So, as I made my way toward the pizza box sitting on the counter beside the refrigerator, I felt lighter again.
Maybe I had gotten in trouble. Maybe it hadn’t been the best day ever. Maybe everything hurt. But I was home. I had gotten a kiss from someone who loved me. I had a bed to sleep in.
For all intents and purposes, it was a good day despite a couple things.
Then I opened the pizza box, saw there was only one single slice left, and I told myself again it was still a pretty good day.
I had enough in the budget to call and order another pizza if I really wanted to, and that was pretty damn good if I said so myself.
Chapter 4
I knew I should have turned around and waited to get my coffee the moment I walked into the break room and heard my bosses arguing the following week.
Again. For maybe the thousandth time or pretty close to it.
In my defense, if I walked out every time I heard them fighting over something, I would rarely get to drink a single cup of coffee. Or eat my lunch. Or refill my water bottle. Or find out if I’d read their chicken scratch on Post-It notes correctly.
That morning, more than normal, I needed caffeine. I’d had a dream about my dad for the first time in months. It had felt so real I’d woken up with tears rolling down my cheeks. It had been years since the last time I’d cried so hard… and that had only made me cry even more. It had felt like I was back living with them, back to those nights when my dad would get drunk and go from being unbearable to being a nightmare; back to the days where, if I was lucky, the woman my sisters had known as their mom would be on the couch, high out of her mind, doing nothing other than letting me know how much she hated me. I’d ended up staying awake, lying in bed, telling myself things I had told myself a thousand times.
I was loved. I had a roof over my head. Food to eat. A bed to sleep in. Money in my bank account.
I reminded myself that life was a gift—sometimes one you wanted to return, and other times one you’d want to keep forever, but it was still a gift. The grass might look greener on the other side, but at least you still had grass. There were places in the world that didn’t have any to begin with.
I was fine.
I had more than I ever would have let myself hope for.
I was fine.
I was really glad my little sister could sleep through anything. Otherwise telling her why I’d woken up crying my guts out would have been a real pain. While I went long periods of time between thinking about them, about those times in my life, my youngest sister had decided just never to think about them at all in the first place—at least not that I knew of. I had tried before to get her to discuss it, just to make sure she was fine, but she’d refused.
Knowing all that I had and reminding myself of it hadn’t helped much, but it had done enough. It got me to take a deep breath, climb out of the bed I’d had to save six months for, and shower in my own bathroom in a house I had a mortgage on—a mortgage I paid every month and even managed to put in a little extra for the principal. I grabbed my lunch bag from the refrigerator, filled with food Lily had bought that weekend, and somehow managed to remember to grab the cake I’d made the night before while Lily had made our lunch. I had fought her for so long about how she should just buy food at the school, but she’d insisted it tasted like crap and she could make something ten times better herself. After all that, I drove to work in a car that I had bought with my own money and headed to a job that I loved most of the time.
I was loved. I had a roof over my head. Food to eat. A bed to sleep in. I had an enormous bag of Skittles in my desk at work. Had an oven to bake cakes in and money to actually buy the ingredients to make them. All on my own. All because someone had given me a chance, a little love, and let me work hard to have all the things I did.
And that made me feel better more than anything else—the knowledge that I wasn’t vulnerable and didn’t have to rely on someone else for basic things.
So, more than on any other day, hearing my two bosses argue weighed me down like a hundred-pound sack of flour on my shoulders. I needed to make some coffee to wake up and get to the booth where I worked so I could pretend like I hadn’t woken up upset. I didn’t feel like trying to be subtle and break up an argument between anyone.
But I knew I would. I hated people arguing, especially when I loved one of them and cared too much about the other.
“When were you going to tell me?” came the voice that was all gruff, hoarse, round edges dipped in chocolate. It was such a nice voice, even if he did wield it like a freaking sword to chop people and their feelings in half. But at least he did it with everyone. He had high expectations and didn’t let anyone at the shop get away with things. Me—and my screwup—included.
Regardless of how he’d been with me on Friday, I had still made a nice, big birthday cake for him yesterday. I made one for everyone, even the ones I couldn’t stand at CCC. I didn’t have it in me to be mean and single them out by not bringing something for them too. But my favorite people at the shop got their favorite cakes. Everyone else got whatever box mix was on sale.
“Ripley, give me a break. I didn’t think you would care,“ the other voice, the one I’d been listening to for nearly the last ten years of my life, responded. It was softer, lighter, patient.
The exact opposite of Ripley’s in more ways than one.
“You think I wouldn’t care about who you hire to work with me?”
“Of course you’d care about that, but all I did was post an ad for the job opening. I didn’t think I needed to check with you about posting one. Come on, son,” Mr. Cooper said.
“Don’t fucking call me that. I’m not your son.”
If I had a dollar for every morning that I’d come into the break room and overheard them disagreeing over something in one of the two offices, I would have had enough money to go on that vacation to Greece I’d been promising myself for forever.
The first time I’d heard them fighting, it had worried me. It had been an argument over payroll and how the shop had too many employees the day after he had put me through his random test over how much I knew. I’d been worried for days that a lot of us at the shop were going to get fired. I was one of the youngest employees. If anyone was going to get the boot, I’d figured it would have been me. They could always contract out to a business that only did paint. I was fully aware of that.
Luckily, no one had gotten fired. It had taken two months of waiting around and eavesdropping almost daily to figure out that Mr. Cooper had put his foot down and wasn’t letting anyone get axed.
At least, no one got fired unless they deserved it.
Now, I just accepted that the man with the voice I liked listening to—and the face I liked looking at—picked arguments with Mr. Cooper for no reason at all. The sky was too blue? He’d blame him. There was some part that he needed that hadn’t been ordered? He’d blame him.
I didn’t get it, and I doubted I ever would; Mr. Cooper was great. Greater than great. I would give him any organ in my body if he needed it.
As much as I eavesdropped, I hadn’t been able to figure out what had happened to make them the way they were. If I really thought about it, there were a lot of things about them I hadn’t been able to figure out. None of us had, and we had tried. I had spent a lot of time listening to Mr. Cooper and Rip because something about their arguments felt… weird.
I was pretty sure there was some serious resentment, at least on Ripley’s part, but I couldn’t figure out why. Why Mr. Cooper would bring someone into the company—his company—who he didn’t get along with?