by Nicole Thorn
“Eighteen small jars and fourteen of the big ones,” I said. “Four hundred and sixty dollars…”
“Whoa,” Bea breathed. “That’s a lot of coke money.”
I glared at her.
“Damn,” Hamilton said, setting his pen down. “Only four-seventeen.”
Bea smiled, putting her hands on his shoulders. “What kind of food do you like for dinner?”
Chapter Nine
Hamilton
“It sounds like you two need to sit down and talk,” Dad said the next morning. He had a bowl of cereal in front of him, with a smaller bowl of fruit next to that. The fact that he also had orange juice just made the table look too full. “I’m sure you could be friends by the end of the day, if you wanted to give it a go.”
“No, Dad,” I said, trying not to sound as bothered as I felt. “I do not want to give it a go. I never want to give it a go. I want him to disappear so that we don’t have to ever talk to each other again in our entire lives. Is that too much to ask for?”
Dad glanced up from his phone, where he had been reading the news. Why people wanted to start their day like that, I didn’t know. As if the world magically fixed itself in the last eight hours.
“Well, Ham, he was there first and while that kind of logic doesn’t usually apply to the real world, perhaps you should consider it from his point of view.”
I hated every second of this conversation. I wanted to groan out loud or bash my head against the table.
“It sounds like he’s genuinely trying to do the right thing for his family, and that’s noble. Just because he was a little rude to you, doesn’t mean that you have to be rude back to him. Be the bigger man. That’s what your mother always told me, at any rate, and I think I’m much better for it.”
I turned back to my toaster waffles and started shoving them into my mouth, so that I wouldn’t be expected to respond to my father’s comments.
Dad finished eating first, almost ignoring his fruit. He took it over to the fridge and popped it back in. Then he turned to me and said, “Don’t worry, Ham. You’ll figure it out. Nothing is as hard as it seems.”
“That’s what you said to me when I started physics. I didn’t believe you then and I don’t believe you now.”
“You passed the class, didn’t you?”
“With a B. And I only got that B because I did every extra credit assignment.”
“You still passed,” Dad called back to me. The front door closed a second later, effectively ending the argument. A cheap way to win, in my opinion, but whatever. I polished off the last of my waffles and went to put the plate in the sink.
The house felt too quiet, even with Purricane dangling from the scratching post while trying to kill it. I briefly wondered what if would have been like to have siblings. My parents had only ever wanted the one kid, and they had gotten me. They probably wished they had a second one after I started acting like an eighty-year-old man.
Either way, I had no idea what it was like to have one sibling, let alone three. The house would probably always be a mess, and people would always be screaming, and no one would have time to actually talk in between the hectic morning and sleepless nights. It would probably be a nightmare.
Not to mention, Dad would feel even worse, because then he would have screwed over several children with the college fund, which was how he saw it. No matter how many times I tried to tell him that I didn’t care about the money, he wouldn’t listen to me. He didn’t understand what it had been like for me, in this house while he stayed at the hospital.
The quiet had a presence that pressed down on me day in and day out. It reminded me that I existed in a house much too big for one person, that several rooms could go weeks without ever being opened, and that I could be stuck like that for an unknown amount of time.
In the quiet. With only vague memories of the things that I’d had before.
I shook myself out of the memories. Dad had made it through his surgery just fine, and I figured that money had been a small price to pay, when the alternative would have meant losing my father.
Purricane finally jumped off the cat tree and came over to scream at me for food. I fed him, though he could learn some manners, and went to get my things together so that I could leave. I’d made another cooler full of jerky. When I told my father how much we’d made yesterday, he had looked so delighted. Of course, I’d had to split the money with Sam, and then some of it went to making new product, but I’d still come out ahead.
I gathered my stuff, shoved the cooler into the back, and went out to the RV. Sam would be getting to the store on his own today, because he had to celebrate his sister’s birthday. He promised to be at the RV by two in the afternoon. I grabbed a book from my room to help entertain me in case we had a slow morning. Purricane watched me as I left the house.
I’d almost reached my spot when I noticed a familiar truck sitting off to the side of the road with a figure slouched down behind the wheel.
Frowning, I pulled an illegal U-Turn, thanked the gods that no cop had been around to see it, and pulled in behind the truck. When I got out, I noticed an odd smell. Possibly some kind of oil, which didn’t bode well for the truck.
Jay had his forehead resting against the steering wheel. What I could see of his face had tightened and he looked seconds away from breaking. If I hadn’t realized something had gone wrong before, that certainly would have done it.
I tapped my knuckle against the glass. Jay jumped high enough that he bashed his head against the roof of the truck. He turned to me with a startled expression.
I gestured for him to roll down the window.
He got out of the car instead. I stepped back to give him some room, but he just hovered in the open door of his truck, looking unsure of himself.
“What happened?” I asked when he didn’t say anything. I looked at the truck, as if some light would point to the damage and I’d somehow learn the knowledge needed to fix it.
“I don’t know,” Jay said, his voice tight. “I just noticed oil leaking out of the bottom as I was driving here. I pulled off to the side of the road so that I didn’t, ya know, die.” His expression looked as stiff as his voice sounded.
