First-Time Caller

Chapter 12

S he’s a natural. Poised and funny and sarcastic. Whip-smart and quick on her feet. We’ve been spending more and more of our time together on the phone lines, and Lucie charms every single one of our callers.

Even the weird ones.

“How tall are you?” asks our current caller, a man with a brusque voice and absolutely zero tact. I wanted to kick him off as soon as he asked her shoe size, but Maggie appeared on the other side of the window with her earbuds in, gesturing wildly to keep it going. I have no idea why, unless she wants to watch my head explode in real time.

“Um.” Lucie glances at me and I shrug. She’s the boss, as far as I’m concerned. She can play it however she wants. Though I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to her ending this call and moving on to the next. He’s treating her like she’s a fish at the aquarium. Or a fillet at the meat counter. “Five ten and a half?”

“That’s tall,” he says.

“Is it?” she asks. “I always thought I—”

“What does your face look like?” he cuts her off.

She pauses and blinks, startled. “I don’t know,” she says slowly. “It’s a face.”

I tuck my smile in the palm of my hand. Lucie is fine when she forgets she’s on a radio show orchestrated to find her a relationship, but as soon as she’s faced with a direct question about herself, she becomes stilted and awkward.

And she says I’m the one who has trouble talking about myself.

She notices my look because she turns slightly in her seat, her knee digging into my thigh. “What?” she asks. “What are you laughing about?”

I hold up my hands. “Nothing. I’m not laughing.” I pull my mic closer, thoroughly unable to contain my grin. “Don’t worry, Baltimore. Lucie does indeed have a face.”

She crosses her arms over her chest. “Fine. You tell him what my face looks like.”

“Well, you have a nose.”

She huffs.

“And two ears. Those are nice.”

“There you go,” she says to the guy on the other side of the headphones. The one I forgot existed. “I have nice ears.”

“Long hair,” I continue. I grin at her. “The better to strangle me with.” Her forehead creases in a heavy frown. “And she gets a dimple on her chin when she’s glaring at me.” I laugh.

I curl away to avoid the flick to my arm and keep the other stuff to myself. How her eyes are the prettiest green I’ve ever seen. How the freckles across her nose are a match for the ones dusted over her shoulder—the ones I keep getting a glimpse of every time the collar of her sweater slips. How her laugh is husky and warm and makes her whole body come alive. That it starts somewhere in her belly and twirls ribbons around her, making her fucking glow.

I’m noticing things I shouldn’t be noticing and I’m not as mad about it as I should be.

“None of that is really helpful,” the guy on the other end of our headphones says.

“Then you’re not who she’s looking for.” I roll my eyes and hang up. “We’re going to take a quick music break. Lucie, what do you want to hear?”

She’s relaxed in the chair next to me, her long legs kicked out beneath the desk. She smiles at me and I can’t help but smile back. “‘A Kiss to Build a Dream On,’ by Louis Armstrong, please.”

The smile falls off my face in increments, a sharp crack in the middle of my chest. I’ve heard that song a million times, in a million different hospital rooms. Through chemo treatments and MRI scans and doctor’s visits. Whenever my mom needed to go somewhere else, she chose that song. Every time.

It’s a painful reminder of memories that have always been easier to hide than handle. Disinfectant and sterilizer and the chemical-clean smell of hospitals.

“When Maya was a newborn, she’d cry half the night,” Lucie explains, oblivious to my mental spiral. “I’d try to sing her this song to calm her down, but I was so tired I could never remember the words. I ended up just singing the chorus over and over.” Lucie’s smile dims when she notices the way I’ve gone still. “What’s wrong?”

I shake my head and tug myself away from memories that still feel too sharp, the edges poking at wounds that I never figured out how to heal. “Nothing,” I say. I clear my throat and swivel in my chair to quickly flip through the music library. I’m operating on muscle memory as I pull up the song. “You really are a romantic, huh?”

It’s a barb I haven’t lobbed in her direction since our first night together. She lifts her chin and scowls at me. “You don’t need to say it like it’s a bad thing.”

“I’m not,” I say, knowing that I am. I’m not being kind, but I’m also not in a place where I can make myself stop. I’ve always done better with a buffer around any strong emotion. It’s how I’ve survived. I’ve lost track of that with Lucie.

She’s here to find a date. I need to remember that.

“Louis Armstrong.” I hit the button for the transition harder than I need to. “As requested.”

