by Nicole Thorn
“Why would you being friendless make me feel better?” I asked.
He shrugged. “People seem to think shared misery is a good thing, as opposed to doubly sad. I didn’t have time for friends. Too much to do. Every day, after school, I’d either be working on the bees or squeezing in a few hours of actual work.”
“You don’t think maintaining beehives is actual work?”
“Not really,” Jay said. “The bees do almost everything. I’m just the guy that collects all their hard work.”
I disagreed with him, considering the chances that he’d get stung a few dozen times, but I didn’t argue. There’d be time later to correct him. “Bea always had a ton of friends, though,” he said, still staring straight ahead. “She always seemed to find the time.”
“Maybe because she wasn’t doing a lot of the actual work?” I asked.
Jay looked offended. “She helped me all the time.”
“Bea was still working with you the first day that we met,” I said. “From what I remember, she sat in the car the whole time.”
I could tell that this offended him, so I held up my hand. “I’m not upset with her over it. I’m just calling it the way I see it. She’s working now, so I don’t think your sister is lazy or doesn’t take your family seriously. I’m just saying that I don’t think she was ever as invested in this as you were, but she still wanted to feel like she was helping.”
Some of Jay’s anger started to dissipate. His shoulders relaxed. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, staring straight ahead again. “I don’t know. Some days, it felt like Bea helped a ton. Others, it felt like she left me out to dry.”
“She kept you company,” I said. “Isn’t that enough? That’s why I kept Sam on, even after you and I started working together.”
“Joined forces,” Jay corrected.
“What?”
“When you’re working with your sworn enemy, you join forces. You don’t work together.” He said this like I had been the fool who just didn’t understand.
I swallowed the urge to laugh. “My mistake.”
“Yeah. Don’t make it again. Anyway, I see what you mean. It still feels different.”
“Because Bea’s your sister, and not the person who dated the guy you had the hots for before you?”
Jay stared at me. “Yes.”
This time, I couldn’t help but laugh. I leaned in and kissed him too, because he had been funny, and I wanted to.
Sam slammed his sign down on the table, leaning in to glare at the two of us. “If you aren’t going to take this seriously, then at least stop making out at the table.”
I stood up as Jay’s eyes flashed. “Why don’t I take a turn with the sign while Jay explains to you how stupid of a comment that was?” I could hear Jay giving Sam a lecture as I walked down the street with the sign held high. A couple of cars pulled in to buy something. Much to my amusement, Jay’s lecture would stop just long enough to deal with the customers and then continue as soon as they left.
A Little Taste of Heavaii started coming down the street a full hour earlier than their sign said they’d be.
“Sam!” I shouted.
He turned toward me. I pointed at the food truck. Sam had been monitoring their social media like a hawk, so we should have been prepared for them to show up early. He pulled out his phone and bent over it. “They didn’t say they were coming early,” he called back to me.
I wandered back over to our side of the street, setting my sign down. “They probably wanted to make sure that we didn’t take their spot today,” I said.
“Bea was working,” Jay said, as if he needed to justify why we hadn’t sabotaged the idiots.
Then, much to our horror, the food truck didn’t turn into Jay’s old spot… but pulled in right next to my RV. I blinked. Jay blinked. Sam’s mouth opened in outrage.
“Uh…” I said.
Jay started to get up, but I held my hand out to him. “Why don’t you let me take care of this.”
“What, you don’t trust me to handle this civilly?”
“No.”
“Fair enough.” He sat back down, and I walked over to the truck. Stanley sat behind the wheel, staring straight ahead with a blank expression on his window. I could hear Helen banging out in the back.
I knocked on the window.
Stanley jumped about a foot into the air before turning to me. He rolled down the window. “Oh, hey there.”
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why are you parked right next to us?”
Stanley glanced into the back of the truck. “Helen’s idea.”
Of course. “Do you mind if I…” I gestured toward where I could hear his wife banging around.
“Go ahead,” he said.
I walked around to the back and slammed my fist against the door. Helen popped it open with that infuriating smile on her face. “Hi there!” she said. “Were you looking for something to eat, perhaps?”
“No, that’s all right,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that there’s an entire half of the street that you normally take up, and you’re over here, for some reason?”
“Well, we’ve just seen so many cars parked over here lately, we thought that we would give this spot a try,” Helen said, wrinkling her nose at me. “I certainly hope that you don’t mind that.”
I stared at her, openmouthed. “Are you joking?”
“Why would I joke about something as important as my sales?” she asked. “I take this job very seriously.” As she said this, she pulled a lei off a peg and pulled it around her head. “If you’ll excuse me, Stanley and I have to start prep.” She stepped back into the truck and slammed the door closed.
I wandered back over to Sam and Jay.
“So?” Jay asked, looking at the truck. “Are they going to move?”
“No,” I said. “They sat there with the intention of stealing our customers.”
