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The routine Kelly and I fell into made it easier to get even more done, increasing our productivity. After a few hours of working on the repairs and modifications to various bikes, we’d break for lunch. More often than not, that meant gathering with everyone else in the field to eat together. We rarely used the field before Merry came along. It was a beautiful place, and the pavilions made it ideal for gatherings or activities, but I barely even noticed it until she started spending more time in it.
A particular tree became her favorite spot for eating lunch, reading, or just working on days with nice weather. Her brother would come down from where he worked in accounting to have lunch with her. Then Glenda joined, then my brothers and parents. Gradually we’d all adopted the field as where we ate lunch when the weather was nice, and sometimes dinner when the days rang long and we couldn’t manage to get home in time.
After lunch we shifted our focus from repairs and maintenance to performance, and I filled the afternoons with practice laps and other tests. Dad would find his way to the garage at some point during the day and was always available to help with our next project, or to watch me go around the track. I enjoyed working with both of them. Having my father and Kelly there gave me a boost and improved my outlook tremendously.
Except that as the days kept easing past, I was getting the strong suspicion Kelly was hiding something. The feeling got stronger when she rushed off every day right as we were taking a break for lunch. I walked with Dad down to the field where Quentin and Merry were organizing box lunches and large containers of sides and desserts on one of the tables in a nearby pavilion. They ordered food for everyone more often than not these days, which was a nice change of pace from me throwing something together at the beginning of the day or, more often, saying I was going to order something and not bothering to stop. Having them get everybody together for lunch forced me to take a break during the day, which felt like it was a good step for my mental and physical health.
I tried not to, but I couldn’t help looking around for her as I took my box and filled a plate with extras. Merry stepped up beside me and gave me a knowing look.
“She’ll be down here soon,” she said.
“I’m just wondering why she always does this,” I told her, probably too quickly. It was supposed to come across like I didn’t really care what she was doing and was just wondering why she always wandered off before lunch, but Merry seemed to catch on to a different note in my voice.
“Maybe she’s taking a restroom break,” she suggested. “Ladies do pee, you know.”
“Is that something they usually need to discuss with others or photograph for posterity?” I asked. She looked at me strangely, and I nodded toward Kelly, who was scurrying toward us, shoving her phone in her pocket as she came. “She always gets to lunch late, and she’s always stuffing her phone in her pocket like she’s just used it. I don’t know about you, but I don’t usually combine restroom breaks and phone conversations. You women and your needs might be different, though.”
I walked away before Merry continued the conversation and potentially went into any detail about female bathroom habits. The thing was, I wasn’t just curious about why Kelly was always a few minutes late to lunch or was always putting her phone away when she got there like she had just gotten off it. A tiny, irrational part of me just assumed she must have a guy somewhere and she snagged a few minutes in the middle of the day to talk to him. It was possible he had a job that kept him far away or he was in the military and had only very limited access to talking on the phone.
Honestly, I didn’t care if he was Superman and needed to stay vigilant to keep the world safe from crime. I hated the thought of her having someone and carving out time for him during the day to talk. And I hated that I hated it. And even more than that, I hated that I had absolutely no practical and justifiable reason to ask her about it. She had been nothing but professional since the first day she came to work at the complex, and even though we’d agreed to be friends, Kelly didn’t act super friendly. Our conversations stuck firmly to being about work and my races, and that was pretty much it. Occasionally she asked a question about one of my brothers, but that came from her brief interactions with them. We didn’t drift into anything personal or about our lives outside of the complex. There was never any conversation about friends or what we did when we weren’t at work.