I don’t bother letting our listeners know we’ll be right back. I start the song and then tug off my headphones so I don’t have to hear the opening notes. They hit the desk with a clatter.

I reach for the coffeepot just so I have something to do with my hands. “Need a fill-up?”

“No, thanks,” she says slowly, hesitant, probably trying to figure out why my mood plummeted as soon as she made her song request. The leather of her chair creaks beneath her as she shifts. “If I have coffee too late, I won’t get to sleep and I have an early shift in the morning.”

I grasp the conversation change with both hands. I need to get back to neutral ground, where I’m not such an asshole. “Is that— are you going to be okay in the morning? Not too tired?”

She shrugs. “I’ll manage. Having a kid and sleep deprivation go hand in hand. And the guys at the shop all know I’m doing this, so . . .” She shrugs again. “It’s been fine so far.”

“The shop?” I can’t believe we’ve been sitting here together every other night for two weeks and I don’t know what she does.

“Mm-hmm. I’m an auto mechanic. Hence the grease.” She wiggles her fingers and I see the smudge of something across her knuckles. “Hazard of the job. I think I’m perpetually grease-stained. I had a guy tell me once it’s off-putting that I have such a burly job.”

“Burly?”

“I think he was trying to say masculine.”

What a fucking idiot. “I hope you kicked him in the nuts.”

She sighs and shrugs her shoulders. That resigned look appears on her face again. Like she was silly for ever expecting anything different. I hate that look.

“I wanted to,” she says quietly. “I wish I was brave enough to.”

I fill my mug, still feeling buzzy and anxious. “Is your shop local?” I ask, half paying attention.

She nods. “Yeah. Down in Fells. The one with the blue roof?”

I know the place. I pass it all the time. “I think Jackson got his oil changed there once.”

“Really?” She smiles and cocks her head to the side. “What sort of car does he drive?”

“A Honda Civic,” Jackson answers from the door. I slosh some of my coffee over the rim of the mug. I didn’t even hear him come in. “It was the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s top safety pick for 2022. Superior marks in front crash prevention.”

“That’s great,” Lucie says, amused.

“Isn’t it?” Jackson pulls the door shut behind him, ignoring me completely. He has a box of Berger cookies on top of his clipboard. He holds it out to her. “Want a cookie?”

I double down on my bad mood.

He keeps doing this. Appearing out of nowhere when I’m in the booth with Lucie, disregarding his schedule, giving me knowing looks. He’s trying to piss me off and I don’t know why.

It’s working though.

“There’s not exactly room in the booth for another person right now,” I snark, annoyed with the song and annoyed with Jackson and annoyed with myself for being annoyed. Lucie freezes with her arm extended toward the cookie box and they both turn to look at me. I stare pointedly at Jackson. “Did you need something?”

Jackson raises both of his eyebrows. “Traffic and weather together, man. You know the drill.”

I glance at the clock. “Not for another ten minutes.”

An amused smile appears on his stupid, smug mouth. He hands Lucie the entire box of cookies. “I usually do it after your music break.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Should I leave, or”—Lucie nibbles on her cookie, watching us go back and forth—”do you guys need the room to work this out?”

“No, I’ll leave. I need something to eat anyway.” I push back in my chair. What I really need is space, and I’m not going to find it in this microscopic room with three people crammed into it. I’m out of sorts, twisted up by that song and every painful memory it’s tugged to the surface. I just need a second to collect myself and I’ll be fine. I hand Jackson my headphones. “All yours.”

Jackson gives me a baffled look. “Thank you,” he says. “For allowing me to do my job.”

It takes everything in me to not punch his arm as hard as I can. But this room is full of very expensive equipment and I can afford to replace exactly none of it, so I back out calmly and stalk toward the break room.

I grab a Little Debbie oatmeal pie instead of the cookies Jackson confiscated and break it into tiny pieces, aggressively chewing while watching Jackson and Lucie in the booth, their heads bent together. Are they talking about Honda statistics? I feel like Jackson is the type of guy to have the owner’s manual memorized. She’s a mechanic. She’s probably interested in stuff like that.

“You’re a terrible wingman,” Maggie says, appearing out of nowhere. I jump and almost choke on my tiny oatmeal pie. She slams her fist in the middle of my back, but it doesn’t exactly feel altruistic. “You know you’re supposed to be finding her a boyfriend, right?”