“She said that?” Sam jumped to his feet, looking ready to fight. I didn’t think I could handle having to keep two crazy people in check, so I waved him down. He mostly ignored me.
“She didn’t say that outright,” I explained. “She said that we’ve had so much business that she wanted to try this side of the street. But when we’ve got customers, it’ll be so easy for her to just shout out her dishes and tempt them over to her truck.”
Jay’s eyes narrowed. “What should we do about it?” Jay asked.
Sam growled something unpleasant under his breath, then glared at us. “You two need to figure out a name and logo for this company so that I can start competing with them.”
“We sell random food on the side of the road,” Jay pointed out. “They have an actual truck. How are we supposed to compete with that?”
Sam glowered some more. “If you think that the truck is so damn flashy, get your own. Just give me something to work with.”
He snatched the sign out of my hand, giving me a papercut in the process, and started walking back and forth again, blocking out as much of the food truck as he could.
“You might be right,” Jay said. “I think he actually cares about how well we do.”
I rubbed my eyes, feeling more stressed than I had fifteen minutes before. “He’s probably right, too. We aren’t doing all that we can to compete with them. We should figure out a way to make this look like a legit business, as opposed to weirdos selling on the side of the road.”
Jay looked around us. “Do you think that we could do that?”
“Why not?” I asked. “They did. And their food smells god awful.”
We could already smell some of it. The scent of cooked fish seemed to follow that truck wherever it went. Helen stepped out, offered us a smile, and propped her sign up. They had a lot of new things on the menu, all with names that would confuse their target audience.
“How long do you think it took them to look those words up?” I asked.
“Forever,” Jay s
aid.
“Are you feeling as stressed as I am?” I asked.
“Probably.”
“Do you want a quick meeting?”
I’d barely gotten the words out of my mouth before Jay grabbed the back of my shirt and yanked me toward the RV door. We stumbled inside, already kissing. The door banged shut behind us as we fell against one of the seats. It wasn’t the most comfortable position, but I could live with it as long as Jay and I didn’t stop making out.
We hit the floor of the RV next, which took us out of sight of the windows. Probably a good thing.
Jay managed to pull my shirt all the way up to my armpits and I had mussed his hair up beyond repair when we took our first breath. By the second breath, both our shirts had come off and we both agreed that we needed to stop before this got out of hand. As I pulled my shirt back on, Jay tried to fix his hair.
“It’s hopeless,” I told him, a note of pride in my voice.
He snorted at me, still messing with his hair. “Perhaps.” He sat down next to me, rubbing his eyes. “All right. I’ll come up with a logo, if you come up with the business name. Deal?”
“Deal.” We shook on it. When we left the RV, carrying a couple of crates to make it seem like we had had gone in there for something other than making out, we found Sam selling a bag of cookies to an older woman. She had bought so many that I worried about what we had left.
He smiled at us. “She forgot to make them for her granddaughter’s summer camp. Apparently, they do parties or something.”
Next door, the food truck already had a line. Every time someone came too close to us, Helen would immediately start shouting about all their specials and the prices, loudly enough that it made it hard for us to talk over her.
Several people wandered over to the food truck, while we dealt with the customers at the front of our line.
Jay looked so angry that I thought his head would actually explode. “Deep breaths,” I said, when we had a lull. Helen wandered over to gloat, leaving her husband with a line longer than I’d seen before.
While she talked with Sam, I heard someone ask Stanley if they had anything fresher.
He looked ragged and tired. “No, ma’am. We only have the items that you see on the menu.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I hate fried fish.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You should really get something that more people could enjoy, you know,” she continued, staring at the menu.
“We’ll try,” he said. “Is there anything that I can get you now?”
She continued to stare at the menu with a wrinkled nose. “A water, I suppose.”
Stanley leaned out the window and shouted at Helen to come help him. As she wandered off, Jay and I exchanged a glance.
The smell of cooking fish seemed to sum up our opinions.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jay
I liked being in clothes that didn’t have sweat all over them. Hammy and I sat on my couch together, watching the best show on earth. He laughed at me when I got the puzzles wrong, but I didn’t understand what he found so funny about it. Dee didn’t laugh. She just sat between us and snacked on jerky while watching the show.
I thought it would be a good idea to spend some time at home instead of hanging out with Hammy at his place. My parents had been infinitely cool about how often I slept over. Of course, Hamilton and I hadn’t had sex yet. Sure, there had been some business meetings, but we mostly passed out on the couch or on the floor. I’d made it up to the guest room a total of one time. We thought it would be better that we’d crash there when we got tired, because driving while exhausted would’ve been dumb. Hamilton’s dad had been nice enough to call and tell my parents that first night, making sure they knew I hadn’t gotten up to anything. Even if I had, I hadn’t been entirely sure they would care.
“Have you ever gotten one right?” Hamilton asked me.
I gasped at him, betrayal cutting into me. “What the hell are you talking about? I get most of them right.”
