Love by the Slice (Valentine’s Sweethearts)

Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

ROWAN LEFT WITH four slices of pizza in a bag, and Greg wondered just how bad the kid’s life was.

Shelly left for Ezra’s apartment. He shut down the ordering system at a quarter after midnight and did all the closing duties. The pizzeria would remain closed for New Year’s Day, and that was just as well because it would give him time to figure out if kissing Shelly was about to cost him his job, his friend, and maybe a black eye.

She’d been willing. She’d turned to him and wrapped her arms around him, and he’d kissed her because her mouth was right there and, yeah, she was kissable. He’d known she was kissable all along, but tonight she’d proven it. It hadn’t been an all-out passionate thing, but she also hadn’t pulled right off him. Were there classifications for different kinds of kisses? Your mom kissed you goodbye before putting on your raincoat for the first day of kindergarten, and that was one kind, but then there was opposite end of the spectrum, where the kiss meant a whole lot of clothes were about to come off. This hadn’t been either.

Friends didn’t kiss on the mouth. And it hadn’t ben a quick peck on the lips, either. She’d hugged him, and it lasted a good two seconds.

A really good two seconds.

Greg checked his phone. Ezra had texted that he and Lacey were still selling pizzas and would probably return close to one o’clock.

Those two had just gotten engaged last week, on Christmas Eve. Greg replied, “Did you kiss her when the ball dropped?” and Ezra sent back a thumbs up.

It wouldn’t be a great idea to text, “Similarly, I kissed your kid sister.”

Kid sister was kind of a misnomer. Although Shelly had been barely twenty when she’d started delivering for Loveless, that had been years ago. She’d been working her way through college ever since.

When Shelly had looked at Rowan, something had changed about her expression. Tension and fear, as if looking into a time portal and seeing herself as a kid.

It made sense. Greg had barely noticed her when he first started making pizzas because she’d been scrawny and always exhausted. She’d barely talked to him at all. Ezra said Shelly hadn’t moved out from home as much as both of them had escaped—first him, then her once he’d secured her a part time job with Loveless—and although Ezra was still sending money back to his mother, there remained a lineup of siblings that they were attempting to extract from the trailer park.

Greg didn’t know the full story because Ezra refused to tell it, and good luck getting Ezra to talk about anything he wanted to keep quiet. Like Ezra’s relationship with Lacey, which Greg hadn’t been able to get him to talk about until one day Ezra had stopped hating her and started dating her. And then somehow, Ezra had become part-owner of Loveless and therefore Greg’s boss.

Kissing the boss’s sister was in a whole different category of bad idea than kissing your friend’s sister. So…he’d better hope Shelly kept it to herself.

Or should he instead get ahead of it and just tell Ezra?

Nah. It would be all right.

By twelve forty-five, closing was done. Ezra and Lacey would be driving the food truck back to its spot. Greg looked around the building to make sure everything was settled.

The wood-fired oven was cooling down from nine hundred degrees. His heart wasn’t. Heaven help him, but he wanted to kiss Shelly again. Except when could that happen? You didn’t kiss under the calendar for Presidents’ Day.

“Well, next year,” he muttered to himself. Because surely next year Times Square would drop a ball again, and until then, he’d have no choice but to drop the ball.

Ezra sent Greg the most perplexing texts, sometimes. For example, “Any idea why a kid is hanging around outside the shop?”

You didn’t need to be one of those New Year’s psychics with predictions on the front page of the paper to figure out it must be Rowan.

Granddad used to say not to feed strays because they’d keep coming back. He’d say this while hauling a twenty-pound bag of bird seed out to the feeder, of course, but Greg as a five year old took him very seriously. Grandma hated the mess under the feeder, but Granddad would sit on the back deck with a pair of binoculars and a birding book open on his lap, and he’d regale Greg with their list of visitors.

Then, when Grandma was nearby, he’d lower his voice to sound serious. “Never feed strays, of course. They always come back.”

Greg was on the clock at his father’s shop, so there wasn’t much time to have a conversation. Across the shop, a metal press let off a slam, and Greg adjusted his ear protection. When he replied, he only sent, “Did you ask? Is he causing a problem?”

