He seemed to swallow, to think for a minute before saying, “I was forty when she passed. We had been together since I was twenty-one.” His voice was quiet, serious. “We were together for nineteen years, and it seemed like six months. It was a lifetime, but it never felt like it.”
Was it silly of me that I felt embarrassed and even a little protective of Lydia? Knowing now that Mr. Cooper had been with someone else for so long?
He kept going, his voice still holding onto its gravity… and something else that might have been bittersweet. The hard bob of his throat confirmed it. “She was… she was the love of my life,” he admitted. “Lydia is too in a way, but Bea was my world. It’s been twenty-three years, and I don’t miss her any less than I did when she first died. Lydia came into my life a lot sooner than I would have dreamed of, a lot sooner than I would have liked, but….” His shrug looked like he had three hundred pounds on his shoulders. “It was meant to be. Lydia came when she came, and I can’t say that it wasn’t fate that brought us together.”
Oh jeez. I blinked. “How soon after?”
He swiped his hand over his head again and looked up at the ceiling. “I met her six months after.”
What was I going to do? Judge him? If he had been anyone else, I would have scoffed or thought something terrible, but Mr. Cooper had always been honest with me. He had loved me back when I hadn’t loved myself much. I had seen him with Lydia. I knew there was a deep love there.
I was the first person in the world to understand that life wasn’t white and black. I hadn’t even been able to find one person to love me romantically, much less two. All I knew was that based on the face he was giving me, other people in the past had given him a hard time for moving on, for finding love. After all this man had done for me, I wouldn’t be one of them too.
“Can I ask what she passed away from?”
His hesitation made me feel terrible. The breath he sucked in and then let out made me feel like an asshole. “She was—”
The sound of knuckles hitting the door came a second before the door creaked open and a familiar voice said, “Ready?”
Mr. Cooper ’s face instantly flushed, and he lowered his voice, “We’ll finish this conversation later, okay?”
He didn’t want to finish the conversation because of Ripley, did he? I wondered… but nodded anyway. There were some things in this life that you didn’t want to talk about. Not ever. And especially not in front of certain people.
I understood that better than most. There were plenty of years that I didn’t enjoy talking about.
“Come in, Rip,” Mr. Cooper called out a moment later.
Sure enough, the biggest man I had ever seen in my life, swung the door completely open and stepped inside, shutting it behind him. He stood there in a gray shirt that was plastered to his upper body. I glanced back at Mr. Cooper as Ripley took the seat that I had left unoccupied closest to the door. He glanced at me once, grunting out a “Luna” that I replied with, “Hi, Ripley.”
“You all right?”
“I’ll live. It’s not the first time he’s jumped me.”
Maybe that was the wrong thing to say.
“Well,” Mr. Cooper continued on the moment his co-owner seemed to have settled into the seat beside me. “We brought you in here because of what happened earlier.”
And, I was right. This was about Jason. Or maybe my cousin coming to my job and starting issues…. But I didn’t think Mr. Cooper would blame me for that. Luckily, there hadn’t been any customers around to see it, so it wasn’t like it would impact business.
Rip leaned forward and took hold of the conversation, his gaze leeching straight on me. “Tell us what’s been going on with Jason.”
Mr. Cooper jumped in immediately. “From the beginning, Luna. Tell us what’s been going on with him when he’s with you. You’ve told me some of it, but I think Rip should hear it from the beginning too.”
So this was where we were going. It had nothing to do with Rudy—thankfully. But either they had watched the video or heard that Jason had been the one to let him into the lot, and his disappearing act afterward hadn’t helped either. The dummy hadn’t thought that through at all. Didn’t he know that even if he never came back, employers checked references?
So I told them, “I never said anything, but I knew him before he started working here.”
Somehow I missed how Rip’s eyes narrowed as they flicked from Mr. Cooper to me and back to the older man again. I didn’t like the look that came over Rip’s face before he asked, “How?”
Here we went. “He dated my sister two years ago. It was a mess. I didn’t like him when she introduced me to him, and I didn’t like him six months later when it turned out he got another girl pregnant. I stayed out of it, but when he would come by the apartment and try to see her, if I was home, I would tell him to leave. Anyway, then he applied here—I hadn’t even known he was interested in working in this field back then—but I didn’t want to bring up personal stuff to either of you. I could live with thinking he was a… you know, not a good person.
“But almost immediately after he started here, he began being really rude and disrespectful. I wasn’t exactly the nicest and warmest person to him, but he was really defensive about everything. I didn’t like him, and he knew that, but I tried to be professional. Nothing helped though.
“He’s messed up a bunch of times since he started coming to help me, and I swear he does it on purpose. He doesn’t listen. He’s got a bad attitude. Insubordinate. He’s petty and lazy,” I kept going. “We get into it over everything, even before he came over to my section. Mr. C knows he’s done some petty crap, but it was on purpose, I swear. And, Rip, you’ve heard him on the phone with me, you know he’s a weasel.
“Today though, we got into a disagreement and he walked out of the room and didn’t come back for half an hour, so that was when I went to look for him. You can ask Owen and some of the other guys, they saw me or asked what I was doing, and I told them. Miguel told me he saw him outside, and that’s why I went out there in the first place. I saw him, and he ignored me and walked right by me, and the next thing I knew…” I’d gotten shoved from behind.
“You saw it happen?” Mr. Cooper asked Ripley with a frown.
“I got there after,” my younger boss confirmed, his expression tight. “Miguel and I were by the back door when we heard Luna yell, and we went right by him on the way out the door. I was too… distracted to stop and think about what he’d been doing.” I didn’t miss the way he fisted a big hand.
“You should’ve gone back in and made sure he didn’t leave,” Mr. Cooper replied pretty freaking crisply, sounding angrier than I had ever heard him, and that was saying something because I’d eavesdropped on his arguments with Rip before.
My younger boss’s mouth slackened, and I knew whatever was about to come out of his mouth was no good.
So I tried to but in. “It’s my fault. I should have said something to one of you and told you the truth when he was being a pain over the last few weeks. I should have followed him back into the building when he was making it obvious he was ignoring me—”
Rip cut me off, blatantly ignoring me as he asked Mr. Cooper tightly, “I was busy making sure Luna was all right. What should’ve happened is that you should’ve listened to me when I said you needed to quit trying to make him Luna’s apprentice.”
Wait. He’d told Mr. C not to stick him with me?
Rip kept right on going. “I told you there was something off about the kid. I told you she didn’t like him working with her.”
He’d done that too?
“I told you we should have fired him after his first fuckup, but you said ‘Let’s give him another chance. He’s young. Everyone makes mistakes,’ didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know it was that bad,” the older man claimed in a wobbly voice, his face flushing.
“Me telling you wasn’t enough?” Rip returned. “Her telling you wasn’t enough?”