I wished I could throw it again, honestly. At his head.
“Oh, Luna, I’m sorry. They don’t know who did it?”
There it went. “The police had said there had been some robberies in the area, but no one I know said they’d heard that.” I swallowed, ignoring the ache right in the center of my chest. “My cousin… the guy I had an issue with in the lot… he admitted he was the one who did it.” The more I said it, the easier it would get. I hoped. “So it was him.”
A hand went up to his head to scrub at the top of it, reminding me of Rip who did the same thing. Mr. Cooper sighed. “I can’t believe they would do that.”
Then he didn’t need to know that it had to have been my dad who sent him. I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
The older man shook his head, clearly looking devastated. “I’m sorry, honey. You should have told me sooner.”
I didn’t want to tell him that I’d called him the night it happened, but he’d had his phone off. “Thanks, Mr. C. It’s all right. I’ll get it all sorted, but if I need help, I’ll let you know for sure.”
My longtime boss’s face dropped, and I could see the argument on his face. But he held the words back and said in a tone that made me feel a little bad, “If there’s anything Lydia and I can do, tell us. You know we’ll help you with anything, little moon. We love you.”
I knew they did, of course I knew they did, but I still told him, “I know, and I love you both too.” That was maybe the tenth time in all the years we’d known each other that I had said those words. “And I will let you know, I promise. I’m still just trying to wrap my head around it all. These last few weeks have just felt like a really bad dream.”
His nod said he understood, and I knew he did. But it didn’t wipe the resignation off his face. “Maybe you should look into getting an alarm system?”
Eh. “Yeah.” I paused and thought about withholding my conversation with Rip from him, but there was nothing to hide. And even if there was, I didn’t want to. “Rip helped me out with it, the day after it happened, that’s why he took the day off. To help me. I’m sorry if that caused a problem between you two.”
Mr. Cooper blinked, and luckily there were no hard feelings on his face from me keeping this from him but telling Rip about it. His voice was a little high, a little shocked as he basically wheezed, “Our Rip?”
Obviously, I wasn’t the only one surprised by this kindness, and it made me feel a little bad and a little defensive. “Yeah.” There was nothing to hide, and I didn’t want to keep this from him any longer. “He knew I’ve been scared, and he’s stayed with me the last few nights.”
I don’t even think he meant to ask, “He did?” But the question did come out of his mouth.
All I did back was nod.
I didn’t know what to do with the look that came over his face.
So I decided to change the subject. “How’s Lydia, by the way?”
I wondered if he was still hung up on Rip helping me out, but he managed to say, distractedly, “She’s great. She was asking me about you a few days ago. I think she was planning on inviting you over for lunch or dinner this weekend, if you’re free.”
“I’m always free for you two,” I told him honestly.
“Have you been going on your dates?”
“Kind of,” I told him, giving him a little smile.
Ripley had kept me company at the bar I’d been stood up at, I thought to myself. “I’ve gone on two and got left hanging at another one.”
I could tell he was distracted, but he still managed to ask. “Any winners?”
I almost snorted. “No. Not even close, but I’ve only gone on three. I don’t want to waste my time, and a lot of these guys don’t want anything serious so….” I shrugged. “I’m just being picky and don’t want to settle. I just want… the right man.” And my heart wanted the wrong one, but I wasn’t going to think about that again in the next millennium. Nope.
Mr. Cooper’s nod was grave, but his voice was even more serious. “I get it, honey.” He sighed. “I was married before Lydia. Did you know that?”
I hadn’t up until I had overheard his and Rip’s conversation—a conversation I wasn’t supposed to have been eavesdropping on. So I lied and shook my head.
He seemed to swallow, to think for a minute before saying, “I was forty when she passed. We had been together since I was twenty-one.” His voice was quiet, serious. “We were together for nineteen years, and it seemed like six months. It was a lifetime, but it never felt like it.”
Was it silly of me that I felt embarrassed and even a little protective of Lydia? Knowing now that Mr. Cooper had been with someone else for so long?
He kept going, his voice still holding onto its gravity… and something else that might have been bittersweet. The hard bob of his throat confirmed it. “She was… she was the love of my life,” he admitted. “Lydia is too in a way, but Bea was my world. It’s been twenty-three years, and I don’t miss her any less than I did when she first died. Lydia came into my life a lot sooner than I would have dreamed of, a lot sooner than I would have liked, but….” His shrug looked like he had three hundred pounds on his shoulders. “It was meant to be. Lydia came when she came, and I can’t say that it wasn’t fate that brought us together.”
Oh jeez. I blinked. “How soon after?”
He swiped his hand over his head again and looked up at the ceiling. “I met her six months after.”
What was I going to do? Judge him? If he had been anyone else, I would have scoffed or thought something terrible, but Mr. Cooper had always been honest with me. He had loved me back when I hadn’t loved myself much. I had seen him with Lydia. I knew there was a deep love there.
I was the first person in the world to understand that life wasn’t white and black. I hadn’t even been able to find one person to love me romantically, much less two. All I knew was that based on the face he was giving me, other people in the past had given him a hard time for moving on, for finding love. After all this man had done for me, I wouldn’t be one of them too.
