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He must notice my distress because he immediately says, “You go ahead though. It doesn’t bother me at all.”
“Did you—always not drink much?” I choose my words carefully, wondering if he might be in some kind of recovery.
“Yeah. I grew up with two alcoholic parents. So I saw the after-effects a little too much.”
I cringe. “Oh, geez. I’m sorry. I can have a soda.”
“No, no. I don’t mind being around people who drink. Though I will say the smell of cheap booze totally takes me back to my childhood. Which is a bitch because it makes hanging out with my fellow Rangers a little difficult.”
“They drink a lot?”
“Party central for about a third of the year. And I can’t really blame them since there’s not much partying for the other two-thirds of the year.”
“I imagine my brother was the same way when he was a SEAL.”
“Not anymore?”
I shrug. “No. He wants to be the best role model possible for his stepson.”
“Good for him. I could have used that when I was a kid.”
My brow creases with concern. “That must have been hard.”
He shrugs. “Life shapes us. I probably wouldn’t have ended up in the military if it hadn’t been for my parents.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I grew up—well, on the wrong side of the tracks, as they say. Some of the poor kids that went to my school—poor like me, you know?—they hadamazingparents.” He shakes his head for a moment, seeming lost in a memory. “They’d work two or three jobs just to get by, just to put food on the table. And they were so proud when their kids would get good grades or get accepted to college. First in the generation to go, in most cases.”
“But not your parents?” My heart feels heavy at the thought, just remembering how proud my parents were when I got into the MBA program at Stanford. I didn’t think twice about their reaction at the time, never really considering that other people might not have the same kind of backing.
“Dead opposite. Lost one job after another. Any paycheck when straight to Jack Daniels, not me. Or to pot on special occasions,” he says with a joke in his tone.
“That’s terrible. Is that why you ended up in the military? To sort of… escape the family, so to speak?”
“Exactly.” He stretches his long, muscled legs in front of him and takes a thoughtful bite of his burger. Then, after swallowing, he adds, “One day this recruiter came to our high school, and I talked to him. My plan was to enlist. But when he found out my GPA, he encouraged me to apply to West Point. I was pretty smart in school. Like you, apparently.”
I laugh. “Not like me at all. The only reason I got great grades in school is because I’ve never been much of a sleeper. So if I was already awake at three a.m., I might as well study, right?” I take a bite of the burger, cooked to perfection, and topped with extra fried onions, juicy tomato, and crunchy bibb lettuce.
Bo put a little extra care into these burgers, I can tell.
“So why is a Stanford MBA grad working in a diner?” he asks me.
A giggle escapes me. “Just lucky, I guess.”
“No, I’m serious. Nothing against working in a diner. But aren’t grads from Stanford usually working in big corporations or something? There has to be a story there.”
“And if I don’t tell you, you’ll go into detective mode again.” I grin, and immediately hope I don’t have a piece of lettuce in my teeth.
“Absolutely. And you know how bad I am at that. I’ve already pegged you as being in the witness protection program, on the run from your prior employer after discovering they represented a money laundering ring masquerading as a kid’s lemonade stand.”
I laugh at his imagination. It makes it easy to picture him as a kid, curled up on a sofa somewhere, devouring those ancientHardy Boysnovels. “Oh, Iwishthere was some kind of witness protection program that could wipe the slate clean for me.”
“That bad?”
“From my perspective, yeah.” I take a long sip of wine. “You want the short version or the long version?”
“The long one of course,” he answers, giving me a look as though I should have known that.
