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“Fine by me, as long as you don’t mind sitting next to Smoke,” Jack said. He lifted a five-foot-long bolt of cloth out of Brandi’s trunk with ease. “Let’s load it up.”
“Now who’s making excuses to hang around whom?” Brandi whispered to me.
I rolled my eyes at her again, but knew there was a grain of truth to her accusation.
16
Alyssa
Loading Jack’s truck with the fabric was much quicker with his help. In fact, we moved all fifteen bolts into the bed of his truck in the same amount of time it had taken Brandi and me to move three bolts to her trunk.
“I don’t know what we would have done without you,” Brandi said. “We owe you one!”
I opened the passenger door and was greeted by Smoke, the gray German Shepherd. He was sitting on his haunches in the passenger seat, looking down at me curiously.
“Over here, boy,” Jack said from the driver’s side. There was one row of seats in this truck, with a narrow spot in the middle that Jack patted with his palm. Smoke stared at me with his serene almond eyes, then begrudgingly moved to the middle.
“You like dogs?” Jack asked.
“I love them,” I said, climbing up into the seat and scratching Smoke behind the ears.
Jack started the engine and backed out, placing his hand across the back of my seat while he twisted to look behind him. “You had one growing up, right? The curly-haired dog?”
“Duchess was our mother’s dog,” I clarified, “not ours. She loved that dog more than she loved us. She wouldn’t even let us take Duchess on walks.”
“Do you have one now?”
I shook my head. “New York isn’t very conducive to a pet that needs to be walked several times a day. Besides, my apartment is tiny. It wouldn’t be fair to the dog.”
“How small is small?” Jack asked. “I’ve always heard horror stories about tiny city apartments, but I don’t really have a frame of reference.”
“About 210 square feet.”
Jack barked a laugh. “Oh, shit. You’re serious.”
“And guess how much it costs.”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.” He frowned out at the road while driving. “A grand per month?”
“Nineteen hundred,” I replied.
He whistled. “I don’t know why anyone would do that.”
“I get to live in the greatest city in the world,” I replied.
“Oh, so you live like in downtown New York? In Manhattan or whatever?”
“Well… no,” I admitted. “I live in Queens.”
“That’s close to the city though, right? Sorry for all the questions, but I really am clueless.”
I winced. “It’s about a forty-five minute train ride into the city.”
“Oh.”
When I explained it out loud, it sounded pathetic. And if I was being honest with myself, it wasn’t the glamorous life I had imagined when I moved there. But I certainly wasn’t going to admit that to Jack.
“It’s amazing,” I said. “I can’t wait to go home.”
