire somebody who wasn’t?”
I grinned at him, but all I could think about was that the only reason I was having a decent day was because Jason had a sore throat and wasn’t talking as much as usual.
But I kept my mouth shut on that topic.
I had just finished giving Jason instructions for the rest of
afternoon, my purse and keys in hand so I could leave for my gynecologist appointment, when I heard the yelling coming from upstairs.
Crap.
Really?
Everyone should have gotten a slice or two of cake. It should have been a pretty decent day. None of the guys in the shop had even come to my room to complain about anything either.
And Jason had barely annoyed me. Considering I was dreading going to an empty house, it had still been an okay day. We had made it through lunch without an issue. The rest of the day should have been free of issues too.
I made my way down the hall toward the main part of the building and found all of my coworkers there, busy, but two of them had stopped and were looking up, like they could see through the ceiling and into the office over our heads.
I stopped there with my bag over my shoulder and looked in the same direction.
“You gonna go do something about it?” Miguel, one of the ones looking up, asked.
I glanced at him. “Why me?”
He scoffed. “I’m not their favorite.”
I blinked again, ignoring the way Owen, the other guy who had been looking up, snickered.
“I don’t have your magic touch,” Miguel added. “I don’t have a magic touch.”
He looked at Owen, and they both nodded and agreed at the same time, “Yeah, you do.”
“I need to go. I have a doctor’s appointment in—” I glanced at my watch. “—thirty minutes.”
The yelling got louder for a brief moment, making us all focus up at the open staircase and the landing that fed off from it.
“Do something, Luna,” Owen said. “It’s Rogelio’s last day. I don’t want today to be my last day. Miguel doesn’t want it to be his last day. Nobody else but Rogelio wants it to be their last day, either. You know how they get.”
I wanted to argue, I really did, but I knew when to pick my fights, and in this case, this wasn’t one I had any chance of winning. I already knew none of them were going to go upstairs and say anything.
“Chicken shits,” I groaned and couldn’t help but smile when they laughed.
I shouldered off my bag and dropped it on the floor by my feet. “You guys owe me,” I mumbled under my breath as I ignored my coworkers and headed up the stairs, shaking my head.
“I’ll buy you a Sprite tonight!” Owen shouted up.
“What’s going on tonight?” I stopped and called down to him. “We’re getting together at Mickey’s. I told Jason to tell you hours
ago,” my coworker claimed.
That freaking fart face. Man, he sucked.
Shoving that aside, it kind of answered my predicament for being home tonight, so I gave him a thumbs-up. “I’ll see you there then,” I told him before continuing up the staircase, listening.
The voices stopped for a second, yet still managing to be a loud, muffled buzz of anger, but right as I got to the top of the stairs, it started up again, less of an unidentified mumble and more individual words laced together.
“—so goddamn disrespectful!”
“I’m fucking disrespectful? Are you fucking with me?”
“No, I’m not fucking with you, Ripley! You hurt Lydia’s feelings! We went because she told me I should go.”
Ooh. I winced at that. I thought it had been long enough that they wouldn’t bring up Rip walking out on them during his birthday celebration. I was wrong. I took one step forward and then another. Still listening.
“I don’t give a fuck why you went or why you took her with you!” “Because she’s my wife, and she has been for almost twenty-three
years!” my favorite boss shouted back.
I took another three steps, passing the break room and approaching the office door when the words got real.
“Yeah, the wife you married a year after your last one died. You want to talk about fucking disrespectful.”
Mr. Cooper had been married before?
I blinked at the door, feeling… I don’t know. Shocked? Taken aback?
I had worked for Mr. Cooper for nearly ten years and had never heard anything about another wife.
There were plenty of reasons why people wouldn’t share information like that, I told myself as I raised my hand. If his wife had died and he didn’t want to talk about it… it wasn’t my business to get why, much less to judge.
There were more than enough things in my life I would rather not talk about with anyone.
But the knowledge that he’d had another wife before the one I knew…. That we had known each other for so long and I had told him things I didn’t tell most others, when he hadn’t ever said anything to me about this….
This isn’t about you, I reminded myself. It wasn’t. Not even close. Then I knocked.
The voices went quiet.
The “Luna?” from Mr. Cooper was low and beyond strained.
Of course he knew it was me. No one else was dumb enough to come bother them while they were yelling. Or I could think of it like I was the only one brave enough to.
Those scaredy cats were downstairs hoping for a miracle. What they were getting was me.
“I’m leaving for the day. I have my doctor’s appointment, and I left Jason in my room. Do either one of you need anything before I go?” I called out, rolling my eyes at my own words. I wasn’t even trying to be subtle about breaking their argument up. Did they need anything? When
had I ever asked them that when I was about to walk out? Never, that was when.
There was a pause that I was pretty sure consisted of them either sitting or standing on opposite sides of Mr. Cooper’s desk, glaring at the door or at each other.
Then Mr. Cooper called out, “No, I’m fine. Thank you for asking.” I made a face at the door, because we both knew that was BS.
Then there was a rumble of a “Go to the doctor, Luna” that I barely understood.
“Okay,” I called out again, wincing at just how fake happy I sounded. “Have a good night!”
I took three steps away and stopped. Then I listened and waited. But there wasn’t a single sound from inside the office.
Until the doorknob turned suddenly and the next thing I knew the door itself was being opened.
Crap.
There wasn’t a point in hiding or running. It was just going to make it that much more obvious and worse. So, I walked like normal toward the stairs to go down, only glancing over my shoulder when I actually made it to the landing. That was when I saw that it was Rip who had followed me out.
His expression was that usual one that seemed like bottled-up thunder under skin and bone.
Screw it. I waved at him.
“See you tomorrow, boss,” I called out to him, knowing I wouldn’t get a response. He was a grumpy little goose.
My phone vibrated from my pocket, and when I picked it up, my sister’s name flashed across the screen.
It was a picture message of what she’d told me earlier was Jamaica Beach in Galveston.
Then another message came through.
Lily: WISH YOU WERE HERE
My poor little heart honestly ached, but I still texted her back.
Me: Me too. Love you and be safe.
I typed another message and then let my fingers linger over the screen, deciding whether to send it or not.
I sent it.
Me: Don’t forget about me.
Her reply was instant.
Lily: I could never forget about my FAVORITE SISTER. Her favorite sister.
Well. Okay. She had never called me that before, but I liked it. I liked it a lot.
Just as quickly as I decided that, the idea of going home to an empty house seemed like hell. With my phone still out, I shot out a quick text to Lenny.
