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Fuck.It hurt more than any bone I’d broken in my twenty years of playing hockey. It felt like all the air had been squeezed from my lungs. Eventually I managed to mutter two syllables.
“Bye, doc.”
***
I stood at the front door at four AM, watching the taillights fade away down the block. I hadn’t slept all night. Couldn’t manage to close my eyes long enough to try. Even after the car turned the corner and there was nothing more to see, I kept standing there staring, lost in thought. At six, the garbage trucks rolled down the street. I looked to the curb next door and saw no cans had been put out. She had to have garbage after packing up the last of the house. So I walked next door to double check.
Both cans were packed, so I wheeled them down to the end of the driveway, just as the sanitation guys approached the house.
“Morning, Fox.”
I nodded. “Hank.”
Hank swung open the attached lid from the first can and heaved the contents into the back of the truck. I couldn’t get my feet to walk away, so I figured I’d help him out and peeled the top back from the second one.
Hank tossed the first can back on the curb and grabbed the handle to the second. As he lifted, the contents caught my eye.
I put my hand up. “Hang on a second.”
Hank stopped, setting the can back down. “Something wrong?”
It was dark. I thought I might’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion, so I reached inside and scooped out some of the contents of a box that sat open inside the can. Sure enough, they were Christmas cards—all the ones she’d had on her walls, all from people here in Laurel Lake.
Jesus Christ. I’d fucked up so royally that she no longer believed the fantasy she’d been carrying with her for fifteen years.
***
My face heated. “You’re fired.”
Opal’s response was to cackle. She waved me off and sat her fired ass down behind her desk. “Oh please. Your idea of typing is pecking at the keys ten words a minute with two pointer fingers, you don’t know how to use any of the software,anddoing payrollis signing the checks after I figure out all the taxes and deductions. The last time I had a day off and the printer ran out of ink, you drove forty minutes to the nearest Best Buy and bought a new one because you couldn’t figure out how to change the cartridge yourself.” She shook her head. “I’m not fired. In fact, I think I deserve a raise.”
Porter had walked into the office halfway through Opal’s rant. The fucker tossed me a pity smile. “Grumpy because Josie left,” he said.
“Get the fuck out!”
“He’s miserable,” Opal said. “Biggest mistake of his life, and he knows it.”
Porter nodded. “I still regret breaking things off with Stacey Krans when I was twenty. Thought being tied down was stupid when I was that young. Now she’s married with a kid and owns an exercise studio. Looks better than she did then.”
Was this seriously my life? These two idiots... I took in a deep inhale of patience and blew it out. “What do you want, Porter?”
“Tile guys on the job over in Two Lakes said they weren’t going to be able to finish tomorrow. Gonna need another two days, so we’re going to have to push back the appliance deliveries.”
“Bullshit.Tell them to get extra workers here by this afternoon and don’t go home until it’s finished. They’re finishing on time.”
Porter looked to Opal. She nodded. “I’ll call the delivery company and have it moved to Thursday, just in case two days turns to three.”
“Thanks, Opal.”
“No problem, honey.”
I tossed my pencil into the air as Porter walked out.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I growled. “I run this company, not you.”
“Well, then get your head out of your ass and do it. Will Rupert is the tile guy on that job. His mother was put on life support last week, and his thirty-three-year-old wife is in the middle of her second round of chemotherapy for breast cancer. They’ve got two kids under five, too. There’s no good reason we can’t push the appliance delivery and cut him some slack.”
“Fine,” I gritted out between clenched teeth.
