Chapter 4
four
. . .
Sadie
"C'mon Vince, we've gotta go," I encourage my son. "Mommy starts her new job today."
I don't necessarily expect him to understand what that means, but I need him to know that we don't have time to fuck around.
"You're still going to pick me up this afternoon?" He questions, his eyebrows moving together in question. His words are slightly mumbled with a small lisp.
"I'll be there. My new boss knows that you're the most important thing in the world to me," I tell him, booping his nose with my finger.
He grins at that, the gap where he lost his first tooth last month showing, and grabs his backpack off the kitchen chair without me having to ask twice.
Small miracles. I load him into the car, get him buckled, and pull out of the driveway with my coffee wedged between my thighs because I never remember to buy a cup holder that actually fits my travel mug.
Daycare drop-off goes smooth, which feels like a good sign after yesterday.
I kiss the top of Vince's head, tell him I'll see him at four thirty, and watch him run off toward a table of blocks without looking back once.
That part always stings a little, even though I know it means he's happy there.
I get back in the car and point it toward Beau's shop, and by the time I pull into the gravel lot at five till eight, my nerves have caught back up with me.
I don't know why I'm nervous. I've done this job before, just for a worse man in a worse mood most days. But there's an anxiety about walking into somebody's business on day one, not knowing where anything is, not knowing what they expect, that puts a knot right in the center of my chest.
Beau's truck is already there when I pull in, parked at an angle that tells me he got here in a hurry. I grab my bag off the passenger seat, along with the travel mug of coffee I definitely need more of, and head for the shop.
He's already got music going when I walk in, a rock song with a lot of heavy guitar in it, coming from a speaker balanced on a stack of two-by-fours.
He's bent over a workbench in the middle of the main room, sanding down something long and flat, and he doesn't hear me come in until I clear my throat.
"Hey." He looks up, wipes his hand on his jeans before he sets the sander down. "You made it."
"I said I would." I hold up my bag. "Where do you want me?"
"The office, where I showed you yesterday. I cleared off part of the desk this morning, figured you'd need somewhere to actually set a laptop down that isn't buried under invoices from March."
I’m touched that he at least made an effort. "You cleared off the desk. That's a start."
"Don't get too excited,” he warns with a laugh. “I put everything I moved into a different box." He grins. "You’re still gonna have to go through it, but we’ll deal with one problem at a time."
I head into the office, and it's exactly as bad as I remember it from yesterday, minus the small cleared square in the middle of the desk.
I set my laptop down there, pull the chair out, and it wobbles when I sit in it, one leg clearly shorter than the other three.
I make a mental note. New chair, somewhere on a list that's about to get very long. I have a feeling there’s a lot this damn office needs to be sustainable.
I start with the boxes closest to me, because I've got to start somewhere, and alphabetical order feels like the only sane way into a mess like this.
I sort receipts from invoices, invoices from estimates that never got sent, and estimates from what looks like personal mail that somehow ended up mixed in with years of business paperwork.
There's a birthday card in here from somebody named Aunt Carol, unopened, dated two Christmases ago.
I set it aside instead of tossing it, because he probably needs to open that himself.
The office phone rings around nine thirty, and I answer it before I think twice about it, because it’s muscle memory for me at this point. "Beau's Hand-Crafted Goods, this is Sadie."
There's a pause on the other end, like whoever called wasn't expecting a person, let alone a new one. "Uh, hi, this is Marion Cole, I've got a built-in bookshelf ordered, was just calling to check on the timeline."
I don't have the faintest idea what Marion Cole's timeline looks like, but I pull a legal pad toward me and start writing anyway.
"Let me pull that up for you, Marion, one second.
" I don't have anything to pull up, not really, not yet, but I flip through the box closest to me until I find a folder with Cole scrawled across the tab in handwriting that looks like it was done with the pen held wrong.
Sure enough, there's an order in there, dated three weeks back, with a due date that's already come and gone.
"Looks like we're a little behind on that one.
Can I get back to you by end of day with a firm date?
I want to check with Beau directly instead of giving you a guess. "
She's fine with that, more than fine, actually, sounds relieved somebody picked up the phone with an actual answer instead of going to voicemail, which I'm guessing is what usually happens around here. I hang up and immediately go find Beau.
He's not sanding anymore. He's over by the table saw, running a board through it, and he's taken his shirt off somewhere between when I walked in and now, and tossed it over a sawhorse.
I stop in the doorway between the office and the main shop, and I'm not proud of the fact that it takes me a solid three seconds to remember why I walked out here in the first place.
He's got muscles that come from actually using your body for a living, not from a gym membership.
His large shoulders fill out his frame, arms flex every time he guides the board through the blade, and a line of sweat is working down the middle of his back that I have absolutely no business tracking with my eyes the way I'm tracking it right now. It’s been a really long time since a man fucked me, and it shows.
Get it together, Sadie.
What he’s doing is working for me, but that’s a problem because I work for him. Either way, this is a fucking bad idea.
