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She got a laugh out of me. She wasn’t far off, only the static was her fault. “Just thinking about…stuff.”
She snorted. “I hate to stereotype, but I nailed it. All static.”
I elbowed her on instinct. Why did I do the dumbest stuff around her? “Sorry. And not just static. I’m happy to report there’s an antenna up here.” I lightly knocked a fist against my head. “Upgraded to digital.”
She laughed. “You’re so corny. I love it.”
I love that she loved it.
“Hey, what’s Gabe doing now?” She took the quickest intake of breath. “Is it okay to ask? You mentioned your brother had a rough time. He’s doing better though?”
I nodded. “Yeah. He didn’t go to medical school like my parents wanted. He considered a pharmacology degree, but ended up going into pharmacy sales instead. Don’t ask me his job title. It’s something super corporate. He’s good at it. Oh, and he got married last year. She’s great.”
“Married! Wow. Well, good on him if he found a keeper.” She sipped at her drink. “And what have you been up to? I’ve been talking about myself all day. Are you…is there…a person in your life?”
She looked past me at the boats. She had to have known I’d acted like a jealous fool earlier about the Noah mix-up. I would have mentioned a girlfriend by now if someone existed. Maybe Jillian was as hesitant as me about asking those questions. It wasn’t as if a rule book existed for this stuff.
If there was, I probably wouldn’t read it anyway.
“Ah, no. Not a person of interest.”
She snort-laughed. “I didn’t ask if she was a suspect in a crime. Person of interest. Who says that?”
I swatted her leg. “Shut up.” But the tension broke. This was Jillian. I was overthinking here. “As for what I do, it’s the same thing as I’m doing here this summer. Fixing up houses.”
“Like a flipper? Are you a house flipper?”
“Nah, I don’t flip. Me and my crew are hired out for jobs.”
“You have a crew?” She lowered her voice. “Are you the boss?”
I laughed. “I’m a few people’s boss, yeah. We do okay.”
She took out her phone. “What’s the name of your company? I’m looking you up.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Tell!”
“Fine. It’s Hoffstetter Construction. Really inventive name.”
She fell quiet as she tapped at her phone. Her nose scrunched. Then her mouth parted. She squinted, scrunched her face some more. Her finger jabbed me in a direct poke to the arm.
“You little sneak! ‘Oh a few people call me boss,’” she said in a dopey voice which I assumed was supposed to be me. “This isn’t some slap-dash operation, Hoffstetter. This is like, a legit company. This is all yours?”
The website I’d paid a pretty penny to upgrade faced back from her phone’s screen. “The whole thing. My folks are investors, so I can’t say I did it all on my own. But I definitely did a large part of it.”
She looked back at the website, tapping and scrolling some more. “I’m such an idiot.”
“What? Why?”
She clicked the screen off and set the phone in the grass between us. “I have to confess…I judged you for ditching college. I thought you were too smart not to try at all. To me, it felt like you were wasting your life. I was mad. Not only how you ghosted me—okay, that was the main part—but how you squandered an opportunity some people don’t have. Your parents could pay for you to go to a great college and you just…didn’t go. You mentioned at the library sometimes you feel bad about it.”
I took a swig of pop as I thought through a response. “I’ve had guilt about my decision for a long time. I didn’t want to waste their money. Getting accepted by a good college didn’t mean signing on was the right choice. If I’d spent their money and hated every second, only to drop out, I would have felt even worse.”
She appeared to think on my explanation. “I’m sorry I judged you. Clearly, you’re successful with your business. Being such a dork for school, I can get kind of closed-minded about education. As if there’s one way toward success.”
“Honestly, it makes sense how you felt the way you did. I didn’t give you anything to go on. I didn’t know at the time how to put any of what I was feeling into words. It took me a few years to get an idea of what I wanted to do. I threw myself into working full time and figured I’d come up with something.”
