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MONDAY
CHAPTER 1
Imoved in with my One True Love a month ago, sure that it was going to be nothing but good times ahead. I was wrong. Here’s a tip for those of you considering cohabitation: If the person you’re thinking of sharing space with has Rogers Rules of Rangering up on the kitchen wall, turn back now. It’s a sure bet that he’s gonna be a pre-dawn kind of guy. Look, Vince knew before I moved into his diner that I do not greet the rosy dawn with glad cries of joy. I’d spent plenty of nights and subsequent mornings with him before moving in and I’d made that clear. And on this particular Monday morning, the dawn wasn’t even rosy yet when the pounding and the cracking and the crashing started.
Even while I was still groggy, I knew Vince was smashing drywall in the addition he was adding to our diner. Nine months ago, he’d moved an old fire-damaged Big Chef diner down to the banks of the Ohio River on a flat-bed truck and had lived happily alone just outside of Burney, Ohio, in its ten by thirty foot interior until we met three months ago and fell into a fun series of one-night stands that ended over a month ago when we decided we were ready to try living together, at which point he surprised me by buying another Big Chef diner in even worse condition so there would be room for me. Six hundred square feet. We were living large. And now we were in a two-diner relationship that involved removing old drywall before dawn and putting up new to make a bigger bedroom, not that he’d let me help.
Part of the problem was that neither of us had thought about what a two-diner relationship might be, and we really didn’t want to talk about it, since we were both allergic to the C word. Real commitment was right up there with root canal for us: we knew it was probably somewhere ahead of us, but let’s not think about that now.
As more drywall fell and I woke up completely, I began to think we should have thought about that now. Possibly established some ground rules, like no bashing drywall before nine AM. But we had bigger problems than that. Like my efforts to be an equal partner in our two-diner life.
Vince and his buddies had moved the new old diner at right angles to the end of the original diner to make an L-shaped floor plan, and then had bolted the two together, cutting an opening between them, so his nice, clean, white diner now had a dingy, dusty construction zone attached to it. I’d tried to help pay for the second diner, but Vince had waved that away. I tried to help with the drywall, and he waved that away. I told him I’dpayfor the paint and drywall, but he waved that away, too. I’d said, “At least let me furnish it,” and he’d said, “Why would we need furniture?”
Vince Cooper, a real mattress-on-the-floor kind of guy.
That’s great when you’re twenty-three, not so much when you’re thirty-three and trying to have an equal relationship with somebody who does the “don’t you worry your pretty little head about that” thing. Not that Vince would ever say that. He just says, “No,” when I try to help.
I realized the pounding had stopped and had a brief moment when I thought he might have come to his senses and be headed back to bed and me, the love of his damn life. Then he poked his head around the glass block wall that separated the bed from the rest of the diner.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” he said.
I threw a pillow at him.
He caught the pillow and dropped it at the foot of the bed and disappeared back around the glass brick while I fell against the pillows that were left and tried to go back to sleep. He came back a couple of minutes later with a mug of mocha, courtesy of my boss, Anemone Patterson who had gifted me a pink Keurig and a lot of chocolate coffee pods when I’d left her house to move in with Vince because, as she put it with her usual tact, “You can’t even boil water, Liz, how are you going to make a decent cup of coffee?” Plus, she’d heard about him making what he called “field mocha” —instant coffee and instant cocoa mixed together in a dirty canteen cup over a camp stove—and been appalled. Well, anyone would be.
Vince sat down at the end of the bed and stretched out his arm to give me the mug.
I sighed and took it, knowing that he wasn’t going to let me go back to sleep.
“How’s the drywall?” I asked him.
“It’s coming along,” he said. Which is what he’s said every day since he started.
He does this thing where he knocks down a piece of the stuff, breaks it into smaller pieces, and then stops and puts it in a garbage bag. Several pieces later, the bag is full—drywall is heavy—so he double bags it and takes it out to a very neat pile up by the road which is down a long lane. Then he comes back and tears down another piece and stops and puts in in a garbage bag. When it’s full, he carries it down the lane and adds it to the pile. Then he comes back and tears . . .
Well, you get the drift. Vince Cooper, meticulous de-constructionist. It’s going to take himforever.
“I was sleeping,” I told him balefully over my coffee.
“It was time to get up,” he told me. “And I padded the sledge. It wasn’t that loud.” Seeing that didn’t make much of an impression, he added, “It’s Monday. You need to get to the Pink House to take Peri to swim lessons.”
The Pink House is where my boss, Anemone, is hosting several people left homeless by an evil arsonist I shot. It’s a long story, forget I said that.
“And if you get there early,” Vince was saying, “Marianne will make breakfast for you.”
The problem with sleeping with a guy for two months and then living with him for a month is that the bastard gets to know you. Left to myself, if I had to choose sleep or food at this hour of the morning, I’d take sleep, but since I was now awake, yes, I was going up to the Pink House for food. Food, sleep, and sex, those are my three priorities depending on what time of day it is, what kind of mood I’m in, and who I’m with.
“Fine,” I said, and took another long drag on my caffeine before I threw back the covers to get dressed.
“No rush,” Vince said, and I realized he’d woken me so we could get in a quickie before breakfast.
How did I know that? Three months, people. I can read this guy like a book.
I glared at him. “Here’s a hint. Waking me up by pounding drywall is not foreplay.”
He looked at me, trying for innocent, but that was hopeless. Vince Cooper is many things, but innocent is not one of them.
“Fat chance, buddy.” I finished my coffee, put my mug on the shelf behind me, and crawled down the bed to the end so I could go shower. One of the many reasons he’d been busting drywall was so we could have a bedroom with a bed we could actually walk around instead of one with walls pressing on each side that we had to crawl in and out over the foot of. Plus, this space was going to be my office. Some day.
