9. Justin
nine
Ilean against Chris’s prep table in his bakery, the cold metal digging into my hips. “What are you doing?” It’s a rhetorical question. I wave my phone to indicate I’m onto him. How do I keep him from totally messing up his life after he and his girlfriend, Alex, had a falling out, when I’m having trouble keeping my own shit together? Truth is, it’s been a week, a whole week of beating myself up for letting Clover go. For my stupid rule: No Name, No Number. A week of wondering.
Does she think about me?
When she falls asleep at night, do I cross her mind? Or am I already just a blip in her past?
How does our one night together compare to her nights before?
To her nights now.
Does she think about it like I do? Like this was the one and only night I felt truly alive.
It can’t be, or I wouldn’t have woken up to a cold bed. To a morning without someone to share my coffee with. I’ve played this in my head over and over. I would have brought her a cup in bed. We would have kissed and cuddled and made love, and then I would have said, or maybe she would have said, ‘To hell with that stupid rule. I want to see you again.’
And she or I would have said, ‘Thank god. I was hoping you’d say that.’ And then we would have kissed again, the kiss to end all hopelessness, and…
My phone lights up with an email from my tenant.
I fire a quick reply and get back to the reason I’m here. Alex left without taking her phone, and Chris has been trying to get in touch with her via his social media. He thinks she’s with her best friend, and somehow a plan formed in his mind to get through to her that way.
It’s not pretty.
The guy knows nothing about social media. The little he does know, he learned from Alex who came to Emerald Creek for an apprenticeship at his bakery.
Now he’s live, insulting his customer base, and he doesn’t even know it.
“Dude, what are you doing?” I close my email icon, trying to get past the fact that my tenant is trying to get an extension on their rent. After what they did to me, they have some nerve.
“I’m banking on a bunch of losers to help me find Alexandra,” Chris says, talking straight into the camera. That’s live, too, as my phone screen attests a split second after he talks.
It’s time for an intervention, so I talk him through what he’s doing. Meanwhile, the email icon lights again. Another pushback from the new manager at the restaurant.
Really? The woman has no shame. I type a quick response and clear my mind by bombing Chris’s video, my head over his shoulder as he talks.
Chris finally gets the idea that he’s not going about it the right way, and he logs off.
“Hey, man, when are you going to reopen the bakery?” I ask him when he puts his phone away.
“Not ’til I get Alex back.”
I sigh and cross my arms, feeling his pain. I’m about to try and talk some sense into him, but he says, “What’s up with you? You look like shit.”
“Nothin’,” I lie. He sees right through it, so I offer, “The restaurant has a new manager. She’s busting my balls about the rent.” I’m not going to tell him I’m bent out of shape over Clover. And if this Chloe Sullivan keeps at it like that, she might become reason enough for me to be pissed all day, anyway.
“What about the rent?”
I tell him the situation in a few words, then move onto the real reason I’m here: talking my friend into reopening his bakery, into getting his life back on track, but before I can get too far, my phone rings. Haley. This should be quick, so I pick up. “Whassup?”
“Hey, so… the lady from the restaurant is here?”
You gotta be kidding me.“The fuck does she want?”
“Um… to talk to you?” She lowers her voice. “She’s really nice, and she wants to fix up the restaurant. I think you should talk to her.”
That’s not going to happen. “They want to fix up the restaurant on my money so they can sell it at a premium.”
“What do you mean?” she whispers.
“They’re late on rent.”
“Yeah! Like half the country,” she hisses.
“Three months, going on four, and asking for more.”
“Oh.”
Yeah, oh. Does my sister really think I’d be an asshole for one month late? “Why did you let her in?”
“She was super nice.”
More like, super pushy. “Really.”
“Yeah, really,” Haley insists, still whispering but in an angry way. “What do you mean about the selling stuff?” she whispers.
I can’t believe they’re actually hoping I’ll give them another extension so they can sell the restaurant instead of just folding like he should have ages ago. The guy was a permanent insult to me. To this whole town. After everything he did, I couldn’t believe he had the balls to stay in town, when he didn’t even live here. No wonder none of the locals ever went to his place. They knew the history. No matter how good his food was—when he was able to keep a decent chef around—they weren’t going to give him their business.
“What’s going on, man?” Chris asks.
I cover the phone’s mic. “The restaurant’s new manager, Murphy’s niece. She’s at the pub. Pain in my ass.”
He lifts his chin. “Shit never ends, does it.”
“You got that right.”
“Runs in the family. Nip it in the bud,” Chris says just as Haley tells me, “What do you want me to tell her?”
“Tell her I got nothing to add,” I tell Haley. “Tell her we’re closed.”
“I said that already, but now she’s inside,” she whispers, while Chris says, “Man, just tell her, her uncle was a criminal and an asshole, and there’s nothing to negotiate.”
“Why’d you let her in?” I snap into my phone.
I can sense Haley’s frustration. “I don’t know! Trying to be nice?”
Why would she care about being nice to that family? “Fuck,” I say and hang up before I add something I’ll regret, something that would hurt my sister. Did Haley already forget what Murphy did? Because I have the scars and the phantom pains that never let me forget.
“Telling you, man, just get in her face and make it clear,” Chris says. “She probably doesn’t know half the story, or she wouldn’t have made nice with Haley.”
“How’d you know she made nice with Haley?”
“Why else would she be inside the pub?”
“Maybe she’s as entitled as Murphy.”
The idea that anyone from that family is inside my pub is enough to enrage me. “That too.” Chris is right. I need to end this before it even starts. “Be right back,” I tell my friend, my long strides taking me across The Green, yet doing nothing to calm my rising anger.
So when I get to my pub, even though I’m blinded by the outside sun and can’t see who’s inside, I don’t need to think twice about what I say to the person slamming into me.
“You need to leave.”