Page 5 of Love By the Slice

Those two had just gotten engaged last week, on Christmas Eve. Greg replied, “Did you kiss her when the ball dropped?” and Ezra sent back a thumbs up.

It wouldn’t be a great idea to text, “Similarly, I kissed your kid sister.”

Kid sister was kind of a misnomer. Although Shelly had been barely twenty when she’d started delivering for Loveless, that had been years ago. She’d been working her way through college ever since.

When Shelly had looked at Rowan, something had changed about her expression. Tension and fear, as if looking into a time portal and seeing herself as a kid.

It made sense. Greg had barely noticed her when he first started making pizzas because she’d been scrawny and always exhausted. She’d barely talked to him at all. Ezra said Shelly hadn’t moved out from home as much as both of them had escaped—first him, then her once he’d secured her a part time job with Loveless—and although Ezra was still sending money back to his mother, there remained a lineup of siblings that they were attempting to extract from the trailer park.

Greg didn’t know the full story because Ezra refused to tell it, and good luck getting Ezra to talk about anything he wanted to keep quiet. Like Ezra’s relationship with Lacey, which Greg hadn’t been able to get him to talk about until one day Ezra had stopped hating her and started dating her. And then somehow, Ezra had become part-owner of Loveless and therefore Greg’s boss.

Kissing the boss’s sister was in a whole different category of bad idea than kissing your friend’s sister. So…he’d better hope Shelly kept it to herself.

Or should he instead get ahead of it and just tell Ezra?

Nah. It would be all right.

By twelve forty-five, closing was done. Ezra and Lacey would be driving the food truck back to its spot. Greg looked around the building to make sure everything was settled.

The wood-fired oven was cooling down from nine hundred degrees. His heart wasn’t. Heaven help him, but he wanted to kiss Shelly again. Except when could that happen? You didn’t kiss under the calendar for Presidents’ Day.

“Well, next year,” he muttered to himself. Because surely next year Times Square would drop a ball again, and until then, he’d have no choice but to drop the ball.

Ezra sent Greg the most perplexing texts, sometimes. For example, “Any idea why a kid is hanging around outside the shop?”

You didn’t need to be one of those New Year’s psychics with predictions on the front page of the paper to figure out it must be Rowan.

Granddad used to say not to feed strays because they’d keep coming back. He’d say this while hauling a twenty-pound bag of bird seed out to the feeder, of course, but Greg as a five year old took him very seriously. Grandma hated the mess under the feeder, but Granddad would sit on the back deck with a pair of binoculars and a birding book open on his lap, and he’d regale Greg with their list of visitors.

Then, when Grandma was nearby, he’d lower his voice to sound serious. “Never feed strays, of course. They always come back.”

Greg was on the clock at his father’s shop, so there wasn’t much time to have a conversation. Across the shop, a metal presslet off a slam, and Greg adjusted his ear protection. When he replied, he only sent, “Did you ask? Is he causing a problem?”

Ezra’s response came fifteen minutes later. He’d probably gotten an order and needed to make the pizza, since he was, you know, part owner of a pizzeria. Kind of like Greg was, in theory, handling the accounts at his father’s machine shop. “Not causing a problem. Just out of place.”

At least it was twenty-five degrees today. The kid wouldn’t be freezing like on New Year’s Eve. He might not even be as cold as it was in this shop with its corrugated metal walls and twenty-foot ceilings.

Ten minutes later, Greg got another text. “Rowan came back?”

This was from Shelly, who didn’t always work Saturdays. Greg texted her, “Did you see him?”

She replied, “Is Rowan a him or a her?”

Greg replied, “I assumed anyone who’d pull that trick was a boy.”

Her response was quick. “A boy…or a starving girl who wanted to give her siblings a decent meal.”

This whole situation was perplexing to Greg, and he returned to figuring out where they needed to be advertising while behind him, the press again slammed down on the metal.

Rowan—boy or girl—hadn’t seemed starving. Sure, he (or she?) had scarfed down that pizza like there was no tomorrow, but Rowan was also scared they’d call the cops. It made sense to be able to leave on a moment’s notice.

Greg decided to leave that alone. “Did you see Rowan?”

“No, just Ezra did.”

It wouldn’t be hard to track the kid down. If Greg walked into the school and asked for Rowan, how many Rowans could there possibly be? In the afternoons, they got kids after school let out. Sometimes they got kids sneaking out of the school forlunch (and then sneaking back in again.) In theory, they could ask around and figure out what the kid actually wanted.

How would you even ask that? “So hey, were you hungry, or hungry-hungry?”

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