Ezra’s response came fifteen minutes later. He’d probably gotten an order and needed to make the pizza, since he was, you know, part owner of a pizzeria. Kind of like Greg was, in theory, handling the accounts at his father’s machine shop. “Not causing a problem. Just out of place.”

At least it was twenty-five degrees today. The kid wouldn’t be freezing like on New Year’s Eve. He might not even be as cold as it was in this shop with its corrugated metal walls and twenty-foot ceilings.

Ten minutes later, Greg got another text. “Rowan came back?”

This was from Shelly, who didn’t always work Saturdays. Greg texted her, “Did you see him?”

She replied, “Is Rowan a him or a her?”

Greg replied, “I assumed anyone who’d pull that trick was a boy.”

Her response was quick. “A boy…or a starving girl who wanted to give her siblings a decent meal.”

This whole situation was perplexing to Greg, and he returned to figuring out where they needed to be advertising while behind him, the press again slammed down on the metal.

Rowan—boy or girl—hadn’t seemed starving. Sure, he (or she?) had scarfed down that pizza like there was no tomorrow, but Rowan was also scared they’d call the cops. It made sense to be able to leave on a moment’s notice.

Greg decided to leave that alone. “Did you see Rowan?”

“No, just Ezra did.”

It wouldn’t be hard to track the kid down. If Greg walked into the school and asked for Rowan, how many Rowans could there possibly be? In the afternoons, they got kids after school let out. Sometimes they got kids sneaking out of the school for lunch (and then sneaking back in again.) In theory, they could ask around and figure out what the kid actually wanted.

How would you even ask that? “So hey, were you hungry, or hungry-hungry?”

Also, Greg had heard there was a literary term for that kind of phrase, something like contrastive focus reduplication, where repeating the word changed its meaning. For example, “When you kissed me on New Year’s, was that a kiss, or was that a kiss -kiss?”

College had taught him all sorts of fun details. If only Greg could remember them all.

The thing was, you didn’t really need to know literary terminology or the reasons for the Battle of Hastings when you handled accounts receivable at a machine shop or when you slung pizzas. He liked working here okay—Dad owned the place, and it had gotten Greg and his brother through college—but it wasn’t more than a job. Loveless only offered part time hours, but it also offered contact with lots of people. Dad didn’t let Greg work directly with the customers, but at Loveless, he’d begun working directly with customers on the first day.

On his very first shift, in fact, a customer had asked him to substitute two personal sized nine-inch pizzas for an eighteen inch pizza, and Greg had to refuse on two grounds. First, that they didn’t sell personal pizzas, and secondly, because two nine inchers wouldn’t be the same size as one eighteen incher. He’d had to explain it while rummaging in his head to remember circumference and area and so on. Greg’s reward for that had been the customer realizing what Greg was driving at, then getting mad that a pizzeria across town had done that substitution once, then asking for three personal sized pizzas instead. To which Greg had replied, see point one.

Shelly was doing college, but not math. She said she really enjoyed her journalism classes, but she wanted to go into public policy. She got passionate about it.

On a slow night, he’d said, “If you could pass one law, what would it be?”

Without hesitating, she’d fired back, “Mandatory paternity testing and child support garnishment from birth.”

Greg only said, “What?” but he hadn’t needed to because Shelly was already continuing, “If paternity testing were mandatory, then nobody would get upset when the hospital did it. They’re doing two dozen other blood tests right after birth, so they might as well get a saliva sample from the father and verify the baby is his, and then by the time the baby goes home, the father’s already got an account in the child support portal, all ready to go if he skips town.”

Greg juggled this thought for a moment, but before he could respond, Shelly was already talking about childhood poverty statistics and educational outcomes. Greg didn’t manage to get out more than, “Wow,” before a large order came in, and he set about making the pizzas.

It was until that night he’d gotten a chance to ask, “Your dad was like that?”

Her reply was flat. “I didn’t have a dad.”

Greg figured she was trying to fix her own childhood. But he also knew enough from things Ezra had muttered that their mother had some kind of psychological situation going on, and had never gotten it treated, and that’s how Ezra had ended up first homeless, and second, here.

That was a lot to discuss over a pizza, something Greg had always thought of as the kind of food you ate during a football game. “The ref totally missed that call” was a different order of magnitude than, “The only thing the SATs accurately measure is childhood food insecurity.”

