AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Bet your bottom dollar Landon and I don’t even wear the clothes we offer our customers. Both of us shop in Atlanta or other places we travel to outside our little south Georgia haven.
But to hear my dad’s opinion, you’d think we were doing great.
“The store sales have a habit of ebbing and flowing, son. It’s always been this way.”
“But we’ve been showing a year-to-year decrease of five to eight percent for the past four years running, Dad. If this continues, we’ll be forced to make changes that won’t be good just to stay afloat.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. But after analyzing our most recent numbers and seeing not a five to eight percent decrease but a dip of nearly thirty-five percent, I can’t do anything but force some changes.
I haven’t discussed these new report numbers with my father yet, although I have no doubt that he’s seen them. He’s just in denial. I don’t look forward to the discussion that’s coming. That has to come.
“Back from lunch?” Landon asks me as I enter, and we meet to give one another a back-slapping man hug.
I glance over at Heath who’s helping Arthur, one of our regulars with a tweed sport coat. A tweed sport coat… See what I mean? Yet I don’t address my part-time sales associate or customer. Instead, I speak to my little brother.
“What are you doing here?”
“What? Am I not allowed in since I’m no longer working here?” he asks, with an exaggerated hand gesture. Landon is by far the most animated and theatrical of us.
“Shut up, asshole,” I murmured so just he can hear me. “Just tell me why you dropped by.”
“This is the halfway point between my last gig and my next one.” Landon shrugs, then gets a shrewd twinkle in his eye. That look never bodes well for me. “So, what’s up with you and Trina?”
Shit.
“Lunch.”
“Just lunch?” he presses, and for some inane reason I’m tempted to clean his clock.
I feel…protectiveof Trina. If I’m honest, Landon’s little barb hits close to home. I’ve been having feelings that are hard to describe any other way than attraction. I settle myself down and don’t get into the squabble I almost fell into. Still, I don’t curb the acerbic tone in my voice.
“So?”
“So you two have been spending a lot of time together for a while now.”
“We’re friends,” I say a little too loudly. “We’ve been friends for years, or have you forgotten that? Is using that camera of yours causing you amnesia?”
“No amnesia. But if you don’t mind my saying, you two seem awfully damn close for just friends.” The dipshit uses finger quotes when he says the word, “friends.”
And Idomind. I mind so much that I’m tempted to pound him again, but then, Landon has always had that effect on me. Growing up, my mom had to consistently bark at us to stop roughhousing or on more than once occasion, out and out brawl. But my younger sibling makes it his personal mission to get my goat.
Regardless, I effect a nonchalant stance. Thirty-five is a little too old to stomp my thirty-three-year-old brother into the ground, even if I am more than capable.
“Maybe you should get your vision checked. Seems like you’re seeing things that aren’t there.”
He snorts raucously enough that it echoes throughout the store.
“Whatever, dude. Be with Trina or don’t be with her. Either way, you seem better. That’s all I’m saying.”
I abruptly recognize this as Landon’s ham-fisted method of checking in on me. Since I lost Jane, he’s lessened his SOB tendencies in my presence. Maybe I should be thankful that he’s being more of a pain again. It might mean that he—along with everyone else in town—has given up on the let’s-walk-on-eggshells-around-poor-Harrison routine.
Because to say that I’m sick of that shit is a major understatement.
For the past three years I’ve had to put up with the pitying gazes. Not that they didn’t mean well. I know that. But sometimes, it just made the sorrow more cutting. More acute. It’s so much harder to get over it all when people think you’re fragile.
Landon’s right, though I can hardly believe it. Iambetter. Some days I can go entire hours without spotting a place in Oak Valley that meant something to Jane and me. And it’s been probably a year or more since something caught me off guard and made me lose my composure.
Small mercies.