I frowned, walking to the hood.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to look under the truck,” I replied. When I reached my destination, I knelt down to see thick oil dripping from the undercarriage to the ground. It hadn’t made a large pool, but even a little bit of oil couldn’t be a good thing. I stood back up.
“What, you didn’t believe me?” Jay asked.
I glanced at him. “No, I just wanted to see if it was leaking so much that we couldn’t get it to a repair shop without a tow truck.”
Jay looked more suspicious, but the expression started to waver, as if he wanted to believe that I wouldn’t be an asshole. I couldn’t blame him for the hesitation. I hadn’t exactly been nice lately.
“Well, I can’t afford a tow truck or to get it repaired.”
“You made four hundred dollars yesterday,” I said.
“That’s supposed to go to helping my family.”
“And it’ll help your family if you can keep selling honey. As for the tow truck, that’s no problem. We can hook this up to the back of the RV, and I can take you wherever you need to go.”
Jay’s face smoothed out in surprise. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I said, and gestured to the back of the RV. “It’s got a hitch and everything. I don’t know how to hook it up, but I know that I can. Where do you normally take the truck to get it looked at?”
Jay said some name that I had never heard before. It sounded like an independent mechanic, which made sense. They were more likely to care about a customer than a corporation would. I’d listened to my father rant about dealerships enough that I never wanted to step into one. He said they surrounded cars like sharks the second someone appeared.
“You call and see if they have an appointment availab
le. I’ll start working on getting the truck hooked up to the RV.”
Jay grabbed his phone from the car while I went back to the RV. I had to move it in front of the truck and then back in as close to Jay’s bumper as I dared to go. I’d only ever hitched something to the RV once in my life, and my father had been there to help me. I hoped that I didn’t fuck up and cause a fifteen-car pileup on the highway.
“There,” I said when I finished. “I think we’re good.”
Jay looked dubious. Probably because I sounded dubious.
“Let’s move all your supplies into the back before we go,” I said. “That way, you only have to miss out on a few hours of work, instead of the entire day.”
Jay frowned at me some more. “You’re being uncharacteristically nice to me right now.”
I scowled at him. “Do you want my help, or do you want me to drive off with your truck and sell all your honey myself?”
“That’s better,” Jay said, moving to his truck. “I just wanted to make sure that you were actually Hammy, and not someone who just looked a lot like him.”
If not for my father telling me to be nicer, I might have decked him. Instead, I walked to the truck and started pulling the boxes of honey out of the back. We set them down under the table in the RV, so that they wouldn’t fall and break. Jay looked around the small space, clearly interested in everything that he saw. He noted the book I’d dumped on the table and cocked an eyebrow at me. “Did Sam finally find something better to do than helping you sell this garbage?”
I snorted. “I watched you eating this garbage all day yesterday, so don’t bother lying. And no, he’s just busy this morning. He’ll be showing up later today to help me out some more.”
“He doesn’t seem to help out all the much,” Jay pointed out, settling into the passenger’s seat. “In fact, he helped me more yesterday than you. I saw him sending people from your side of the street over to mine, so that they’d buy both honey and jerky.”
“I noticed that too,” I said, pulling into traffic.
“He doesn’t sell half of what you do. Why bother bringing him out every day?”
I shrugged. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really know. Sam didn’t do much for the stand. In fact, there had been several times where he actually drove customers away because he wouldn’t stop talking long enough to sell them the jerky they wanted. And other times, he ignored them so that he could finish reading a page in his book. I’d probably sell more without him around.
“He said that he was your ex. Is that why?”
I frowned. “Huh?” My focus had been on the GPS, which didn’t seem to know where it wanted me to turn, but I glanced at Jay just in time to watch heat flood his cheeks.
“Are you not? I mean, did you not? I mean, you didn’t date Sam?”
“I did. But why would I keep him around because of that?”
Jay shrugged. “Maybe you’re looking to date him again. I don’t know. I’m just throwing ideas out there.”
I snorted. “Um, no. No. Hell no. Look, I liked Sam a lot when we were dating, but he was kind of a nightmare. We’re better off as friends. He’s a nightmare like that too, but I can limit how much interaction we have.”
“You obviously think that’s cleared things up, but you’d be wrong.”
“You don’t really know Sam yet, and if you’re lucky, it’ll stay that way. I’m sure he’s going to start flirting with you soon, and then you’ll never be able to get rid of him. I love the guy, but he’s destructive in a uniquely Sam way. He likes to get into relationships, but he doesn’t like to be in them, and it makes things… bad.”
Jay frowned some more. I turned right when the GPS instructed me to, and then left. Jay and I didn’t talk much until we got to the mechanics. They didn’t have a long line of people waiting, but they said all their jobs would take them an hour at least. They took Jay’s truck to the back, where it could leak oil freely, and told him that they’d call as soon as they knew what happened to it.
He looked more distraught by the second.
When we got into the RV, I glanced at him sideways. “Maybe it’ll be an easy fix.”