Later, he said, “You’d be a great social worker.”

She’d replied, “Social workers get paid dirt wages, and they’re treated with nothing but disrespect. I’m not dealing with that.”

Greg had never seen social workers treated with disrespect, but he also hadn’t dealt with any social workers, so he didn’t object.

Between projects, Greg checked his phone. A respectable amount of time had passed, so he texted Shelly, “Is Rowan back?”

“No.” It came quick enough that she must not have been making a delivery. Then, while Greg was trying to figure out a way to keep the conversation going, she added, “I feel bad for the kid.”

That was an opening. Greg replied, “It’s not like we can do anything.”

“Are you kidding? We could do so many things.”

She was definitely sitting in the shop, on one of the stools where she could lean with her elbows on the counter, her brown hair draping down alongside the phone while she worked rapidly with both thumbs at the keyboard. She’d have one foot hooked around a leg of the stool. He’d only been on that side to see it a couple of times, but when he had, she was coiled around it like a vine around a tree trunk as it climbed toward the light.

Greg replied, “Name one.”

“Get the kid hooked up with food services. Talk to the school guidance counselor about doing a wellness check. For that matter, calling in a wellness check ourselves.”

Greg replied, “That’s three.”

She sent, “Very funny.”

Greg replied, “Are you thinking child neglect, or just there’s no money at all?”

As a kid, he’d heard his parents arguing about finances, but the understood priorities were always paying the rent, getting food, paying the utilities, and keeping everyone clothed. His mother had used the same winter coat for sixteen years running. She did the same with winter boots, but my goodness, the fight when Dad tried to do the same with his work boots? For that, she’d insisted he get high quality steel-toed boots that kept him safe on the machine shop floor.

Non-slip shoes, for the record, didn’t work in a pizzeria. Unlike in most commercial kitchens, flour got right into the grooves, ending the non-slip effect in a hurry. So Greg wore his steel toed boots to Loveless, too.

Shelly’s reply came: “I don’t know which. We’d have to ask.”

How would you even do that? “Hey, Rowan? Assuming that’s not a fake name you gave us in case we called the cops…? Are your parents poor, or just poor parents?”

What Rowan probably needed was money, or rather, an adult bringing in regular money. Greg and Shelly couldn’t do that.

Shelly was still texting. “I’d ask who he lives with, if there are brothers and sisters, where he lives, and things like that. Where does your mom work? That stuff.”

Greg replied, “Would that have helped you?”

He regretted it the instant he sent it, but he could see she was already typing.

“Maybe.”

Then, “I don’t know. It would depend if I trusted them.”

Greg sent, “Why should Rowan trust the guy who made him a pizza?”

Shelly replied, “Because you’re trustworthy.”

That…was not what Greg had expected to read. In all his life, no one had called him trustworthy.

Ezra didn’t trust him. Ezra thought Greg was a screw-up. Greg’s father didn’t trust him with the metal press equipment. Even Greg’s mother, although she never said she didn’t trust him, always checked to make sure he was wearing those steel-toed boots when he went to work, as if without her supervision he’d tromp off through ten inches of snow in flip-flops.

Shelly said, “Then I’ll be the first. To Rowan, you look trustworthy.” A moment after, “You said you wouldn’t call the cops, and you didn’t. You made Rowan a whole extra pizza. You even ate a slice of it, so Rowan didn’t feel like a charity case.”

That was interesting, because at the time, Shelly had scolded him for doing exactly that—and Shelly hadn’t taken one.

Shelly finished with, “If keeping your word doesn’t make you trustworthy, what does?”

Maybe to Rowan, the social distinctions of who was important who wasn’t important were all a blur. Maybe the pizza dude was equal to the school principal and the crossing guard and the doctor and the pastor. At that age, had Greg realized a machine shop owner wasn’t on a par with the mayor of Bangor?

Greg replied with, “Thank you. So, if I see the kid again, I just need to do what I say I’ll do.”

She replied, “And be approachable. You’re very approachable.”

She must still be drunk from that midnight kiss. This was very close to buttering him up.

If he were that approachable—and that trustworthy—then maybe someday, Shelly would trust him enough to approach for real.