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“What do you mean?” she asked, sniffing. I could almost see her wiping her eyes with a tissue as her lower lip trembled. “I thought he’d be excited to get a promotion.”
“I guess what I mean is, if you had offered him the glasses as a gift but not tied to the promotion, he wouldn’t have overreacted. If you had offered him the glasses and the opportunity to take cooking classes, he wouldn’t have overreacted.”
“I offered him the glasses and a chance to take business classes,” she said. “I wasn’t going to throw him into the job without training.”
“But you’re missing the bigger picture, Ivy.”
“Which is what?”
“That he has a traumatic brain injury. While that manifests itself as the inability to read, it’s also the inability to write. He can’t take classes where he has to put pen to paper like in business school. He can take classes where he doesn’t need to read or write. He already knows he can’t write anything. How would he even begin to address that disability in business classes, much less as the manager of the diner?”
The line was quiet for so long I thought I’d lost her. I looked at the phone, but the seconds were still ticking and the call was active. “Ivy?”
“I can’t believe I overlooked that aspect of it, Indie! I should have run this past you before I talked to him about it, but I didn’t want him to feel like I was checking with his mommy.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, poor choice of words.”
“I understood what you meant,” I promised, hoping to make her feel better.
“I’ve worked with him for so long that I forget he doesn’t write either. He doesn’t have to in the kitchen because Mason does the ordering. When they run out of something, Lance leaves the label on a board, so Mason knows to order it. They have a system down pat, so I don’t even think about it anymore.”
“I think that was his point,” I agreed. “He’s happy, comfortable, and confident in the job he has and it’s not a matter of stepping outside his comfort zone, either. He knows his abilities and his disabilities better than we do. We shouldn’t question the choices he makes because he has reasons for making them.”
“Agreed,” she said quietly. “I feel like total rubbish. I need to talk to him. There’s no way he’s quitting the diner. Do you know where he’d go?”
“He left a few minutes ago after blaming me for losing his mom and his job.”
“What?” she asked on a breath. “Why would he say that?”
“I guess that’s just how he feels. He pointed out that since I started working with him again, he’s lost his mother and his job. He thinks we shouldn’t have rekindled a relationship because it doesn’t seem to be doing him any favors. Or at least that’s what I gathered from his statement.” I paused and rubbed my forehead. “He was probably just upset about everything and needed someone to take it out on, right?” I asked, begging for some kind of reprieve from the horrible thoughts running through my head.
“He wasn’t thinking clearly, and you just said he doesn’t think quickly or clearly when he feels trapped. I’m sure that’s all it was, Indie,” Ivy promised. Her tone told me she prayed her words were true.
“Either way, I would say he’s walking past the diner right about now. After you’re done talking to him, please have him text or call me? He left upset, but I don’t want to gang up on him.”
“I will. Give me thirty minutes.”
I hung up the phone and laid it on the bench as my chin fell to my chest. The logical side of me knew I had nothing to do with Michelle dying or losing his job. He didn’t have to quit. He made the choice to quit before he even spoke to me about the situation. I glanced around the bakery and sighed. There was no joy to be had in the cookies tonight. It looked like this year The Michelle Garland Christmas Cookie would cease to exist.
Chapter Twenty-One
I was cleaning up the baker’s bench when the back door to the bakery opened. My heart pounded with excitement as I ran for the back room. “Ivy’s looking for you, Lance!”
“It’s not Lance,” a voice said and I stopped dead in my tracks.
“Brenda. The bakery isn’t open. You can’t be in here.”
She shrugged as though she didn’t have a care in the world. “The door was open. I’ve been wanting to talk to you, but you keep ignoring my phone calls.”
“I have nothing to say to you, Brenda.” I braced myself firmly in the doorway to the bakery and wouldn’t allow her past. There was no way I was letting her into a room full of dangerous objects.
“You don’t have to say anything, you can just listen. It’s about Bruce.”
“What about him?” I asked, swallowing around the nervousness in my throat. I could smell the alcohol wafting off her in waves the closer she got to me. A drunk Brenda was a bad omen. I’d learned that the hard way many times.
“You missed his funeral.”
“I didn’t miss anything,” I countered. “You didn’t want me there and I didn’t want to be there.”
She stuck her finger out at me. “Do you know how poorly it looked that our only daughter didn’t show up to her own father’s funeral?” Her finger shook with anger, and I sighed because dramatics were about to ensue. I’d been through the dramatics enough times with the woman to know.
