Page 65 of All In
Pain squeezed my heart. I got the grocery list from her, then gathered my stuff.
“Where are you going?” Vivian asked from the front desk. “You have a client coming in twenty minutes.”
“Call them back, would you? See if you can push it to forty.”
She shook her head but took up the receiver. “You’re lucky you’re so damn cute,” she muttered.
“Thanks, Viv. You’re the best.”
I stopped, grabbed her Magic 8-Ball and gave it a shake.
“You asking if Gus is going to fire your ass?” she muttered, her hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. “Spoiler alert:It is certain.” She turned aside. “Yes, hi, is this Brittany? This is Vivian from Vegas Ink…”
I didn’t ask the toy if Gus was going to fire me, but the same question I had this morning. It was later, so I was asking again later.
I swear the fucking triangle looked smug as it floated its answer:Outlook not so good.
After I tore through the grocery store with Mom’s list, I screeched my truck into the drive. My forty minutes was up; I was nearly an hour out of the shop. But my hopes for dropping off the food here and heading back out were smashed to pieces when I found my mother sitting on the living room floor, a hundred photos spread out around her on all sides, and one held slack in her hand as she cried.
“Christ.” I dropped the grocery bags and hurried to kneel beside her. “Come on, Ma. Let’s get you to the couch.”
“He was so handsome,” she murmured, staring at the photo in her hand of Jonah at UNLV graduation, wearing a red gown and red cap. She didn’t pull her eyes from the photo as I lifted her off the floor and helped her sit on the couch. Then she looked to me, her eyes red and shadowed. “I miss him so much, Theo.”
“I know you do.”
She leaned into me, crying softly. “I’m trying to be strong, but some days…”
“I know,” I told her, putting my arm around her. “We all have bad days. That’s nothing to feel ashamed of. It’s okay.”
“You’re so good to me. I know it’s been hard for you, but you’re so strong.” She sat up, cupped my cheek in her hand. “You’re all I have left. I get so scared that something will happen to you too…”
She collapsed back into tears, and I held her together. “I’m right here.” I said, my jaw clenched, as if trying not to let the words escape. “I’m not going anywhere.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
The house was a mess. The drywall had been taken down in some places, my kitchen floor was pulled up, and plastic sheets hung like curtains to keep the dust from flying.
I wanted to do as much of the work as I could, thinking the more I made this place a real home, the more settled I’d finally feel. But holy shit, it was a much bigger job then those HGTV shows make it look.
Thankfully, Yvonne was handy with a sledgehammer and let me pay her in beignets I bought from her favorite bakery. Today she was helping me demolish the old kitchen cabinets. They’d been painted and repainted so many times, the doors stuck together.
“What’s with the mopey face, baby,” she said, peering at me from behind her safety goggles. “You seem a little down.”
“Do I?” I yanked at a cabinet door that hung on one hinge. “Just nervous, I guess. I have a date on Friday.”
“With Teddy?”
“What?” My head shot up, and I frowned. “No, not Teddy. He’s back in Vegas. The date is with a friend of Phoebe’s.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, what?”
“Nothing.” Yvonne whacked the sledgehammer into the lower cabinet like a pro golfer, splintering wood and cracking it off the wall.
I don’t know why I felt the need to explain myself, but the words poured out anyway. “Teddy’s only a friend. He’s my best friend.”
