Page 24 of Love By the Slice

“It’ll all work out” meant someone until the moment it didn’t.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SHELLY DIDN’T EVEN have to ask. Ezra rearranged the schedule so she wasn’t delivering during Greg’s shifts. The next Saturday night, when they were both scheduled, he kept Greg in the food truck with himself, and he left Lacey to handle the shop.

Other than the one time Greg had Shelly moving pizzas around in the oven, she’d never done any of the cooking. Sure, she’d done some prep, but that had been more along the lines of “Here, open these cans” rather than chopping or mixing. Lacey, on the other hand, had learned everything she could from Ezra and then practiced under his watchful eye. “He called them Sunday pies,” she’d told Shelly last year, “because they wereholey. But they weren’t actually full of holes.”

Tonight, the pizza truck was parked at the Juniper Snow Festival, and Lacey was in the rhythm of taking orders for the shop, prepping pizzas, and boxing them for Shelly to deliver. Her tempo was fast, and the orders came in just as fast. Shelly would return to Loveless just long enough to shove more pizzas in the thermal bag and step right back out the door.

The weather was frigid, but the roads were dry. By now, she knew Hartwell inside and out, every back road and every shortcut that even the map apps didn’t know. If Lacey did open a branch in Juniper, she’d better send Greg to that one. It wouldn’t make sense for Shelly to learn all new addresses on all new roads.

Shelly had regulars. She had regulars who tipped well, and therefore she made sure they had a hot pizza on their table the first instant they could, even if that meant sidelining two other customers to deliver theirs first. She also had customers who tipped her a quarter, and guess which ones got delivered last?

Lacey was tracking the Loveless One Hundred, although since it was a Saturday it was more like the Loveless Hundred Seventy Five. Every so often, a message came from Ezra in the pizza truck.

Shelly sighed as she loaded up the next delivery. Ezra and Lacey were so cute together. Those two had been at odds from the start, but then it turned out Lacey really did want what was best for the pizzeria, and Ezra had been able to crush down his pride to make the changes the pizzeria needed. Once they’d respected each other, everything else had come easy.

Respect, Shelly mused, wasn’t how Greg had treated her. She was fun for him, and entertaining, and amusing, but he’d never treated her like someone he cared about.

None of these were addresses she recognized as tippers, so Shelly mentally arranged them in a loop. The last was on the third floor of a three-story building with lopsided wooden steps and a deep groan from every one of the stairs. When she got to the top, the door opened before she could knock, and Rowan bounced out to her. “Hey! You came!”

Shelly laughed. “What, not a sardine and pineapple pizza?”

“Nope. Meatball all the way.” He took the pizza box from her, but his grandfather was standing behind him and lifted it from his hands. Then Rowan reached into his pocket and carefully withdrew three dollar bills.

Shelly flinched. “You don’t have to.”

“I do have to. Granddad says it’s important to tip for pizza delivery.” He handed her the money, and Shelly took it. “It’s my birthday, so we’re celebrating, and this is what I wanted.”

Shelly said, “Happy birthday!”

Granddad said, “Would you like to come in?”

“I’ve got five more orders to deliver,” Shelly said, “or I would. Thank you.” She glanced at the grandfather. “Is everything okay now?”

The grandfather sighed. “I thought about what you said. When the school called back, I went ahead and let them set me up with some people to talk to. Things are going to be a little different.”

Rowan said, “Maybe I can get pizza more often.”

Shelly warmed at his smile. “I hope you can.”

Rowan said, “Tell Greg he was right. Things really did work out.”

Those last five words tanked Shelly’s mood. She drove back to Loveless with a storm cloud over her head and a blizzard in her heart. “Things really did work out” because someone had worked them out for Rowan. She’d called the school. The school and investigated. The school had acted on the results of the investigation. More parties had gotten involved and hooked them up with social services. And then the grandfather had done the hard work of accepting those services.

That wasn’t “things working out.” Sure, to Greg, who’d done none of the work, it seemed like things had worked out. But every single piece of that was work someone had done.

As Shelly read the order tickets back at Loveless, Lacey said, “Did you get stiffed on the tips? You look ready to throat-punch someone.”

Shelly huffed. “I’m still mad about Greg.”

Lacey kept silence as Shelly stacked pizzas in the delivery bag, at least until the moment Shelly was ready to step back out the door, when she said, “Just for my own curiosity—when did Greg stop being a happy-go-lucky guy who made you feel optimistic, and become someone who didn’t take life seriously?”

Shelly snarled, “You’re not helping,” and stalked to her car.

Yes, those were the same characteristics. But Greg should be able to figure out when it was time to be whimsical and when it was time to be serious. You can get on a rowboat in a river and float down the river without rowing. You’ll get where you’re going. On a lake, though? You’ll just stay where you are, bobbing around forever. Try that on the ocean, and you’ll die. In those cases, you lock in the oars and start paddling.

Optimism and lack of ambition was great when nothing was going to go wrong. Greg could say, “Relax,” and Shelly could relax. But now that she knew he would say the same thing even if the world were burning down…? That was the opposite of relaxation. That was knowing he’d drop the ball and never pick it up again. That was knowing she’d never relax again because no one else would pick up the slack.

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