“Can I ask what she passed away from?”
His hesitation made me feel terrible. The breath he sucked in and then let out made me feel like an asshole. “She was—”
The sound of knuckles hitting the door came a second before the door creaked open and a familiar voice said, “Ready?”
Mr. Cooper ’s face instantly flushed, and he lowered his voice, “We’ll finish this conversation later, okay?”
He didn’t want to finish the conversation because of Ripley, did he? I wondered… but nodded anyway. There were some things in this life that you didn’t want to talk about. Not ever. And especially not in front of certain people.
I understood that better than most. There were plenty of years that I didn’t enjoy talking about.
“Come in, Rip,” Mr. Cooper called out a moment later.
Sure enough, the biggest man I had ever seen in my life, swung the door completely open and stepped inside, shutting it behind him. He stood there in a gray shirt that was plastered to his upper body. I glanced back at Mr. Cooper as Ripley took the seat that I had left unoccupied closest to the door. He glanced at me once, grunting out a “Luna” that I replied with, “Hi, Ripley.”
“You all right?”
“I’ll live. It’s not the first time he’s jumped me.”
Maybe that was the wrong thing to say.
“Well,” Mr. Cooper continued on the moment his co-owner seemed to have settled into the seat beside me. “We brought you in here because of what happened earlier.”
And, I was right. This was about Jason. Or maybe my cousin coming to my job and starting issues…. But I didn’t think Mr. Cooper would blame me for that. Luckily, there hadn’t been any customers around to see it, so it wasn’t like it would impact business.
Rip leaned forward and took hold of the conversation, his gaze leeching straight on me. “Tell us what’s been going on with Jason.”
So this was where we were going. It had nothing to do with Rudy—thankfully. But either they had watched the video or heard that Jason had been the one to let him into the lot, and his disappearing act afterward hadn’t helped either. The dummy hadn’t thought that through at all. Didn’t he know that even if he never came back, employers checked references?
So I told them, “I never said anything, but I knew him before he started working here.”
Somehow I missed how Rip’s eyes narrowed as they flicked from Mr. Cooper to me and back to the older man again. I didn’t like the look that came over Rip’s face before he asked, “How?”
Here we went. “He dated my sister two years ago. It was a mess. I didn’t like him when she introduced me to him, and I didn’t like him six months later when it turned out he got another girl pregnant. I stayed out of it, but when he would come by the apartment and try to see her, if I was home, I would tell him to leave. Anyway, then he applied here—I hadn’t even known he was interested in working in this field back then—but I didn’t want to bring up personal stuff to either of you. I could live with thinking he was a… you know, not a good person.
“But almost immediately after he started here, he began being really rude and disrespectful. I wasn’t exactly the nicest and warmest person to him, but he was really defensive about everything. I didn’t like him, and he knew that, but I tried to be professional. Nothing helped though.
“He’s messed up a bunch of times since he started coming to help me, and I swear he does it on purpose. He doesn’t listen. He’s got a bad attitude. Insubordinate. He’s petty and lazy,” I kept going. “We get into it over everything, even before he came over to my section. Mr. C knows he’s done some petty crap, but it was on purpose, I swear. And, Rip, you’ve heard him on the phone with me, you know he’s a weasel.
“Today though, we got into a disagreement and he walked out of the room and didn’t come back for half an hour, so that was when I went to look for him. You can ask Owen and some of the other guys, they saw me or asked what I was doing, and I told them. Miguel told me he saw him outside, and that’s why I went out there in the first place. I saw him, and he ignored me and walked right by me, and the next thing I knew…” I’d gotten shoved from behind.
“You saw it happen?” Mr. Cooper asked Ripley with a frown.
“I got there after,” my younger boss confirmed, his expression tight. “Miguel and I were by the back door when we heard Luna yell, and we went right by him on the way out the door. I was too… distracted to stop and think about what he’d been doing.” I didn’t miss the way he fisted a big hand.
“You should’ve gone back in and made sure he didn’t leave,” Mr. Cooper replied pretty freaking crisply, sounding angrier than I had ever heard him, and that was saying something because I’d eavesdropped on his arguments with Rip before.
My younger boss’s mouth slackened, and I knew whatever was about to come out of his mouth was no good.
So I tried to but in. “It’s my fault. I should have said something to one of you and told you the truth when he was being a pain over the last few weeks. I should have followed him back into the building when he was making it obvious he was ignoring me—”
Rip cut me off, blatantly ignoring me as he asked Mr. Cooper tightly, “I was busy making sure Luna was all right. What should’ve happened is that you should’ve listened to me when I said you needed to quit trying to make him Luna’s apprentice.”
Wait. He’d told Mr. C not to stick him with me?
Rip kept right on going. “I told you there was something off about the kid. I told you she didn’t like him working with her.”
He’d done that too?
“I told you we should have fired him after his first fuckup, but you said ‘Let’s give him another chance. He’s young. Everyone makes mistakes,’ didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know it was that bad,” the older man claimed in a wobbly voice, his face flushing.
“Me telling you wasn’t enough?” Rip returned. “Her telling you wasn’t enough?”
