Pepper
(Five Years Later)~
While I did my best to never complain about my blessings, finding and keeping good help was hard.
Since I didn’t need more than a couple of full-time employees, I employed a lot of high school kids for the part-time stuff, but those kids kept growing older and graduating on me, leaving me always looking for help.
Now, when I had first opened The Flower Shoppe five years ago, I’d had Leah to help me, and it’d been both a wonderful and therapeutic experience for the both of us.
After dating her father since college, then getting married and starting a family, we’d gotten a divorce after twenty years together, and it’d been a huge adjustment for all of us.
When I’d first met Tullie, I hadn’t paid him much attention, him being one of the many other students in my art-history class, but after being paired up with him for a project, that had changed.
He’d been a six-foot-one ball of curiosity, and with his light blonde hair, brown eyes, and sweet face, I’d fallen hard for him.
Always inquisitive and active, we’d had that in common, and it’d been refreshing that Tullie hadn’t cared about being ‘cool’.
Growing up, I hadn’t been nowhere near to being cool, but I hadn’t minded in the least. My parents, Graham and Wendy Milo, had raised me to be authentic, choosing happiness over what others had thought of me, so I had walked around looking like a total mess most of the time.
Of course, being the sports fanatic that I’d been, and also playing volleyball like it’d been my life’s blood, I hadn’t ever had the need to check my hair or makeup when out in public, but I’d been fine with that.
Plus, nothing had been more important to me than my best friend, Roxanne Rafferty, and we’d been two peas in our own perfect little pod, always choosing happiness.
Even when Roxanne had been diagnosed with Usher’s Syndrome, that hadn’t stopped us.
She, her family, and I had all taken sign language classes, and I could still sign with the best of them, even though she lived states away now.
In a sweet turn of events, during high school, Royce Cameron, our school’s star quarterback, had fallen hard for Roxanne, and upon graduating from college, he had proposed to her, the both of them getting married before starting his career in the NFL.
Nowadays, he was a sports broadcaster, and Roxanne was a literacy advocate, and they both lived in Nevada.
At any rate, once Tullie and I had graduated from college, we’d gotten married, and it hadn’t been long before Leah had come along.
Though it’d been a struggle at first, Tullie had taken his degree in chemical engineering to Streep Chem, and I could remember all the long hours that he’d had to work just to prove himself among all the other gifted minds in the company.
Still, Tullie had made a name for himself rather quickly, and it hadn’t been long before his intelligence and drive had gotten him promotion after promotion.
I, on the other hand, had taken my degree in marketing to a small ad agency that had been the perfect fit for me at the time.
Since a marriage took sacrifices, had we’d both been workaholics, our marriage never would have lasted as long as it’d had.
So, I’d done the nine-to-five bit as Tullie had put his all into his career, something that I hadn’t minded at the time.
However, once Leah had come along, everything had changed.
Though Tullie had adored his little girl, work had been all that he’d known, and so I had quit my job to become a full-time mom, and I had raised her while Tullie had provided for us financially, something that most women would balk at, but it hadn’t bothered me in the least. The one thing that I could say about my ex-husband was that he hadn’t ever made me feel like the money earned had been ‘his’.
To this day, Tullie March didn’t have one stingy bone in his body, and that was just one of the many fine qualities about the man.
Nevertheless, somewhere along the way, we had become roommates, and it was a regret that would probably always stay with me.
Our divorce also hadn’t come as a surprise, nor had it come with any fireworks.
It hadn’t been until I’d realized that we’d gone six months without sex that I’d had no choice but to sit Tullie down and talk with him about our marriage.
When he had shared feelings that had mirrored mine, we had spent the next three months talking every night about Leah, our marriage, our friendship, and our futures.
So, two months after that, divorce papers had been signed, and Tullie had left me with enough money to start my own business.
By then, Leah had been entering high school, so fifty-fifty custody had been an easy thing to agree on, and though disappointing, that had been the beginning of our new lives, and that’s when the old Pepper had started reappearing.
For twenty years, I’d been playing it safe, dressing like an adult, and making my husband and child proud of me, but if you looked at me now, you’d wonder if I was colorblind.
Starting my own business had also been scary as hell.
My dad worked as a warehouse manager and my mother had worked as a city clerk, so neither of them had been much help in the advice arena, but with the internet being what it was, it hadn’t been that hard to get started.
Plus, I’d also been lucky enough to have Tullie in my corner, something that I would always be grateful for.
While my daughter’s parents might be divorced, we hadn’t broken her family in the way that most divorces could.
When I’d finally been ready to open the shop, everyone had shown up in support, and Royce had even posted it on his social media page, turning me into an almost overnight success.
Not for nothing, not only was Royce Cameron gorgeous as all get out, but having four Super Bowl rings throughout his career had made him pretty famous through endorsements.
Roxanne being deaf and not your average sports wife had also catapulted their fame in a way that had taken all of us by surprise.
For whatever reason, the public had fallen in love with the way that Royce was in love with his wife, and it really was the stuff of romance books and romantic legends.
Love aside, Kelly Jermaine had finally graduated from high school, and she had put her two-weeks’ notice in, having gotten into Harvard, which wasn’t located in Macon.
Now, while I was happy as hell for her, hiring new people always sucked.
June and July were prime wedding months, and so I couldn’t afford to dilly-dally the process.
However, I also couldn’t afford to hire someone lazy, something that no business needed.
As I locked the shop up, I waved to Suzanne Ryder, the photo studio owner across the street, glad to call the end to this day.
No matter that I’d done it for five years in a row already, I always needed a couple of weeks to recover from Mother’s Day.
In fact, I was pretty sure that every flower shop in the country had to recover from it, not to mention all the bakeries and restaurants.
Getting into my car, I started the ignition, then headed home, eager for the silence that greeted me every evening. While I loved people, socializing, activity, and noise, even superheroes needed to rest every now and again.
~
Josiah~
While I hated the frigid pain of winter, summer was an entirely different animal altogether.
Shade couldn’t always be found, and the sweaty mess that came with it was always unpleasant.
Luckily, I had a few more weeks before things would become unbearable again, and if I had to pick my most favorite months out of the year, they’d be April and October; April because the weather was always perfect, October because I’d always been a fan of Halloween.
Growing up in Kern, Oregon, life had been simple and almost like living in a damn family sitcom.
My father, Gene Austin, had been a history teacher for our only high school, and my mother, Mara Austin, had been a bank teller at one of the only two banks in town, and with no siblings to share the spotlight, I’d gotten away with a lot, though I had also gotten punished for a lot more.
Nonetheless, with Kern being a small town, Halloween had always been a fun affair, no one worried about crime like in the big cities.
In Kern, everyone had known everyone else, and every parent on the block had known us kids by name.
Whenever I looked back on that time in my life, it was always with a fondness that made my heart ache a bit.
Unfortunately, it always took adulthood to make you realize just how much you’d taken childhood for granted.
In addition to that idealistic childhood, I’d also been fortunate enough to have had a stellar career in the military.
I had joined at the ripe old age of eighteen, and if ever there was a crash course in growing up, it was the military.
Wanting to be the best of the best, I had joined the Marines, and nothing changed a man like experiencing the military up-close and personal.
I mean, you could read the books and watch the movies, but none of those depictions ever came close to the actual experience.
Only other service members understood and felt the profound difference that defending your country made.