Chapter 1 #2
“Then why the fuck do you always come straight over here?” I stalked over to the nearest shelf, grabbed a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and threw them at him. “There. Those have enough preservatives in them that they’ll still taste good after the heat death of the universe. Happy?”
“No?” He wrinkled his nose. “The heat death of the universe?”
“Yeah,” I said. I blamed Cash and his audiobooks. He’d been listening to a bunch of stuff about space lately. “You know? The thing I’d give my left nut for right now, because at least this conversation would be over!”
Brown Jacket Guy opened his mouth, then closed it again, then opened it and said, “Can I at least get an Americano?”
I fixed him with a stare. “Are you going to bitch about it tasting bad?”
“That depends. Are you going to make it properly?”
“I’m gonna make it like I always make it.”
“So no, then.” He made an unhappy face. “I’ll take it to go.”
“And a pastry?” I asked, just to be an asshole.
Fucker didn’t even blink.
Just pointed at one of the sad Danishes—it might have been apple, but who the fuck knew—and said, “Give me that one.”
I stared at him and he stared at me, and I figured both of us were wondering who was winning here, and then I moved in behind the counter and hunted for the tongs and a paper bag. I jammed the Danish in the bag with enough force that it ripped and slapped it on the counter. “Two fifty.”
“And my Americano?”
I groaned. He was definitely winning.
I turned on the machine and glared at him while it made its usual burbling and hissing noises.
Fuck if I knew what it was doing. If there was an instruction manual, I’d never seen it, and I wouldn’t have read it even if I had.
I added a scoop of grounds. Bobby kept telling me I needed to grind the beans fresh for every cup, but fuck that.
The machine was new, and I hated it. I wanted to go back to the old drip-brew pot, but Bobby had gotten it in his head that people wanted fancy espressos and, somehow, that I could make them.
He was wrong on both counts. People did not come to Goose Run Gas for nice things, and they sure as shit knew better than to expect me to provide them.
The machine took forever to dribble out a brown liquid that passed for coffee. When it was done, or near enough, I jammed a lid on the cup and slid it across the counter to the guy. “There. Coffee.”
“Is it as nasty and bitter as you?” he asked, wrapping his hand around the cup.
My glare intensified. “Here’s hoping. Maybe while you drink it, you can ask yourself why you come in here every goddamn night if it’s so terrible.”
“You are literally the only place open.”
“That’s because normal people are at home asleep at this hour,” I said. “You could try buying a thermos and making your coffee at home.”
He blinked. “Wow. You are really nailing this customer service thing.”
I flipped him the bird.
He slid a ten-dollar bill onto the counter and then still just stood there.
“What?” I asked him, gesturing at the door.
“I want my change.”
“It’s customary to tip.”
“To—” His eyebrows escaped toward his hairline. “To tip? You think you’re getting, what, a five-dollar tip out of me? For what exactly?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t spit in your cup?”
“You—” He laughed, but it wasn’t a happy kind of laugh. It was more of a “I can’t believe this shit” laugh. “You’re fucking crazy.”
“And yet you keep coming back,” I said. “Seems like you’re the crazy one.”
He shook his head. “Nope. I swear, today I’m buying a coffee machine and you won’t see me again.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d said it.
“Good.” I grabbed the bill and carried it over to the register, because fuck opening the one at the coffee booth just for a single transaction. I rang up his purchases and slapped his change down.
“What’s this?”
“Danish, coffee, and the Doritos,” I said.
“I didn’t order the Doritos.”
“Well, you’re still holding them, dude, and I’m not a mind reader.”
“Fucking fine,” he said and swept the coins awkwardly into his palm as he juggled all his stuff.
And then, because he was an asshole, he tipped all of his change into the charity box beside the rack of chewing gum and slid a single quarter back across the counter to me.
“There you go. For your excellent customer service.”
I flipped him the bird again, and he stalked outside.
I hoped he choked on Dorito dust.
But I was laughing, just a little bit, as I shoved the quarter in my pocket and settled back down in my seat to try and catch some sleep before dawn.
Sleeping in the daytime was hard. It didn’t matter how thick the blanket I’d hung over the curtain rail was—shards of light still got around it and stabbed me in the face, pulling me right back into wakefulness.
The house was quiet during the day, which was the only good thing.
Everyone was at work and Gracie was at school, but I still didn’t sleep well.
I’d gotten a few hours this morning because Cash was on afternoon shifts, so he’d dozed beside me for a bit, but I’d woken up when he’d left, and now it was almost the evening again and all I’d done was just kind of prowl around the place aimlessly.
“Night work sucks,” Danny said as he stirred something in the pot on the stove. Maybe soup. It smelled great, at least. “I don’t miss it.” He gave a wry twist of his mouth. “Of course, once I’m an EMT, I’ll get my fair share again.”
