Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Good!” Dad said harshly. “Do you think you could sell it for what you owe?”

  “Yes, but I’d have to go to court and seize it first,” I reminded Dad. We had learned years and years ago that it was much easier said than done to put a lien on someone’s property. It was always better to have them sign it over on their own.

  “Ay a la vey!” Dad grunted. “Will he come around, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I need the money. I was doing fine until I had two big jobs show up. I thought it was going to be better. More money. You know. Then all of a sudden people won’t pay and I’m screwed!”

  Now my mother was stroking my arm as though she were being supportive. “And you have to shake that poor girl down for four hundred dollars because of that?”

  “Yes, Mom,” I groaned. “Please. Don’t worry so much about that poor girl. Tansy is a smart woman. I’m sure she’ll land on her feet.”

  “She seems like a lovely girl,” Mother said thoughtfully. “Have you—?”

  “Don’t start!” I warned her. “Mom, don’t you dare start.”

  “You know,” Mother began slowly, drawing out each syllable as though she were giving me time to throw myself out of the car to escape what was coming. “Damion spoke to us last night.”

  Oh. My. God! I was going to kill him. Murder. Him. He would not live long enough to walk down the aisle. Lena would be a widow before she was a bride. Yep. Murder. Death. Kill him! What had my brother been thinking?

  My hands were suddenly sweaty on the steering wheel. I could not breathe.

  “About Cari,” my mother clarified. Because really, that needed to be clarified. Because all three of us didn’t know exactly what she was referring to. “Damion told us that your relationship with Cari wasn’t what we all thought. Damion told us that she was a terribly mean person and if she hadn’t died unexpectedly from that heart condition, that you might have led a very miserable life with the girl.”

  My father grunted. “Damion said she made you sell the Mustang.”

  “Actually, she sold it without my permission out of spite,” I managed to say without choking to death on the words. “She did a lot of things just for spite.”

  “I’m so sorry, mijo,” my mother whispered. “So very sorry. But you cannot really believe that all women are like her!”

  “I don’t,” I said flatly. This was sort of true. So I shrugged and hoped that my mother would just let this go. Now. “I don’t believe they’re all like Cari. I just don’t want to take the time to weed out the ones that are. And don’t even try to sit there and tell me that Cari was an isolated incident. I’ve heard my friends and my mechanics talking about their wives and girlfriends. There are many more ugly women out there than pretty ones. If we’re talking about their personality, of course.”

  My father grunted. Funny, but I actually had the feeling that he supported me on this belief. Sometimes I wondered how he had survived so many years with my mother, but then I realized that this was probably why the garage had done so well. My father spent every waking moment at the shop. Which begged the question, what did he do with his time now?

  “Okay!” My father held up his hand to forestall any other comments by my mother. “So the shop is in trouble. Kind of. As in the shop needs money for taxes, which it could easily provide if people would just pay their bills.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about that finance company we talked about using a few years ago?” my father asked immediately. “That seemed like a good idea.”

  “Yeah, before recession hit and banks aren’t willing to loan anyone money without a DNA sample and a contract for their oldest child,” I muttered. “Not going to work, Dad. Most of these people wouldn’t qualify because they don’t pay their bills. And of course, that’s why they’re on my problem list.”

  “What if we send letters?” my mother volunteered. “We used to send collection letters years ago. People were so afraid of them that they paid immediately.”

  I sighed. “You’re right, Mom. When people cared about their credit, those letters made a big impact. At the moment I don’t actually think that these people care about their credit or their reputation or anything.”

  “What kind of world do we live in now?” Mom sounded appalled. “I cannot understand how anyone thinks that it’s all right just to walk away from money that they owe! It’s not like someone signed their name on the estimate and then told you to do the work with the assumption that it would be free!”

  That was true. The guy’s name was Harvey Kraus and he had absolutely written me a check in good faith for the first half of the transmission. I considered myself lucky that I tried to deposit the check before the guy came back to try and pick up his truck and pass me another bad check to pay for the other half.

  “That’s not what’s important here, Mom.” I told her. “The important thing is that you and Dad realize that I’m not going to start dating again. I don’t care if Cari happened to be the only hellhound in the litter. I’m not taking a chance. So as long as we have that straight…”

  My dad started laughing. My mother looked outraged. But I at least had a chance to confess my problem to them both. Now we could all move on. Right?

  I pulled into their driveway and paused. This was the house that I had grown up in. There were so many memories here. My parents were good people. I was lucky to have them. Yes. They drove me crazy on occasion, but for the most part they meant well.

  “Look,” I said, leaning around to look at my mother in the backseat. “I know that you just want to see me settled and happy.”

  “Valentino…”

  “No.” I held up my hand. “You’ve told me that a thousand times. But I am settled and happy. When I was married to Cari I thought that it was the end. It was going to be the absolute end of everything. It would never end. I used to lay awake at night and think about how many years I had in front of me to deal with her bullshit. How many years I was going to have to just close my mouth and hide at the shop just to avoid her horrible behavior and all of the nasty things that came out of her mouth.”

