by Nicole Thorn
“I’m happy for you,” I lied.
The lie was worth seeing how brightly Beatrice smiled at me.
***
I couldn’t focus on the book Bea had insisted I read. It was good enough, but I had to battle trying not to throw up on the side of the road. It proved to be harder than I thought.
The RV had gotten there before I’d showed up, and I kept staring at it from my book. Two guys sat outside this time. Hamilton, and his buddy. They would talk every few minutes, but I couldn’t tell what they said from across the street. I didn’t see them laughing.
Bea hadn’t come with me, but I had her voice in my head. It told me that nothing good could come from a feud with a competing shop. Not that friendship would get me much either, but at least I wouldn’t have had the guilt of this hanging over my head. I didn’t have a whole lot going for me, but I was nice. I liked being nice. I hadn’t been nice to that dick, and I probably needed to fix it. Even he’d sort of tried to.
With a deep breath, I decided to be the bigger man.
The boys looked at me as I crossed at the walk. I tried not to sweat under their gaze, but I had never been good at hiding my emotions. My mom said that came with being an honest person. I didn’t know if I liked that very much.
“Don’t suppose I can buy a bag from you,” I said, pulling cash from my pocket.
Hamilton smirked at me. “Sure. Twenty bucks.”
I made myself smile. “Your sacrifice went to a good cause, if it makes you feel better. It was donated toward a very small organization of one, in an effort to make a teenager read more.”
“Makes me feel so much better.”
“Fifteen dollars,” the guy beside him said, standing and taking a bag. “Sam,” he told me.
“Jay,” I responded as we exchanged meat for money.
“Yes, I know. Very nice to meet you. I can appreciate a guy who wants to make the world a little more delicious.”
I laughed while Hamilton rolled his eyes. “Thanks. I don’t have any grand plans though. Nothing more than making enough money to live. I wish I was as selfless as needing to sweeten the world.”
“Even still. Hey, do you actually collect the honey stuff yourself? Do you have a fleet of bees?”
“I do,” I said. I started opening the bag of jerky, wanting to try a piece so I would look as pleasant and kind as I could. The smell of meat hit my nose strongly, but I liked it. “They’re kind of mine and my sister’s pets. We have a corner of the backyard sectioned off so we can collect it. I make it all myself.”
“That’s really cool. My grumpy buddy over here makes his jerky too.”
I looked over to Hamilton, who didn’t appear all that happy to have me trying to chat. I knew I should have stayed put, but I thought I needed to at least give peace a try. It was the right thing to do, and my sister would have bugged the hell out of me if I sat there and did nothing. Then in all likelihood, I would get dragged across the street with an annoying girl by my side, and she wouldn’t let me leave until I had a good relationship with the strangers.
“I assume you wanted to chat about the location,” Sam said to me. “Look, we really didn’t know that you already claimed this spot. Have you been here long?”
“Since I was like twelve,” I answered, nibbling on a piece of jerky. It tasted great, with the perfect blend of spices. It worried me of course, because a lot of people would probably prefer this over my honey. They could grab a bag of this and go on their way. Honey was a hard sell for the price, while his jerky cost less here than it would in the store. Basically, I’m screwed.
“I’ve been making my own honey for years,” I said, trying not to sound as miserable as I felt. “My parents would let me sell over here because it was close to their work. In theory, my dad can see me from the gas station.”
I turned to see if I could spot him a couple hundred feet away. It was a lot easier to see a truck and a table set up than one person from so far across a parking lot and a street.
“We’re not having this conversation again,” Hamilton said. “I’m not moving. I already moved across the street. If that’s not good enough for you, then I’m sorry, but you need to deal with it.”
“Really, Ham?” Sam sighed.
“Yeah, really. He’s still selling plenty of honey without me leaving this spot.”
I felt that familiar anger coming back to me. “And you get to decide what plenty is for me? Have you been looking at my bills? Did you fill my gas tank?”