“Isn’t that what I’m doing?”

She studies me. “Is it? You haven’t let her talk to anyone for more than three minutes.”

“Three minutes is our average length of call.”

“You’ve been on the air together for two weeks, Aiden.”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“You’re cutting our callers short.”

“I’m letting her talk to a bunch of different people. This stuff takes time, Maggie. She’s not going to make a love connection right away. That’s unrealistic.”

“Is it unrealistic? Or do you want it to be unrealistic?” Maggie sets her hands on her hips. She fixes me with a stern look. “Is this going to be a problem for you?”

“What?”

“You know what.”

I cross my arms over my chest. “I don’t know what.”

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the station-issued cell phone. We use it for text message promotions and late-night Door-Dashing.

“I’m not an idiot, Aiden. I know you think this idea is stupid. Beneath you.” I open my mouth to respond, but Maggie points aggressively in the direction of the booth, cutting me off. That’s not what I think at all. “You’re supposed to be helping her find her happily ever after in there. Do I need to remind you that your job, and everyone else’s, depends on it?” She presses the phone into my chest. “So turn that frown upside down and go make some magic for that woman. She deserves it.”

She does deserve it. But her candidates right now aren’t exactly showstoppers. Maggie hits me with the phone again and I flinch. “Why are you trying to shove the bat phone into my chest cavity?” I ask.

“I want you to give it to Lucie.”

“Why?”

Maggie throws up her hands. “Are you going to question every little thing I do?”

Probably. “Why does she need the phone?”

“So she can take text messages from callers without handing out her personal number to a bunch of weirdos who want to know if she has ears,” Maggie says. “I want to give her a chance to get to know the men that interest her. On her own terms.” She fixes me with a fierce glare, waiting for me to object. I wisely keep my mouth shut. “I got the news tonight. We scored a major sponsor. From this moment forward, her segment will be called ‘Lucie’s Road to Love, sponsored by Mr. Tire.’”

I stare at Maggie. “Are you kidding me?”

Maggie doesn’t so much as smile. “What?”

“Is that for real? Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack. Why are you making that face?”

“ Lucie’s Road to Love ? Mr. Tire ? Why not just slap a Royal Farms sticker on her forehead and call it a day? If she finds love, everyone in the greater Baltimore area can get a free chicken basket.”

Maggie is unamused. “Are you done?”

“Don’t stand there and tell me she deserves magic when you’re auctioning her to the highest bidder.”

Something flashes in Maggie’s eyes. Fury with a healthy dose of violent enthusiasm. She looks like she could murder me with her pinky toe and enjoy every second of it. “I’m not auctioning Lucie, you moron. I’m leveraging the situation for our failing station. I’m doing what I have to do because someone gleefully drove us right into the ground.” She slaps the phone into my chest one last time. “Get over yourself and this superiority complex that seemingly cropped up out of nowhere. Give her the phone. Let her talk to people. She can decide for herself if she wants to explore anything further with them. No more gatekeeping.”

She holds the phone to my chest until I reluctantly take it. “That woman is finding her match, Aiden. Whether you’re on board with it or not.”

AIDEN VALENTINE: The text lines are now open for . . . “Lucie’s Road to Love, sponsored by Mr. Tire.”

LUCIE STONE: [laughter]

AIDEN VALENTINE: That’s enough.

LUCIE STONE: I’m sorry, it’s just—

AIDEN VALENTINE: I know.

LUCIE STONE: Is it weird I’m pleased? I feel like an F1 driver. I’m sponsored by Mr. Tire.

AIDEN VALENTINE: I’m pretty sure your road to love is sponsored by Mr. Tire.

LUCIE STONE: Don’t say it like that.

AIDEN VALENTINE: Like what?

LUCIE STONE: Like it’s something gross.

LUCIE STONE: It’s very pure. Poetic, almost.

LUCIE STONE: Come wander down my road to love.

AIDEN VALENTINE: Now you’re the one making it gross.

AIDEN VALENTINE: [sigh]

AIDEN VALENTINE: As a reminder, Baltimore, don’t text weird stuff to the phone. If you text weird stuff, I’ll be the one who answers and I can guarantee you won’t enjoy it. The phone is monitored. Don’t—what? What’s that look?

LUCIE STONE: You got very intense just then.

AIDEN VALENTINE: Remind me to tell you about the foot pictures.