  My mother covered her mouth with her hands. It was dark in the car. I couldn’t see much of her expression in the greenish light coming from the dashboard, but what I could see was pretty horrified. She looked as though I had just broken her heart.

  “I know,” I continued slowly, “that it’s considered tragic when someone in their twenties dies of an undiagnosed heart problem. But honestly, I think it was a blessing because that woman wasn’t doing a damn thing to make the world a better place.”

  My father cleared his throat. “I think what your mother and I just want you to understand is that not all women are like that. You are right. There is always a risk involved when you begin a relationship with a woman. There is a possibility that she isn’t truthful with you or that she will change into someone mean and bitter as you grow older. Things happen. But you are older now. You are much wiser and you have lived a lot more. This means it will be harder for you to be taken advantage of.” My father patted my arm and opened his car door. “It’s just something to think about.”

  Uh huh. I was thinking about it all right. I was thinking about the fact that Tansy Economides was a complicated woman who could be sugary sweet when she was working for a tip and a total shrew when she wanted something for nothing. Maybe Dad was right. Obviously, I was getting better at figuring people out.

  Wait. Did I actually have Tansy figured out? Not in a million years!

  My father closed his door and then opened the back door for my mother. She leaned forward and gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Mijo, please don’t close yourself off from everyone. Okay? I don’t want my sweet Valentino to be an old man who dies alone.”

  My mother got out and Dad closed the car door. They waved to me as they walked up to the well lit front entrance of their cozy little house. They’d lived a full and happy life together. It wasn’t something that we talked about very much, but I
had always wondered what would happen when one of them died. Would the other one be able to go on? As much as I suspected that they were constantly at each other’s throats when they were younger, now that they were in their “golden years” they had become totally dependent upon one another.

  I shivered as I started to back out of the driveway. That was a horrible thought. Was it better to love hard and lose somebody or to never lose at all? I had been depressed when Cari died. I remember feeling so helpless. She’d had her heart attack and that’s when they had discovered this horrible heart valve malfunction. She had been in the hospital for a week and there had been nothing that they could do. She needed a heart transplant, but hearts didn’t fall out of the sky. She had begged me not to let her die. She had been afraid and yet there was nothing that I could do. That tore at me.

  But once she was gone? I am ashamed to admit that the relief started almost as soon as the funeral was over. I had walked into my little house four blocks from the engine shop and there had been nobody to shout at me for leaving my boots by the door. Nobody to complain that I was such a filthy pig that there was constantly a ring in the bathtub. No one telling me that my hands were too rough to touch her or that I smelled like a grease pit. No. I didn’t miss my late wife at all. And that was probably the thing that made me the most hesitant to get into another relationship. If I didn’t miss her at all, then why change anything?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tansy

  Three days. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that this was the third day. Meaning the third day of getting up in the morning and going to the real estate office, then coming to the restaurant and pulling a double shift after that. Now it was eleven o’clock on Thursday evening and I was dead on my feet. Literally.

  I placed the refilled salt and pepper shakers back on the tables. This was my very last task of the evening. I had rolled bundle after bundle of silverware. I had swept. I had refilled all of the little sugar packet containers, the salt and pepper shakers, and I had even cleaned the little silver trays that the condiments sat on. My section was spotless and now it was time to go home. If I were lucky, I would never see the inside of this place again. At least not for a few years maybe.

  I frowned. Well, maybe not for years. I liked the food. So maybe I could be—oh my goodness, wait for it—a guest. Maybe I could be a customer someday. How weird would that be? Actually it would have been really weird so I probably would have gone straight to the bar and ordered from there to avoid the awkward table scene.

  “There you are.”

  My mother appeared. Her dress was gold tonight. Sometimes I actually believed that my mother intentionally worked the dinner rush so that she could have an excuse to buy all of these ridiculous vintage evening gowns. She loved that eighties wrap-around Designing Women-style of clothing. Yesterday she had worn her dusty rose. Tomorrow was Friday. It would be rainbow then. Sparkling and pretty much matching the twinkling lights that we had hung all around the restaurant’s collection of fake Greek columns.

  “Thank you for all of your help this week,” Mama said as she patted my arm. “I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see you back here where you belong.”

  Uh oh. I bit my lip. I think Mama had the wrong idea here. Clearing my throat, I picked up the tray that I had used to carry the newly refilled salt and pepper shakers. I walked it over to the waitress stand in order to buy some time to think. Susan and Brianne had gone home for the night already. I could actually see that Susan hadn’t done most of her closing work. She’d been complaining of a headache about halfway through the night like she thought Mama was going to send her home or something.

  “Mama, I’m not going to be here tomorrow night.”

  My mother looked taken aback. “But tomorrow is our busiest night.”

  “No. Saturdays are the busiest night,” I corrected her. “Which is why you always have at least five if not six waitresses working Fridays and Saturdays. Right?” I was actually trying to prompt her. If she told me that she thought they could make it through the weekend with three people, I was going to kill her.

