Libby blinked with surprise at Sam’s broad back. All right, he didn’t believe that she and Ryan could find a way to get along, but he didn’t have to be rude about it. She found his aloofness unsettling—she was used to the Lone Ranger hovering around her.
“Okay, see you, Libby!” Madeline called out to her, throwing a tote bag over her shoulder and then lifting a hand. She walked up to where Luke was standing and slipped in under his arm.
A swell of jealousy and hope filled Libby. She wanted that sort of affection and love in her life and always had. She wanted to be wanted and needed. Funny how she kept ending up with people who didn’t want her or need her.
“So . . . which way to the car?” Tony asked, having hoisted a rusted toolbox from the bed of Sam’s truck.
“This way,” Libby said, and turned her back on the happy couple and Sam.
Her car was parked next to Mrs. Kendrick’s old Buick, which they kept around for emergency transportation when one of their cars was in the shop, as Libby’s had been frequently the last few months. But lately, Libby had not been able to get that one to start, either.
Tony squinted at her car. He put down his toolbox, took a smoke from his pocket. “It’s a Dodge,” he announced.
“Does that make a difference?”
“Just saying.” He wandered over to the car, and with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, he popped the hood and propped it open. “Oh yeah,” he said, nodding.
“Oh yeah? Oh yeah what?” Libby asked, moving in beside him to have a look. Only she had no idea what she was looking at. A lot of greasy things were all she could see.
“It needs work.” He leaned down, started sorting through his toolbox.
Libby heard the sound of two vehicles start up and drive away. She leaned to her right and through the open garage door she watched Sam’s truck move down the road ahead of Luke’s Bronco.
He hadn’t even said good-bye, hadn’t told her to stay out of trouble. It stung—ignoring him was her thing, and honestly, she’d started to come around to his showing up with basketsful of unsolicited advice.
She settled against the Buick as Tony began to dismantle parts of her engine. She watched him a few minutes and asked, “Did you learn to do this in the Army?”
“Marines. And no, my old man taught me about cars.” He paused to take a drag from the cigarette he’d perched on the edge of her car, and then adjusted the dirty bandana he’d tied around his head.
“May I ask what happened?”
Tony squinted at her from the corner of his eye. “I’m guessing you aren’t talking about what happened when my old man taught me about cars. I was in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. Heard of it?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Meanest place on earth, I’ll tell you that. Ran into an IED.” He glanced at Libby again. “Improvised explosive device. That’s what the locals make to blow up big nation armies.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Me too. Sure has put a crimp in my style.” He leaned over the car again, tapping on something. His pants, Libby noticed, were stained, as if they hadn’t been washed in some time. His shirt was torn at the hem. “If you know about cars, maybe you could get a job at Wilson’s in Pine River,” Libby suggested, referring to the oldest auto shop in town.
“Got no way to get there,” he said. “No license, no wheels. Not to mention hard to drive without a leg.” He grinned at her as if he found that amusing.
Libby wondered why Tony lived so far out if he couldn’t drive. Once, her dad said that the people who came to live in the mountains around Pine River were usually running from something. At the time, she’d thought Grant was referring to himself, because if ever there was ever a man who ran from responsibility, it was him.
“Maybe Sam could take you,” she suggested, absently studying her cuticle.
“Sam? He drives me around a lot, that’s for sure. To the store, to the clinic. To my meetings. Not fair to ask him to come and get me every day and take me into work.”
“What meetings?” she asked curiously.
“AA,” he said, squinting at her again through a tail of smoke. “Twice a week. Sam, that dude has a sweet tooth. He likes the cookies.”
The Stuffed Shirt formerly known as Sam didn’t seem the sort of man who would drop someone off at a meeting and run in to get a cookie or two. “You mean you bring him cookies from your meeting,” she clarified for her own benefit.
But Tony shook his head. “It’s not my meeting, it’s our meeting. We go twice a week, and everyone gets a cookie. I mean, you sit for an hour or so. People get hungry, so they put out cookies.”
While Tony explained the reasoning behind providing cookies at meetings, a bell was clanging in Libby’s head. “Wait—Sam goes, too?”
“Sure,” Tony said, his focus on the engine of her car. “I thought you knew that.”