Luna and the Lie

by Zapata, Mariana

  Rip, on the other hand, watched me with that quietly furious freaking face that said he didn’t even want to look at me in the first place. He didn’t want to look at my face that was usually makeup-less minus the pink lipstick I wore every day. He didn’t want to look at the cotton-candy blue hair I had kept over the last year. He didn’t want to look at me.

  He wouldn’t be the first person.

  “I am sorry,” I said to him, trying to cling onto whatever was left of my pride while feeling all of about an inch tall.

  He just stared at me, and I knew he wasn’t going to say anything else.

  I’d apologized and I’d meant it. That was all I could do. I turned around and slowly headed the way I’d come, purposely avoiding making eye contact with the guys watching because I didn’t want to see pity on their faces. I’d probably only gotten about two lanes away when I heard Rip call out, “You all gonna get back to work or what?”

  I pressed my lips together and glanced down at my donut bracelet, rubbing my thumb over one of them. It could have been worse.

  He could have fired me, and maybe then he could have gotten himself out of repaying the favor that he had felt like he’d owed me for the last going-on three years. I bet that would have made him happy.

  Everything was fine, even if it didn’t feel that way.

  Things could always be worse.

  Chapter 3

  Every single light was on inside the house when I pulled into the driveway at ten that night.

  Literally every one.

  I sighed as I turned the ignition off and told myself that soon there wasn’t going to be anyone at the house to turn on a single light. Or make my lunch. Or give me a hug when I needed it. Or talk me into staying up late to watch a scary movie.

  That reminder just made me sigh again, but for a totally different reason.

  Then I remembered how high my electricity bill was going to be this summer if my little sister didn’t calm down, and I opened the door and got out.

  In the dark, it was too hard to see the old house except for the squares and rectangles of light behind the curtains that Thea, my slightly younger sister, had bought as my birthday present a year ago.

  Up the two steps, I swung my keys around my index finger and then slipped the right one into the lock and turned it. The television blared, but somehow my baby sister, Lily, heard me open the door because she called out, “Luna? Is that you?”

  “No, it’s the ax murderer.” I dropped my keys into the bowl my other sister had bought for my birthday the same year. “Did you make something for dinner?” Please, please, please….

  “No, I ordered pizza!” my little sister replied from where she usually was stationed on a rare Friday she wasn’t working—in front of the TV because senior year of high school was exhausting apparently. Not that I would have known that.

  I’d always been able to see right through my sister’s BS. She stayed home on no-work-Fridays so that she wouldn’t spend money. She was always saving for something. For the last year, she’d been saving for college expenses. The year before that, she’d been saving for a car—a car I had ended up splitting with her.

  At the thought of pizza, my stomach grumbled, reminding me I hadn’t finished my lunch, and since then, I had only stuffed down a banana and a handful of Skittles from my not-so-secret stash after my incident with Rip. I thought it was some kind of miracle I hadn’t ended up with a headache, but the Coke I’d had with the Skittles had probably helped.

  I was tired. Inside and out. No matter how much I had tried not to wallow in the guilt I felt for screwing up—and how much I tried not to think about how unforgiving Rip had been about it—it had happened. His facial expression, tone, and the guilt in my gut just kept running on a loop in my head. The tightness in my chest hadn’t gone anywhere in hours.

  It was still hanging around the general vicinity of my heart. I was embarrassed and disappointed in myself.

  Sorry doesn’t fix your fucking mistake.

  I sighed once more as I untied my boots and then toed them off, leaving them right next to Lily’s black Converse, eyeing the pair of checkered yellow Vans and pink New Balances there too.

  Rubbing my brow bone with the back of my hand, I dragged my feet in the direction of the living room down the hall. Passing through, there were still so many things I wanted to redo to the house, and tearing down some of these walls were next on my list. Hopefully I could get Lily to help me before she left, and if my other sisters came to visit, I could get them to help too. There weren’t enough hours in the day or days in the year.

  In the living room, I found her sitting in between a girl and a boy her age that I had met before. I lifted my hand at them but blew a kiss at the dark blonde in the middle.

  “Hey,” I said to the three of them, watching as my little sister raised her arms up to the ceiling as her way to get me to come toward her.

  She was the most affectionate one in the family, which was just one more reason I was going to miss her when she left for college. That thought pierced me straight in the gut.

  She was graduating high school next week. Next week. She’d be eighteen in a couple of weeks. Legally an adult but forever my baby sister who had grown up way too fast, no matter how hard I had tried to prevent that from happening.

  Bending over the back of the couch, Lily’s arms went around my neck as she pressed my cheek to the side of her face. “Tough day, sugar tits?”

  My “It wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t the worst, sugar lumps” went right into her cheek as I dropped a quick kiss on it.

  “Sorry, boo.” She pecked me right back. Her green eyes—the same shade as mine and both of our sisters too—were extra watchful. She had told me enough times how I worked too much and was going to wear myself out too quick. “Want us to go to my room?” Her gaze flicked to my wrist and she smiled. “Oh, look, you’re wearing it.”

