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“I’ll have the hot honey fried chicken sandwich and fries,” he said. He hadn’t looked at the menu so that told her he was a regular, not just for business but to eat.
“That sounded good,” she said of his sandwich.
“It is. It’s messy though. I always go through a bunch of napkins. More sticky than anything.”
“I’ll have to try it another time when I’m not in my work clothes. I’m bound to drop something on me if it’s that messy.”
“No reason to stain a white shirt,” he said.
She found it funny they were having this asinine conversation. “Back to you, not my potential laundry issues.”
He grinned at her. He grinned, smiled, and laughed a lot, she realized. She found it odd considering what Brian had said about Cal losing his parents so close together and so young.
“What is it you want to know exactly?”
“Whatever you want to tell me,” she said.
Their drinks were brought out. “How about this? I say something and you say something. The sharing of information. You know, like what might happen on a date.”
“So this is a date?” she asked.
He just grinned at her again. “When I was eighteen my father got me a job stocking shelves at the liquor store I own. I worked there through my two years of college. I got close to the owner. He was a friend of my father’s. When my father died, Tom was great to me. When his health took a turn a year later or so, I had money from my father’s life insurance and other investments left to me and decided to buy the liquor store. I liked the work and the people. I always knew that I didn’t want to work for anyone else. Not sure why, but in my mind I figured I’d be my own boss. Why not just start with something I knew and enjoyed?”
“First,” she said, “I want to say that Brian told me that your mother passed when you were in high school.”
“Did he tell you how?” he asked.
“Not much. It seemed personal to me.” She didn’t want Cal to think Brian was telling too many details and the truth was, Brian hadn’t said much.
“It’s not a secret,” he said. “She went Christmas shopping. A fight broke out over a stupid video game. She tried to calm people down like she always did. She just had this way about her. One of the assholes pulled out a gun. It went off by mistake and hit her in the stomach. She didn’t make it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Shit happens in the world. A few years later my father died during a drug bust gone wrong. I like to think they are together. They’re happy, I know it.”
Son of a bitch. How could he think that? Feel that?
She’d be angry and upset at the world and he was talking about it as if it was a story to be told rather than a tragedy that he’d lived. It made her petty problems seem small.
“That’s a lovely way to think of things.”
“Thinking any other way doesn’t change what happened,” he said. “When my father died, everything came to me. It gave me the money I needed to start my life.”
“And the first thing you did with that money was help out a friend of your father’s?” she asked. She knew her voice had gotten all soft.
“Tell me something about you now,” he said.
Mia figured she’d pushed too much, but his silence was the same as admission in her eyes. “You shared something personal so I’ll do the same. My last job was at a not-for-profit. My clients weren’t billed. They were income eligible for our services. Most of those cases were in family court, custody hearings, divorces, domestic violence or evictions.”
“Depressing things,” he said.
She snorted. “Exactly. Mostly. The client list grew, my time stayed the same.”
“You burned out?” he asked.
She nodded. Mia didn’t want to sound like a wuss. “Your turn. The restaurant was your next business. We’ll skip over your income properties. I could see from your history that the first house you bought was a multi-family one and you lived there too. Makes sense that you’d buy more.”
“Yes to the first house. I was twenty-three when I bought it. I was living with my grandfather after my father died. You could say we needed each other, but then I needed to move on. I stayed there for about five years while I continued to buy more homes and businesses. I’ve lived in Paradise Place for about six years now.”