He shuts the saw off and turns around, and I snap my eyes up to his face so fast I’m sure he knows I was ogling him. "Everything okay?" he asks.
"Marion Cole called. She said she’s got a bookshelf that’s three weeks overdue. She wants a real date, not a guess."
"Shit." He grabs a rag off the workbench, wipes his hands, and I try very hard not to watch the way his stomach moves, and his forearms flex when he does it. "I can have it done by Friday if I push. You want to call her back and tell her Friday?"
"I can do that." I linger a second longer than I mean to. "You always work like this? Shirt off, during the entire day with no break?"
He nods, running the back of his hand over his forehead. "It gets hot in here by ten. The AC unit's older than I am, and I haven't had time to replace it." He tosses the rag back onto the bench. "You want the shirt back on? I can put it back on."
"I didn't say that." It comes out faster than I mean it to, and I feel my face heat up right along with it. "I mean — it's your shop. You can totally wear what you want."
He grins at those words. It’s a slow spread across his face, showing a dimple in his left cheek that I haven't noticed before. It looks like he’s trying to decide if he should give me a hard time about enjoying his body.
He doesn't, though, just nods toward the office.
"Go call Marion back. I'll get this bookshelf moving. "
I do, and I keep my eyes on the paperwork the rest of the morning, mostly, except for the handful of times I catch myself glancing through the doorway anyway.
Around noon, he knocks on the door frame, even though the door's wide open and there's nothing to actually knock on except the frame itself. "Have you eaten yet?"
"No.” I shake my head. “I didn't bring anything. I wasn't really sure what the setup was here."
"The setup's whatever we make it. I usually just grab food from the diner in town, but I can order in if you'd rather not leave.
" He's got his shirt back on now, thank God, though it doesn't do near as much as I'd like it to about the fact that I already know what's underneath it. "What do you like?"
My stomach growls, and I’m just thankful it looks like he’s going to pick up the bill because I don’t have a lot of extra money. Being a single mother to a little kid isn’t the easiest thing to do. "Anything, honestly. I'm not picky."
"Everybody says that and then hates whatever I pick." He pulls his phone out anyway, scrolling. "I'm getting the diner's turkey club and fries. You want the same, or you want to actually tell me what you like so I don't get it wrong?"
"Turkey club's fine. I’ll take extra pickles, if they do that."
He smirks. "More than likely they do that." He taps out the order, phone against his ear a second later, and I listen to him rattle off our lunch to somebody named Peggy who apparently knows him well enough to ask about his mother before she even takes the order down. He hangs up and leans against the door frame. "Twenty minutes. Peggy delivers to me, so she’ll make sure it’s here almost as soon as it’s done. ”
"Thanks." I stretch my hands over my head, feeling my back pop from sitting hunched over a desk for four hours straight. "You know, watching you out there all morning, you work hard. Like, actually hard, not just busy for the sake of looking busy."
He shrugs, and he’s almost shy about it, which doesn't match the man who took his shirt off in front of a woman he'd known for one day without a second thought. Like he’s shy about how well his business is doing, and how hard he works at it.
"I don't know any other way to be, honestly.
I grew up watching my dad work like that.
He built furniture out of a shed behind our house, did it for thirty years, never took a day off unless he was sick enough he couldn't stand up.
Guess it just got wired into me somewhere along the way. "
"Is he still around? Your dad?"
"He passed away a few years back. Had a heart attack out in that shed, working on some cabinet he never finished." He says it like it isn’t a big deal, but I catch the way his jaw tightens for just a second before he makes a point of loosening it. "I finished it for him, and delivered it to the customer myself, told them it was the last thing he ever built. I’ve been trying to build my business up ever since, I guess, like it means he’s still with me if I keep going. "
"It does mean he’s still alive if you keep going.
In your heart, and in every piece you make.
" I don't know him well enough to say it, not really, but it comes out anyway, because it's true, and because the way he said it made my chest go tight. There was a sadness in those words, and I don’t like it.
"You're keeping it alive. That's not nothing. That’s a lot of hard work, and a big emotional toll. "
He looks at me for a second longer than feels comfortable, like he wasn't expecting me to say that, or maybe wasn't expecting anybody to say it in a way that landed. "Yeah," he says finally. "Guess I am."
The moment stretches a beat too long, and I look away first, back toward the desk, back toward the mess of boxes I've still got left to sort through. "I should get back to it. Want that bookshelf date confirmed before Peggy shows up with lunch."
"Yeah. Sure." He pushes off the door frame, heads back toward the table saw, and I hear the whir of it start back up a few seconds later.
I sit back down in the wobbly chair, pull the legal pad toward me, and try to focus on Marion Cole's bookshelf instead of the fact that I just learned more about this man in five minutes than I learned about my last boss in two years, and that I liked every single thing I learned.
This is a bad idea, I remind myself again.
I go back to work anyway, still looking up to enjoy the way his body moves.