“We’ve been watching for an hour and a half and you’ve gotten a total of one right, and you screamed the answer a whole second after they started solving it on TV.”
I stared at him flatly. “I don’t recall.”
“You did that,” Dee said. “I remember because I almost fell on the floor when you threw your arms in the air.”
I narrowed my eyes at the child. “How could you turn your back on me? I bought jerky for you.”
“Hammy would have let me have it.” She took a bite, staring me in the eyes.
Everyone turned on me in the end.
“Fine,” Hamilton said, holding his hands up in surrender. “You are the god of puzzle games and if you could spin that wheel, then you would spin it all the way to Olympus itself. I cower in the great glow you set off all around you.”
At least someone finally noticed. “You’re kind.”
I might have answered, but my phone went off. My mechanic had given my number to his kids, which seemed like it should have been against some law. They had both been texting me on and off, seeing if I wanted to sell them the truck yet. They’d even upped the offer to eighteen hundred, since their father found one less thing wrong with it than he thought. Blessings rained down upon me.
“You okay?” Hamilton asked. I looked over to see that my sister had moved onto his lap, over me completely. I’d lost my siblings to my boyfriend and there was no turning back.
“Eh,” I said with a shrug. “Those guys want my truck still.”
Hammy waggled his eyebrows at me. “You want me to go rough ‘em up for ya? No one annoys my man.”
I would have played along if I had been in the mood for it, but the stress had become a little too much to handle. “I just don’t know what to do. If I sell the truck, then I’m out a car.”
“You’ve been out a car for a little while now and you manage.”
“Because you give me rides. It’s working out so far, but I can’t live off that forever. I need to be able to get places on my own. Like the store.”
Dee gave me a funny look. “Daddy always goes to the store. Why do you need to go?”
I hadn’t meant to let that slip, but I could rebound. “I meant, if he needed me to pick stuff up,” I lied. I had no reason not to tell Dee that I would be moving out soon and completely responsible for myself.
“Oh,” my sister said, chewing on jerky. “But Hammy can take you anywhere you wanna go. Right?” She craned her neck back to look at him.
“Yeah, I think it’ll be fine,” Hamilton said. “What are the odds I’ll be busy with something when you need me? Everything I’m busy with involves you.”
I sighed. “I agree, but I still need some means of getting around. I don’t know how good a car I can get with the money those guys are offering me.”
Hamilton thought for a minute. “I have a suggestion you probably won’t like.”
I smiled, rubbing my eyes. “Wow, you make it sound so tempting. What is it?”
“It looks like you and me are in it for the long haul with the business, right?”
I nodded, agreeing. I’d already started on the logo, and I knew he had some working titles for our future products. It might have been a little optimistic to assume everything would completely go to plan. We’d just started dating, and barely had our little business going. For all I knew, everything could fall apart. I tried not to look at things that way, since it did nothing but upset me. Maybe it would work out. Maybe we could both sustain a living from this if we figured out the right components to use.
“You can take some of that truck money, and I could take some of my savings, and we can really invest in the business.”
My heart thudded hard. “Invest?”
“Yeah. Maybe I can try finding some kind of way we could feel like a real business. The food we make is good. There’s no reason we can’t make this work. A lot of people start from the ground up and make something of themselves.�
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I took another breath, thinking about that money in my bank account. “If I sell the truck, that money could pay for,” I said, then stopped, remembering Dee sitting with us. I lowered my voice for the next word, hoping she paid more attention to the TV than me. “Rent.”
“Right,” Hammy said. “What would that get you? One, maybe two months if you had a—” He stopped too, lowering his voice. “Roommate.”
“I have a little more than that. And what about you? You want to go to school and you need every dime you can get if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life paying off interest on student loans.”
“Yeah,” Hammy said. “But if we do this right, we could get a lot more money.”
“Or lose what we have.”
“Or,” he said, smiling. “We could get a lot more.” When I didn’t say anything, he went on. “Come on. Don’t you want a life plan that’s more than just barely getting by? Isn’t this what you want to do for a living?”
I hadn’t thought about it as much as he seemed to think I had. It had always been about paying bills and getting by, so I hadn’t really sat down to decide if I wanted to sell honey until the day I died. I loved making it. Every single step I had to take calmed me, from getting the bees to a jar, and even in the most stressful of times, it was fun to do.
“Is it what you want to do for a living?” I asked. “What about college?”
“I can earn the money for college with this, and I can take classes that would help me actually run a business with you. I know a ton from my dad already. It’s not like Helen and Stanley. You and me actually know what we’re doing. Those morons make money even with no clue whatsoever. Imagine what we could do if we really sank our teeth into this.”
There would come a point where I needed to figure out what the hell to do with my life. There had been times where I’d almost got a cashier job so I could have something steady. This could be steady if we did it right. We could make enough money to live, and maybe even enough to go beyond basic survival. We could be happy.
I exhaled, not realizing I’d been holding my breath. “What were you thinking we do then?”