  I gave her another kiss on the cheek before straightening. “Of course I am, and not unless you care if I sit here for a little while with your leftover pizza.”

  She made a face. “You’ve been snorting too many paint fumes today.”

  I made a face back at her before turning around and heading into the kitchen down another short hallway. I really needed to open up the house more and make the layout better. I’d gotten the plans for it right after I’d bought the place, and I’d bet I could find an engineer or an architect who could tell me just how many of the walls I could take down. I worked too much to really get a lot of the Home Remodeling Network shows in, but I had a general idea of what I wanted this place to look like eventually.

  I took in what I had currently—a closed-off kitchen that had been popular in a different century, solid cabinets, a countertop that had been replaced at some point in the last twenty years, and a stove and refrigerator that got the job done… There were glass and ceramic containers on the countertops, a fancy blender that Lily had talked me into, a countertop mixer that I had splurged on during a Black Friday sale, and a wire basket half-filled with apples and oranges.

  I had so much, and I was so lucky. Even in its current state of needing a serious uplift, even the kitchen could make me happy. Because it was mine, and no one could take it away… unless I stopped paying the mortgage, but I hadn’t gotten fired yet, so that would be a worry for another day.

  I could still easily remember the days of looking through a pantry and refrigerator with no food in it. I had made myself a promise that I would someday open a cabinet and always find something in there to eat and my sisters could have the same. I had sworn to myself that if I ever became a parent, I would give my kids what my parents had been too selfish and negligent and careless to give us.

  And right then I remembered that I had managed that. Maybe it took working sixty hours a week and getting scolded by a boss who usually blatantly ignored me when I tried to put him in a good mood, but I had done it. I had done it.

  As tired as I felt then, as much as my shoulde
rs ached from holding the spray gun, and my arms and hands and back and feet hurt from the hours of bodywork I had done that day, it was all worth it.

  There was a laugh from the living room that I knew was my little sister’s and that too just cemented how worth it busting my ass was.

  So, as I made my way toward the pizza box sitting on the counter beside the refrigerator, I felt lighter again.

  Maybe I had gotten in trouble. Maybe it hadn’t been the best day ever. Maybe everything hurt. But I was home. I had gotten a kiss from someone who loved me. I had a bed to sleep in.

  For all intents and purposes, it was a good day despite a couple things.

  Then I opened the pizza box, saw there was only one single slice left, and I told myself again it was still a pretty good day.

  I had enough in the budget to call and order another pizza if I really wanted to, and that was pretty damn good if I said so myself.

  Chapter 4

  I knew I should have turned around and waited to get my coffee the moment I walked into the break room and heard my bosses arguing the following week.

  Again. For maybe the thousandth time or pretty close to it.

  In my defense, if I walked out every time I heard them fighting over something, I would rarely get to drink a single cup of coffee. Or eat my lunch. Or refill my water bottle. Or find out if I’d read their chicken scratch on Post-It notes correctly.

  That morning, more than normal, I needed caffeine. I’d had a dream about my dad for the first time in months. It had felt so real I’d woken up with tears rolling down my cheeks. It had been years since the last time I’d cried so hard… and that had only made me cry even more. It had felt like I was back living with them, back to those nights when my dad would get drunk and go from being unbearable to being a nightmare; back to the days where, if I was lucky, the woman my sisters had known as their mom would be on the couch, high out of her mind, doing nothing other than letting me know how much she hated me. I’d ended up staying awake, lying in bed, telling myself things I had told myself a thousand times.

  I was loved. I had a roof over my head. Food to eat. A bed to sleep in. Money in my bank account.

  I reminded myself that life was a gift—sometimes one you wanted to return, and other times one you’d want to keep forever, but it was still a gift. The grass might look greener on the other side, but at least you still had grass. There were places in the world that didn’t have any to begin with.

  I was fine.

  I had more than I ever would have let myself hope for.

  I was fine.

  I was really glad my little sister could sleep through anything. Otherwise telling her why I’d woken up crying my guts out would have been a real pain. While I went long periods of time between thinking about them, about those times in my life, my youngest sister had decided just never to think about them at all in the first place—at least not that I knew of. I had tried before to get her to discuss it, just to make sure she was fine, but she’d refused.

  Knowing all that I had and reminding myself of it hadn’t helped much, but it had done enough. It got me to take a deep breath, climb out of the bed I’d had to save six months for, and shower in my own bathroom in a house I had a mortgage on—a mortgage I paid every month and even managed to put in a little extra for the principal. I grabbed my lunch bag from the refrigerator, filled with food Lily had bought that weekend, and somehow managed to remember to grab the cake I’d made the night before while Lily had made our lunch. I had fought her for so long about how she should just buy food at the school, but she’d insisted it tasted like crap and she could make something ten times better herself. After all that, I drove to work in a car that I had bought with my own money and headed to a job that I loved most of the time.

  I was loved. I had a roof over my head. Food to eat. A bed to sleep in. I had an enormous bag of Skittles in my desk at work. Had an oven to bake cakes in and money to actually buy the ingredients to make them. All on my own. All because someone had given me a chance, a little love, and let me work hard to have all the things I did.