  “I suppose you are right.” My mother heaved a giant sigh and picked a piece of imaginary lint from her gold dress. “And this weekend will be very busy. The new cook arrives tomorrow.”

  New cook. I frowned. Surely she was not alluding to what I thought she was alluding to. Right? “Mama, what new cook?”

  “The one from Greece.”

  “So Papa figured out how to get him a work Visa?” I was about to let her squirm out of this one.

  Mama carelessly lifted one shoulder and then set about rearranging the condiments I had just arranged on the nearest table. “I don’t know that I would say it is arranged, per se. But it is certainly happening. I know you will just love him. He is very close friends with your cousin Aniki.”

  “Aniki is forty, Mama,” I said flatly. “And I’m sure he’ll be great. But I’m not working here this weekend. I have a career. I just needed some extra cash and you keep saying you need the extra help. I can’t help this weekend. I’m helping clients put an offer on a house. Two sets of clients actually. I’m totally busy on Saturday and Sunday. I won’t even be in here to grab a bite to eat.”

  All of this was supposed to make sure that my mother came to the realization that I wasn’t suddenly agreeing with her plan for my life. Shula Economides was an animal when it came to that sort of thing. Her tenacity was legendary and I was starting to become afraid that by coming back for a few days I had unintentionally started something.

  “You owe this to your family.” My mother’s voice slid down the scale and I could have sworn she was actually growling at me. “You say you come back when you need some extra cash? Don’t you think that’s a little selfish? You take what you need from us, from your family and from this restaurant, but you don’t want to give back. What kind of woman are you?”

  Whoa. Wait just a second here! I felt my brain spinning as it tried to catch up with her. I put my hands in the air and made a gesture almost as if I were shoving her away from me. I needed to get a handle on this now. “What are you talking about? I come and work a few waitressing shifts because it’s obvious that you don’t have enough people and suddenly this means that I need to marry some cook so he can get a green card? How does that even make sense? I don’t owe you or Papa or this place anything!” I protested loudly. “I worked here all my life. I don’t want it to become my life, Mama. It’s not! Do you understand? I’m a real estate agent. That’s what I do for a living. It’s how I pay most of my bills. And yes. Sometimes things get slow, but that doesn’t mean I have some obligation to give it up and come running back to the restaurant business!”

  “You have an obligation to your family!”

  I bristled. I could actually feel every hair on the back of my neck and my arms standing on end as I glared up at my mother. “Really? What about my family’s obligation to me? Aren’t they supposed to be supportive of my dreams and my aspirations? What about that?”

  “That isn’t how it works! You have been infected by this American nonsense! Why would you think that you should be able to just decide what you want to do and walk away from this business?”

  “You mean you’re giving it to me?” I snorted and jammed my hands down on my hips. “Because I had no idea how close to death you apparently are, Mama! Are you ready to die and hand over the reins to this place so that I can run it as I see fit? Are you ready to do that?”

  My mother gave a cry out outrage that seemed to echo off the mural painted walls and bounced back and forth crazily from one side of the room to the other. It was so loud that it actually brought my uncle and my father running from the kitchen.

  “Shula!” My father’s bellow was loud enough to wake the dead. “Shula, are you all right?”

  “She’s fine, Papa!” I shouted back. They wanted to be loud? Fine. I could be loud too. “She’s just being angry with me because I don’t want to quit my real estate job and
be her full time waitressing slave.” I set my jaw and glared at my mother. “I’m not doing it. Do you understand me? Not. Doing. It.” I glared at my father. “And I’m not going to marry some old man from Greece just so he can stay here in the States either.”

  My father actually looked confused. “Anatoli? Why would you marry him?”

  “Because Mama wants me to marry a nice Greek boy and work here until I die in the kitchen!” I snapped. “I don’t know. I thought you wanted me to marry him too!”

  My parents were sharing some very pointed looks across the room. I could not tell what they might actually be trying to say without using words, but I could tell that it was something significant. My uncle was shifting from foot to foot looking as if he were ready to retreat to the kitchen. The man had a wife and four daughters. He knew how to get out of the line of fire. I imagine he felt like he was standing in it right now.

  “Tansy,” my father said in a tone that suggested he was trying to be highly reasonable. “We understand that you’re very much dedicated to this real estate thing. But you must remember that when your mother and I agreed to pay for the class and the license, it was with the understanding that you would not dedicate all of your time to the real estate business. It was to be more of a hobby.”

  My jaw actually dropped. “A hobby?”

  “Yes. A hobby. Something you could do when the restaurant business was slow and nothing more. You were not to abandon your job here and dedicate yourself full time to the house-selling hobby.”

  Funny, but as much as I could remember about the moment my parents had told me that they would support my desire to get my real estate license, I did not remember anything about this being a hobby. I took a deep breath. “I paid you back for school. I worked my ass off here at the restaurant while I was in school. I agreed that while I was in school and you were paying for it, that I would not just sit around and do nothing. I didn’t say that was going to continue and that I would be happy to pretend to play restaurant for the rest of my life and only do real estate on the side!”