Page 12 of Love By the Slice

WHEN GREG ASKED if he could change his Thursday shift for Friday, Ezra only texted back, “No.”

Greg was at the machine shop today. He’d already cleared his Friday schedule on the grounds that Ezra would swap with him, since Ezra always did. This time, thought, it was just, “No,” and nothing more. Nothing to argue with, there.

Greg had a reasonable plan, he’d thought. Swap his Thursday shift for Friday, and he’d be working the night when Shelly was delivering. Now that they had Rowan sorted out, he had no more excuses to talk to her. He didn’t need an excuse to talk to her if they were working, though, and Shelly did the Friday night deliveries.

It was such a perfect solution that Greg refused to give up on it. “Why not?”

Ezra replied, “I’m not blind. I know you’re hitting on my sister.”

Greg frowned at his phone. Ezra never was one to pull punches, but even so, this was more than a bit of a leap. Greg started typing something to the effect of, “What?” when Ezra’s next text arrived.

“This is not going to end well. You and she will crash and burn in a matter of weeks, and I don’t need the hassle of dealing with you two afterward. You’re going to make me take sides.Lacey and I will be wrangling the schedule to keep you apart. So—no.”

Greg backed up over his own typing. Where to go from here?

Greg replied, “Shelly’s an adult who makes her own decisions.”

Ezra texted, “Agreed. But she’s also my sister, and I’m going to protect her from those decisions. No shift change.”

Ezra and Shelly both had the same zero-to-sixty responses, but Greg had gotten pretty good at de-escalating them. “I wouldn’t hurt Shelly. She’s rock solid and level-headed.”

Ezra replied, “You’re closer to me than my brothers, so pay attention. You’d hurt her by being careless, and you’d never even know you did it.”

Greg replied, “Cold.”

Ezra sent back a thumbs up.

A moment after, “Pizza.”

Greg went back to work on the purchase orders, punching numbers on the keyboard harder than he had to. “Careless.” Ezra must have a different definition of that word because Greg was not, as it turned out, sloppy about details. It’d be one thing if Ezra walked into Loveless half the time to find the door unlocked and flour all over the equipment. Greg didn’t leave his key stuck in the door. He didn’t get a takeout coffee and forget it on top of his car. He’d never lost a phone.

You could also break it down as care-less, as if Greg didn’t care about anything. Again, not true. Hadn’t he shown he cared about Rowan? He cared about Loveless Pizza, which for years had seemed like the only thing Ezra cared about. Ezra cared about Shelly, of course, but Greg cared about her, too.

He broke his invoicing rhythm to type, “Careless how?”

Also, that “you’d never know you did it” sounded ominous, as though Greg tromped across the Maine landscape leaving a trail of bloodied hearts in his wake. He’d had a few girlfriends, sure,but they’d broken up amicably. It always came out of the blue, a total surprise, as if one day each had awakened and thought, “Okay, end of chapter. Send invoice. Close file.”

Greg sent an invoice and closed the file, then opened the next.

You know, if Ezra refused to let Greg work with Shelly on Friday, he would order a pizza and have her deliver it. It would have to be to the shop, though. His house was just outside the delivery zone.

So there.

Or…and this was more to the point…Greg could go to Loveless and hang out there because it was a public location, and he’d see Shelly that way.

Either they’d gotten a bunch of orders at once or Ezra was ransacking his brain for ways Greg was careless. Eventually, though, he sent an answer. “Your last two girlfriends dumped you because you never paid attention.”

Greg sent back, “Not true.”

“Entirely true. You pride yourself on being easy-going, so whenever they brought up an issue, you blew them off.”

Ezra hadn’t been there, so Ezra wouldn’t know. He was just guessing based on Greg having had no idea it was coming.

Anyhow, better to be easy-going than always turning everything into a catastrophe. Ezra always had his eyes wide for danger.

So, for that matter, did Shelly. If he could do anything for her, he would love to be able to dial her down from a constant 10 to maybe a five or a six. Lower her expectation of doom and danger. Like with Rowan: she assumed something like he was being trafficked and they’d need a SWAT team to kick down his apartment door, and instead she’d only needed to call the school and get someone to talk to him.

Living life like that must be so stressful. Most of the time, things worked out fine.

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