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.”