He didn’t respond to that, instead taking his phone and starting to text furiously. I let him be, driving around the neighborhoods quietly. By the time we got back to our spot, his anxiety had started to leak out of him and into me. I drummed my hands on the steering wheel, and if I hadn’t been driving, I would have bobbed my foot up and down.
I pulled over onto the side of the road.
“Since you don’t have your truck, why don’t you set up next to the RV. That way, you can keep all your supplies safe inside. There’s also water and air conditioning. If you wanted it.”
Jay glanced sideways at me. “You’re starting to make me nervous again. Why are you being nice?”
Irritation prickled along my skin. “If you want to blister out in the heat, then be my guest.” I got out of my seat and marched to the back of the RV to grab my folding table. I had to push Jay’s out of the way to do it.
He hadn’t even gotten up by the time I shoved it out the door and into the Arizona sun. It was just past ten in the morning, which didn’t seem like a big deal, but in reality, we had already missed the first rush of customers for the day. We probably wouldn’t be making almost five hundred dollars that afternoon.
I began setting up my table before Jay stepped out of the RV with his. He put it about a foot away from mine. The two of us didn’t say a word as we brought out our signs and supplies and set up an awning to keep the sun from hitting us. I could attach it on to the RV, which was more than what Jay could do. The night before, I’d also put a fan in the window so that it pointed down at the table. It would do little to keep us cool, but the breeze would feel nice.
Customers started to trickle in just before lunch. With the two tables near each other, it seemed like we had some more crossover than before. Someone would be checking out his honey, then catch sight of my jerky and decide why not? And the two of us didn’t say a word to each other for almost an hour and a half.
Finally, I broke the silence by handing Jay a ten and saying, “Can I get another jar of honey? My dad wants to give it to a different friend.”
Jay raised an eyebrow. “Your dad has a lot of friends.”
I shrugged. “He’s a friendly guy. You should see him at the store. It takes him an hour and a half to buy ten things, because he stops to talk to everyone.”
Jay passed me a jar of honey and I took it into the RV to keep it safe from repurchase. When I came back out, Sam had appeared seemingly out of nowhere. He stood in front of our tables in a Superman T-Shirt and pajama pants. He had his hands on his sides and an eyebrow raised. “I feel like I’ve missed something,” Sam said.
I grabbed his folding chair and brought it out. “Don’t worry about it. Just sit down and start hocking goods.”
Sam unfolded the chair with a snap of his wrist and smiled at me. “Oh, you’ve got it.” He slammed the chair down right between the tables and started harassing passerby, asking if they wanted sweet or savory.
“What are you doing?” Jay asked.
Sam turned to him and winked in an overly dramatic way that made me want to slam my head down on the table. “I’m hocking goods. You just sit there and look cute. It’ll reel them in, and I’ll make them want what you’ve got.”
Jay blinked, clearly surprised.
I sighed, knowing that we would be in for a long, long day.
Chapter Ten
Jay
“It’ll be okay,” my sister lied.
“I’d kind of convinced myself I would die a virgin. Yet here I am, getting fucked.”
“You are the biggest drama queen I know,” Bea said, yanking the bill for my truck out of my hands. She folded it and tucked it away in her pocket.
“Eight hundred dollars,” I repeated. “Do you have any idea how many things they said are wrong with my truck? It could have killed me.”
Bea rolled her eyes. I didn’t know how she managed to stay so calm since I drove her to work and school, when it was in session. Maybe she wanted to keep me from freaking out. It wouldn’t work. Not when I had so much riding on that old, awful truck.
Bea put her hands on my shoulders when I wouldn’t snap out of it. “The truck will be fixed. The bills will be paid. It’s gonna be fine.”
My eyes narrowed. “And what are you basing this off of? Do you have a fairy godmother telling you the future?”
“I’m the fairy godmother, so hush and listen to me. It’ll be hard to work around not having a truck, but not impossible. You’ve done it before.”
“When I was a kid with a ton of energy. Do you have any idea how hard it is not to fall asleep during the day? I was already up all night, freaked out about the truck, jarring more honey, and cleaning the house. I just want to sleep.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “Maybe you should.”
“What?”
“Maybe you should take a day off and just sleep. AJ and Dee Dee are out of the house, and Mom and Dad already took off. Mom had some meeting with her boss. It would be quiet, and you could get all the rest you need. It’s not like you take days off anyway. This would be good for you.”
It wouldn’t have been. If I tried to sleep, I would have laid awake thinking about how I should have been out working. Even missing a single day could have thrown me off to the point where it took me a week to catch up. I never knew when I would get twenty people looking to buy. I had to be in that same exact spot every day, just in case.
“I just got an insane bill,” I said. “It’s not the time to take a day off.”
I’d never seen my sister so disappointed. She sighed, rubbing her eyes. “How long are you going to be doing this? I’m curious?”
“Doing what?”
“Pushing yourself to the point where it’s dangerous. You don’t get enough sleep, you don’t eat enough, and you make yourself sit out there in the heat all day. You don’t take any time off, and you don’t let yourself go do things that you like. Most people go hang out with friends.”