“It’s not my fault you have a gas guzzling piece of garbage to drive around in. If you want to spend less money, then maybe you need a different car.”
I snorted. “Yeah, because I can just go get another car.”
Hamilton shrugged. “I’m just saying. I did my part and I moved, so you need to back off now.”
“I didn’t come over here to start trouble,” I stated coldly.
“Did you not? Because it sounds to me like you’re trying to make me feel bad for stealing your spot, as if you could claim public property. You need to get over it.”
Heat bubbled and I wanted nothing more than to push the table over. But the Sam guy seemed reasonable. It was just his friend that had the real problem. I didn’t know why someone so nice would hang out with such an ass.
“I need to get over it?” I asked. “Someone comes and takes my place with absolutely no thought about it, and I should get over it?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t want to blow up, and Sam tried to tell Hamilton to cool off. It didn’t really matter to me though. The damage had been done and I acted as irrational as I could.
“Fine,” I growled, turning to walk away. “Your jerky sucks, by the way!” I called out on my way across the street.
Hamilton gave me a wave, not at all bothered.
Oh, this would get ugly.
Chapter Seven
Hamilton
Sam and I agreed to take Saturdays off, mostly because Sam refused to get up early every day and I needed some time to really work on the jerky. I could make a lot in a day, especially since Dad let me use his storage room to keep it all. He had an oven in the butcher’s shop too, for reasons I actually hadn’t figured out yet, and I could spend all of Saturday there, working on my supply without anyone bothering me.
So, we didn’t get back to it until Sunday morning, just before the churches let out and people flooded the entire town as they did their errands. Jay had arrived before us, naturally, and he looked so bothered to see us there that I smirked.
“Don’t look so smug,” Sam said, shaking his head. “It’s not nice.”
“I’m not smug.”
Sam heaved a giant sigh as he unbuckled his seatbelt and went into the back to get the cooler full of jerky. “You are smug, and it’s going to bite you in the ass one of these days.”
I unbuckled as well and grabbed the jerky sign from behind the seats. I opened the door and stepped out into the bright, Arizona sunshine. It already felt like summer had come in to kick our asses, even though we hadn’t even reached June yet. I started to set up the table and the sign while Sam brought out the jerky, still looking annoyed with me. The money we earned would probably cheer him right up.
Jay continued to glare at us from across the street.
I finished setting my sign up, and turned to look at Sam. “I’ll be right back.”
“You better be headed over there to flirt with him,” Sam said. “Because if you aren’t, then first of all, you’re stupid. Second of all, I don’t want to talk to you for the rest of the day.”
“You’re not convincing me to flirt,” I warned him as I jogged across the street. Jay glared at me from his folding chair, tapping his foot.
“Hey,” I said.
Jay continued to glare. “What are you doing here?”
I picked up one of the jars of honey. This one had a ton of the golden liquid inside, much more than the smaller jar that I got, and it cost the same as the one I had bought. Co
uldn’t say that that surprised me. If I offered to by this now, I wondered if Jay would dump the entire jar over my head…
“I’m here to sell jerky. I feel like we’ve been over this before,” I cocked my head, as if in thought.
Jay stood up and pulled the honey from my hands. “I thought you found somewhere else to sell,” he said. “You weren’t here yesterday.”
“I had to get more supply going,” I said, crossing my arms. “Besides, did you sell more yesterday than you have any other day?”
“Yes, actually,” Jay countered.
“Must be a weekend thing.”
I could have sworn that Jay started grinding his teeth. I’d never actually noticed someone doing that in anger before. It really shouldn’t have made me smirk the way that it did.
The smirk seemed to annoy him even more. “Are you over here for a specific reason? Are you trying to drive away the customers that I could have if you weren’t here?”
“Relax,” I said, waving my hand. “I’m sure that they’ll come in soon enough. Church is about to let out, after all.”
