Chapter 29
Olivia
The millwork guy had been very sorry.
He'd said it four times, which was three more than I needed, and he'd personally walked me to the loading bay and shown me the correct spec sheet and stood there while his guys pulled the right cabinet doors one by one and loaded them with a care they probably didn't extend to every order.
I'd stayed until the truck was sealed and the paperwork was signed and there was nothing left to oversee.
I was maybe ten minutes from the site, almost back, when the low fuel light came on.
The gas station appeared on the right, one of those standalone places with four pumps and a small mart that sold lottery tickets and beef jerky and coffee that had been sitting since morning. I pulled in.
I was standing at the pump, collar up against the wind, watching the numbers tick over, when a familiar truck pulled in on the opposite side.
Collins.
He climbed out, saw me, and did that thing where he briefly considered pretending he hadn't. Then he raised a hand in a wave and started pumping his own gas.
We stood there on opposite sides of the pump island in the cold, and I thought that might be the whole of it. A nod, a wave, back in our cars.
"Long drive," he said.
"Two hours each way."
"Worth it?"
"Ask me when the cabinets arrive."
He grinned, looked down at his boots. He was still in his work clothes, dust ground into the denim, a smear of something on his jacket that might have been caulk.
"You eat?" he asked.
"Not since this morning."
He jerked his head toward the mart. "They have those hot dogs that have been rotating since like 2019. I've had three of them and I'm still alive, so."
I laughed, which surprised me. "Sure."
The hot dogs were terrible. We ate them standing at the narrow counter along the window, looking out at the pumps, and Collins talked about the upper cabinets they'd gotten installed before the light went and how Walt had found a level issue in the run above the refrigerator space that would have driven the countertop template completely sideways.
"Good catch," I said.
"Walt catches everything." He took a massive bite. "Slowly. But everything."
We ate in silence for a moment. Outside, a minivan pulled up to the pump I'd vacated. Collins watched it with the focused attention of someone who had nothing important on his mind.
"I listened to this podcast once," he said.
"About communication. Or maybe relationships.
It was a long drive." He chewed. "Anyway the guy said that when someone's acting like an idiot, it's usually because they're scared.
Like, the idiot behavior is just the scared behavior wearing a coat.
" He paused. "I think that's what he said.
I might've been half asleep." He looked at his hot dog. "Could've been a bumper sticker."
I waited.
"Are you mad at Ben?" He said without looking at me, chewing with the studied casualness of someone who had definitely been thinking about how to ask that.
"Why?"
"He was weird today. Weirder than usual." He glanced at me sideways. "And then you left. So."
"I had to sort out the cabinet order."
"Yeah." He didn't sound convinced.
I finished the last of the hot dog and folded the paper wrapper into a small, neat square. Outside, the sky had gone fully dark, the gas station lights reflecting off the wet asphalt.
"He's working something out," I said finally.
Collins nodded slowly. "He does that. Takes him a while." He crumpled his own wrapper. "When I first started working for him, I did something really stupid."
"How stupid?"
He winced. "I borrowed his truck."
"Without asking."
"Without asking." He paused. "There was this girl. She needed help moving some stuff and I thought, you know, show up in a truck, that's a whole thing. Women love a truck." He looked at me. "Do women love a truck?"
"Collins."
"Right, okay. So I borrowed it. And I was trying to parallel park outside her building and there was this concrete pillar and I genuinely thought I had more room than I did and—" He made a sound like an explosion.
"Rear panel. Tailgate. Both taillights. The whole back corner basically.
And a little bit of the car next to me." He held up a finger. "Which was also not mine."
I set down my hot dog.
"And then when I got out to look at the damage I kind of—" He stopped. "I kind of reversed into the building a little."
"You reversed into the building."
"The bumper," he said. "Just the bumper. Mostly."
"What about the girl?"
"She watched the whole thing from her window." He was quiet for a moment. "Then she texted me that actually her friend could help her move and she was all set." He picked up his coffee. "We never spoke again."
"Oh, Collins."
"I know." He held up a hand. "I know. I was twenty-one and I was an idiot and she wasn't even that impressed, for the record." He shook his head. "I came in Monday morning and Ben was already there. He just looked at the truck, then he looked at me. Didn't say a word."
"What did he do?"
"Sent me home that afternoon. No explanation, nothing.
Just— go home, Collins. See you." He laughed, short and humorless.
"I thought I was done. I went home and updated my resume and called my mom and told her I'd screwed up the best job I'd ever had.
" He picked up his coffee cup. "Spent a whole week like that. Certain it was over."
"But he called."
"Sunday night. 'Monday, seven sharp, don't be late.' That was it." Collins looked out at the dark parking lot. "Never mentioned the truck again. Never docked my pay for it. Just—" He shrugged. "Moved on."
I looked at my coffee cup.
"He's like that," Collins said, quieter now. "When he decides something, that's it. He doesn't go back on it." He glanced at me. "Takes him a while to decide. But once he does."
He let the sentence sit there, unfinished, the way the best sentences sometimes had to.
Outside, a truck pulled away from the pumps, its taillights fading into the dark. I thought about Ben standing in the clearing this morning, not quite able to look at me. I thought about the way he'd come after me, tried to do the right thing, and ended up doing the wrong one.
He was deciding something.
"He's a good man," I said.
"Yeah." Collins stood up, crumpling his cup. "Dumb as a post sometimes, but yeah."
He tossed his trash, zipped his jacket, and headed for the door. Then he stopped, hand on the glass.
"For what it's worth," he said, without turning around. "The truck looked fine after. You'd never know."
He pushed through the door and walked back out into the cold, and I sat there alone at the narrow counter, looking out at the dark road.