  And that made me feel better more than anything else—the knowledge that I wasn’t vulnerable and didn’t have to rely on someone else for basic things.

  So, more than on any other day, hearing my two bosses argue weighed me down like a hundred-pound sack of flour on my shoulders. I needed to make some coffee to wake up and get to the booth where I worked so I could pretend like I hadn’t woken up upset. I didn’t feel like trying to be subtle and break up an argument between anyone.

  But I knew I would. I hated people arguing, especially when I loved one of them and cared too much about the other.

  “When were you going to tell me?” came the voice that was all gruff, hoarse, round edges dipped in chocolate. It was such a nice voice, even if he did wield it like a freaking sword to chop people and their feelings in half. But at least he did it with everyone. He had high expectations and didn’t let anyone at the shop get away with things. Me—and my screwup—included.

  Regardless of how he’d been with me on Friday, I had still made a nice, big birthday cake for him yesterday. I made one for everyone, even the ones I couldn’t stand at CCC. I didn’t have it in me to be mean and single them out by not bringing something for them too. But my favorite people at the shop got their favorite cakes. Everyone else got whatever box mix was on sale.

  “Ripley, give me a break. I didn’t think you would care,“ the other voice, the one I’d been listening to for nearly the last ten years of my life, responded. It was softer, lighter, patient.

  The exact opposite of Ripley’s in more ways than one.

  “You think I wouldn’t care about who you hire to work with me?”

  “Of course you’d care about that, but all I did was post an ad for the job opening. I didn’t think I needed to check with you about posting one. Come on, son,” Mr. Cooper said.

  “Don’t fucking call me that. I’m not your son.”

  If I had a dollar for every morning that I’d come into the break room and overheard them disagreeing over something in one of the two offices, I would have had enough money to go on that vacation to Greece I’d been promising myself for forever.

  The first time I’d heard them fighting, it had worried me. It had been an argument over payroll and how the shop had too many employees the day after he had put me through his random test over how much I knew. I’d been worried for days that a lot of us at the shop were going to get fired. I was one of the youngest employees. If anyone was going to get the boot, I’d figured it would have been me. They could always contract out to a business that only did paint. I was fully aware of that.

  Luckily, no one had gotten fired. It had taken two months of waiting around and eavesdropping almost daily to figure out that Mr. Cooper had put his foot down and wasn’t letting anyone get axed.

  At least, no one got fired unless they deserved it.

  Now, I just accepted that the man with the voice I liked listening to—and the face I liked looking at—picked arguments with Mr. Cooper for no reason at all. The sky was too blue? He’d blame him. There was some part that he needed that hadn’t been ordered? He’d blame him.

  I didn’t get it, and I doubted I ever would; Mr. Cooper was great. Greater than great. I would give him any organ in my body if he needed it.

  As much as I eavesdropped, I hadn’t been able to figure out what had happened to make them the way they were. If I really thought about it, there were a lot of things about them I hadn’t been able to figure out. None of us had, and we had tried. I had spent a lot of time listening to Mr. Cooper and Rip because something about their arguments felt… weird.

  I was pretty sure there was some serious resentment, at least on Ripley’s part, but I couldn’t figure out why. Why Mr. Cooper would bring someone into the company—his company—who he didn’t get along with?

  There had to be a reason why a man had shown up one day and become our newest boss, almost without warni
ng, without anything more than a strained smile from the owner of the business and a “I’d like you all to meet Ripley” in the break room.

  Ripley, this man who constantly kept his skin covered with long-sleeved shirts. I had never, ever seen him wearing anything else. Not when we worked until midnight. Not when we worked until two o’clock in the morning. Not at seven in the morning. Not even on a Saturday. He constantly hid whatever tattoos he had.

  At first, I had wondered if they were ugly or old, but he didn’t strike me as the type to care what other people thought. Plus, wouldn’t he have just gotten them redone if that was the case? Mr. Cooper had never been slumming it financially, and the business had only boomed in the years since it had expanded into the restoration business—specifically with the cars Rip bought, restored, and then sold. I couldn’t think of a single car he’d worked on that hadn’t been flipped in a matter of weeks for a lot more than he had invested in them. He could have easily afforded getting tattoos redone if he didn’t like them. The only reasonable explanation I could think of was that some tattoos were intensely personal to people. I didn’t walk around flashing the one I had around.

  A part of me was holding out hope that one day he’d slip up and tug his shirt up his forearm or something. He could accidentally pull up his shirt too if he wanted, and I wouldn’t complain. Knowing him, that day was never going to come. If he hadn’t shown them off already, I really doubted he ever would.

  Then again it wasn’t my business what they were. If I wanted to know bad enough, I guess I could have used the favor he owed me to get him to tell me, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t, either.

  Focusing on that moment though, I decided to do the same thing I always had when I overheard them. While I was at it, I could drop off the cake that I had made for Rip. Up until last year, I hadn’t even known what day his birthday was; the only reason I found out was because he’d tossed his wallet at me one day so I could grab his credit card and buy his lunch, and his driver’s license had been right there.