“I know that,” Jay said. “I’ve been selling honey here for almost three years. Do you think I don’t know the patterns?”
With the two of us facing off over his table, it would have been easy for someone in the distance to think that we were friends. They wouldn’t be able to see our expressions or hear the frustration in Jay’s words.
It occurred to me that I didn’t even know why I had bothered coming over. He’d caught my attention, when the sun hit him directly. His little awning could only do so much to protect him from the unrelenting sunshine. The light illuminated the perfect color of the honey as well as him.
I picked up one of the jars and waggled it. “I’m gonna buy this one. The little price tag on the bottom says ten dollars. Is that accurate?”
Jay lifted his chin and I waited for him to add to the price. “You just bought a jar. Why do you need another one?”
I shrugged. “My dad likes the honey. He wants to give some to a friend at work so that they can use it too. So, ten dollars?”
“Yeah,” Jay grumbled.
I pulled the bill from my pocket and handed it over to him. Jay looked bothered by the fact that he had to take it, which amused me when I walked back across the street with the honey.
Sam raised an eyebrow when he saw it. “What’s that? Did you make friends?”
“You say that like I’m an annoying kindergartener that nobody likes,” I said, going up into the RV to store the honey.
“I mean, if the shoe fits.”
I ignored Sam until I came back out. “So, did you?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “We still hate each other. Your optimism isn’t going to change that, believe it or not.”
Around then, the wave of church goers flooded the streets, and we got slammed. I hadn’t expected the rush of customers, despite thinking I’d have a boost in sales. It looked like Jay got quite busy as well. We didn’t do spectacular as to sell out in the first hour, or anything like that, but our supply had been diminished by quite a lot. Jay’s table had some empty spots on it as well, and he had to go back to his truck to restock his honey supply.
I stretched out, rolling my head around on my neck. “Not a bad hour, if you ask me. Hungry worshippers make hasty decisions.”
Sam grunted, leaning back with his book in his lap. He had switched out to a book with a half-naked man on the cover. “You should take Jay some jerky.”
“Why?” I asked, groaning.
“Because it would be nice.”
I opened my mouth to insult him, but Sam slammed a package of jerky into my chest hard enough to hurt. I sighed, getting up. “I should have left you at home and kept all the profit to myself.”
“But then you wouldn’t be welcome to my scintillating personality.”
“I can just turn on a gameshow if I wanted your personality,” I said, and marched across the street before he could respond to that. I figured that he wouldn’t say anything nice, anyway.
Jay glanced up from his phone with a frown when he saw me approaching. I got the feeling that this wouldn’t end well for me. He’d probably throw the jerky, that he lied about hating anyway, at my face.
“Here,” I said, offering it to him.
He raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“You haven’t eaten,” I said. “So, here. Have some jerky.”
His eyes narrowed.
“You’ve been watching me sit at my table all day. What? Do you think I poisoned this one? You can go take a random package from the table if you think that.” I gestured behind me, half expecting him to do it.
Considering the way that we had been acting around each other, it wouldn’t have been all that strange. Finally, he took the damn package and offered me a grudging thanks. I’d barely gotten out ‘you’re welcome’ before someone honked several times. It startled me, but Jay didn’t seem that surprised. As a matter of fact, he looked delighted as he lifted his head.
His sister, Bea, had pulled up in a strange car, with a woman behind the wheel. It must have been their mother. She looked just like her children. She and Jay’s sister talked for a few seconds, Bea looked impatient to go. When she got out of the car, she opened the back door and pulled out a little girl that couldn’t have been older than five. She had a huge smile on her face the second she saw Jay.
He started to rise, lifting his hand to greet them as his mother pulled out onto the street. She drove past us, giving a single honk as she merged back into traffic. She seemed to be heading to the store.
“Hey,” Jay said as his littlest sister plowed into him for a hug. “What are you doing here?”
“I missed you,” the little girl said. “I begged Mommy to let me come with her to the store so that I could see you.”