Gracie showed me her homework. It was some math puzzle about apples that she’d colored in.
“That’s good work,” I said, because I might have been an asshole to everyone else in the world, but never Gracie. “Where’s your dad?”
“He’s at Avery’s,” she said. “Mowing his lawn.”
“Is that what the kids are calling it?” I asked even though I could hear the lawnmower, and Gracie gave me a quizzical look.
“Hey, Gracie,” Danny said to distract her. “Can you help me cut these carrots up?”
We had kid-safe knives for the kitchen these days because Avery had trained Gracie up to be his little helper over at his place, and she loved to do the same here too.
I hadn’t even known you could get knives that knew the difference between skin and vegetables, but Cash and I had spent ages trying to cut our thumbs open on them, and we couldn’t, so they worked.
“You want a nap before dinner?” Danny asked, and it took me way too long to realize he was asking me and not Gracie.
“Nah, I’m good,” I said, but I went and dozed in front of the TV for a while. I didn’t wake up until Wilder opened the front door.
“Where’s Avery?” I asked.
“He has some late meeting tonight,” he said. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
I hauled myself off the couch in time for dinner and made sure that I put a plate in the refrigerator for Cash to reheat once he got home from work.
We ate, and I helped with the dishes while Wilder got Gracie ready for bed.
He added a sticker to her chart for putting her pajamas on, and then he added one next to my name for drying the dishes, because he was an asshole like that.
Joke was on him. I fucking loved collecting those stickers.
We were watching TV when I heard the familiar roar of Cash’s dirt bike coming down the street. It grew steadily louder and louder—right until it didn’t. Instead, the sound turned high-pitched, like Cash was revving the engine, and fell suddenly silent.
I was on my feet in a second, and Danny and Wilder followed me as I ran out the front door.
“Daddy?” Gracie yelled. “Daddy?”
“Stay on the porch!” Wilder shouted back.
It was dark in the street, and I couldn’t see shit for the longest time while my eyes adjusted. My heart was racing, and I felt dizzy and sick. The gravel at the edge of the road dug into my bare feet, but I didn’t give a fuck. I hardly felt it.
“Cash?” I shouted down the street. In the distance, a block away or so, headlights shone, but there was nothing in our street.
Danny yelled out for him too, and a moment later a figure appeared out of the gloom: Cash, limping toward us and wheeling his dirt bike.
The three of us hurried to meet him.
“You okay?” Danny asked. “You bleeding?”
“Okay,” Cash whispered, but his voice shook, so I knew he was lying.
Wilder got the flashlight on his phone working and sucked in a breath through his teeth when he illuminated Cash’s jeans. The knees were shredded and bloody, and Wilder hissed. “Give me the bike. You guys help him.”
“What happened?” Danny asked as we supported Cash between us and headed back toward the house.
“Pothole,” Cash whispered in my ear.
“Pothole,” I repeated.
Sometimes Cash wasn’t great at saying stuff aloud to people, even Danny and Wilder, so I did it for him. Always had, since the time we both could talk and Cash just hadn’t. Only one of us had been smart enough to shut the fuck up when we were kids, and it hadn’t been me.
Gracie was waiting on the porch, jumping from foot to foot like she needed the bathroom. She looked like she was about to cry. “Daddy? Cash?”
“He’s okay, Gracie,” Wilder said. “Everyone’s okay.”
Cash tipped his chin up at Gracie and forced a smile to prove Wilder right.
Danny and I got Cash into the bathroom and sat him on the edge of the tub. Then Danny got to work, cutting away Cash’s jeans and using tweezers to pull pieces of gravel out of his knees. Even though he wasn’t far into his training yet, it was clear he knew what he was doing.
“Frankly, I think that if any one of us can rock a pair of Daisy Dukes, it’s you,” he told Cash, and Cash responded with a wet-sounding sniffle that was almost a laugh. “Okay, so this is the part where I tell you it’s gonna hurt.”
Cash nodded grimly as Danny opened the iodine.
So yeah, it was just some gravel rash on his knees and one arm in the end. We’d had worse. And once Cash was wrapped up in his favorite blanket in his favorite chair, eating a bowl of ice cream, he seemed fine.
But all I could think about was what if he’d hit a pothole on the highway instead, going seventy? And how the hell had he hit a pothole in our street anyway? He knew it like the back of his hand.
I looked over at him from where I was wedged on the couch between Wilder and Danny and saw his eyelashes dip. Saw the shadows underneath them too and remembered I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep without my brother beside me.
I wasn’t sleeping days, and Cash wasn’t sleeping nights.
And tonight that had almost caught up to him in the worst possible way.
Fuck this shit.
I needed to get off night work before it ended up killing one or both of us.