Shit, shit, shit. “No, it’s my fault. Mr. Cooper, I should have insisted—”
Ripley’s hand came up and he waved me off. “No. I told him.” He pointed one thick, long finger in Mr. Cooper’s direction. “I told you, and her fucking cousin could have had a gun on him. He could’ve had a bat on him, a tire iron. She could’ve gotten her brains bashed in because you always think you know what’s right!”
I could have not been there or within ten miles based on how intense the stare down they were having with each other was.
And suddenly, I had a feeling that this conversation had just taken a sudden turn to This Has Nothing To Do With Me.
I would have been right.
“I had no idea—”
“You never have an idea,” Ripley said, loudly.
“This is nobody’s fault but my own,” I tried to tell them, trying to make eye contact with one of them, but they were both staring too hard at each other. It was like I wasn’t even in the same universe. “It was my cousin. My family. And I don’t know if he paid Jason to open the gate and let him in or what, but it’s my fault,” I tried to say… but they weren’t listening. They weren’t even close to listening.
“That’s unfair, Ripley,” the older man said, completely focused on him.
“You think?”
Mr. Cooper swept another hand over his head. “I know it is. I told you I didn’t know.”
“You don’t think that excuse is getting old after all these years?”
“Son, give me a break,“ Mr. Cooper almost croaked, rubbing his hand over his chest, his face reddish pink.
But the man in the chair decided he wasn’t going to give anyone a break, not his business partner, not the man who had been so kind to me for so long. “Don’t fucking ‘son’ me. You always think you know better than anyone else, but you don’t.”
Okay. All right. I needed to calm this down. “Hey, Rip. Don’t put this on Mr. C. It’s on me. I should have said something from the beginning—”
They were still ignoring me as their voices got louder.
“I didn’t know!” Mr. Cooper shot back as Rip stood up. “It’s not fair for you to keep bringing up things from twenty years ago.”
How had they known each other twenty years ago?
“Hey, you two, can we agree it’s nobody else’s fault but Jason’s?” I piped up, getting to my feet to hopefully remind them they weren’t in here alone.
I was invisible though because nothing changed.
Nothing changed because Rip jabbed his finger in Mr. Cooper’s direction and hurled,
“Twenty-two years ago, not twenty, and it could be another forty and I still wouldn’t forget what you did to Mom—”
Wait.
Wait.
Mom?
Mom?
Mr. Cooper wheezing had me snapping my eyes toward him just as he reached up and slapped another hand over the center of his chest.
“Mr. Cooper?” I asked, taking a step toward his desk as Ripley’s voice seemed to trail off.
Mr. Cooper sucked in another gasp as his fingers curled over the shirt he had on. “I… I…”
“Call 911!”
Chapter 25
“I’m going to get some tea or coffee from the cafeteria. Do you want anything?”
I asked as I got to my feet, ignoring the way my knees popped from how long I’d been sitting in the waiting room at the hospital.
At the hospital.
At the hospital after following the ambulance carrying Mr. Cooper.
Mr. Cooper who I was 99 percent sure, had suffered a heart attack.
Two hours in the waiting room had given me enough time to nurse a pounding headache, a knot in my chest tha
t would have felt like a malignant tumor if those felt like something, and knees that cracked as I stood up. After the paramedics had shown up, I had followed behind, wanting to throw up and pray at the same time, but I hadn’t prayed for anything in so long, I wasn’t sure I knew how to do it anymore.
And behind me, in Mr. Cooper’s car, had been Ripley in his truck.
Rip who hadn’t said more than a handful of words to me since he’d first shouted for someone to call an ambulance. Who had stood there to the side while the EMTs had loaded Mr. C up. Who hadn’t made a move to leave, which was why I had taken his car since mine was at home.
Rip and I had sat there, three chairs apart, in silence the entire time. I wasn’t sure what he had been thinking, or what he’d felt. And I sure hadn’t known what to say.
I didn’t know what to think, if I was going to be honest with myself.
Mom.
Twenty-two years.
All that anger…
It wasn’t the time to think about it, but it was hard not to let my mind wander to those words and what they possibly meant.
I wasn’t stupid.
I’d had my heart in my throat for the last two hours. My stomach felt off and tight and hot, and I genuinely felt sick with worry over a man I loved and cared for. It didn’t help that I had been blowing up Lydia’s phone and she hadn’t answered. I’d left her voice mails on her cell and their home phone telling her to call me, but she still hadn’t.
Was it normal for whatever they were doing to him to take so long? I wondered. I wasn’t sure. I had tried looking up things on the internet, but the information was so broad, all it did was make me sicker.
Which was why I knew I needed to get up and move around for a little while, even if it was just a short trip to the cafeteria. Being helpless was one of the crappiest things in the world.
Rip stared straight ahead at the television playing an episode of Law and Order as he answered in a voice I had never heard before. “No.”
He had barely moved in the hours we’d been sitting there. Was he worried too? Did he feel guilty for getting into an argument with Mr. Cooper—his maybe-possibly-I-think-Dad—right before? I couldn’t blame him if he did.
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