Bea stopped not too far from them, putting her hands on her hips. “I promised Mom that I’d keep an eye on her while she shopped. We won’t be here long. Mom’s just getting stuff for dinner tonight. She started a roast without checking to make sure that we had everything to go with it, so we need potatoes, carrots, and dinner rolls.” She smiled fondly as she said this.
“Who are you?” a tiny voice asked. I glanced down to see Jay’s baby sister staring up at me from the ground with big eyes.
“I’m Hamilton,” I said. “I work over there.” I pointed at my jerky stand and Sam, who had lifted his book so that anyone passing by could see the cover. Including the little girl standing in front of me.
“What’s he reading?”
“Nothing,” Bea said, taking the child and turning her back toward the honey stand. “He’s not reading anything that we need to concern ourselves over. Well, Dee Dee, this is Hamilton. He’s the reason that Jay has been in such a grumpy mood the last few days. Now, I’m not saying that you should do anything, but you are at the perfect height for punching him.”
Jay jumped out from behind his honey stand. “Hey, hey, hey, let’s not. Besides, Hamilton and I get along just fine, don’t we?”
I wanted to ask why he felt the need to lie to his little sister about it, but I shrugged. “Sure. We get along great.”
“So, you’re friends?” Dee asked, her eyes looking brighter than they had a few seconds before.
“Yep,” I said.
Dee threw her hands into the air and launched herself at her brother. He managed to catch her, which seemed like quite the feat to me. He tossed her into the air and caught her again while she wrapped her arms around his neck. “You made a friend!” Dee shouted.
I raised an eyebrow and looked at Jay, who glowered back at me. Meanwhile, Bea snickered off to the side, trying not to look as amused as she clearly felt.
“I’ve had friends before, Dee Dee,” Jay said gently, holding his sister as tightly as he could. She didn’t seem to mind this as she smiled at him, looking too innocent to understand.
“Yes, but you’ve never brought them over,” she complained. “I’ve met
all of AJ’s friends, and Bea’s, but yours never want to meet me.” She sounded horribly sad about this.
“That’s a shame,” I said. “Jay, why haven’t you invited me over to meet your darling little sister? It’s quite rude, if you ask me.”
Oh, he shot me a poisonous look for that one. If he could, he would have skinned me alive. I smiled back at him, not bothering to hide my amusement. The little girl wouldn’t understand it, and it didn’t matter if Bea did. She had been the one to overcharge me for the honey to start with.
“Yeah, why haven’t you asked him over?” Dee questioned.
“Because we’re both very busy people.” Jay glared at me while he answered. I felt like he did this in the hopes that it would keep me from talking. Which just proved that he didn’t know me all that well.
“I would make time to visit you,” I said, then put my hand on my chest. “It’s all right, if you don’t want to share your family with me, I’ll get over it. I’ll use the honey that I’ve bought from you to warm myself on the long nights.”
“Jay!” Dee cried, sounding so, so sad for me.
I thought that Jay would beat me to death with a jar of honey, the way he glared at me. “Well, maybe the next time we both have a day off, you could come over and visit with the family. You wouldn’t want to let my little sister down, now would you?”
I glanced at Dee, who stared at me with all the hope in the world. Hmm, this might have backfired on me.
Bea had her mouth covered with her hand, but her eyes wouldn’t stop dancing in amusement.
“Of course,” I said, holding my hand out to Dee. “I’d never break a promise.”
She hooked her pinkie through mine and glared as she pulled it. “That’s a sacred binding.” She said, or tried to. She stuttered over the word ‘sacred’ until it almost sounded like ‘scared.’
“Aw, you remembered,” Bea said and patted her sister on the head. “Good.”
“Am I missing all the fun,” Sam asked, coming up behind me. He’d abandoned our table, but without anyone on the road, that didn’t upset me. We wouldn’t get another bump until the after-lunch rush started, as people went home or started going shopping and getting peckish.