Page 39 of This Love
But I hadn’t.
Be polite.
I hadn’t done that either, but they had paid. Harry had set them straight.
Other advice took some time to work out.
Flo, who worked last night, kept saying, “Don’t give them an inch, honey, or they’ll take a mile.”
It took some thinking to figure out what she meant. It had nothing to do with measurement. It meant that if I let a customer get away with a small thing, like touching my hand, then they’d do something bigger, like pinch my butt.
Instinct had taken over on that one, and I’d punched the guy in the nose. He’d stood up in a hurry and backed away.
Harry had handled him, too.
Maybe the only real advice I needed to follow was, “Always have a Harry.”
But Harry was only a help at the diner. My life included a lot of other things. Like shopping at Shelfmart for groceries. And figuring out how to work the stove and the washing machine and how to program the air conditioning. I was hopeless with my cell phone, barely able to make a call, much less understand all the colorful icons and what they could do.
I’d have to forge a new path. It might not look like the old Ava’s life. It might not include all the same people.
Maybe.
My hand flattened against my chest, pressing against the long bone that ran from my neck to my shoulder. The tattoo was right there.
The heart remembers.
Chapter 15
Tucker
Just one more hour of work until I could go clean up and see Ava.
I jumped down into the pit below a 1964 Ford Mustang. It wasn’t often we got cars like this in the shop for an oil change. People who bought classics tended to do the maintenance themselves.
I set up a funnel for the drip and unscrewed the drain on the oil pan. Right as the oil started flowing, I heard a long, low whistle from up above.
Feet appeared at the edge of the pit. I knew from the scuffed black-and-white checkered Vans that it was Fuentes.
I walked over and peered up. He was admiring the ride, running a hand over the dark blue paint.
“Don’t fingerprint the wax job,” I told him with a laugh. “The dude who brought this in is probably going to inspect it from bumper to hood ornament.”
Fuentes stepped back, whistling again. “Don’t tell me it’s some insufferable tech bro who got it for his Tinder pics.”
“Probably.” The oil slowed to a trickle, so I turned back to wait it out, then screwed in the drain plug and wiped away the dribble.
I ran up the steps two at a time to stand next to Fuentes, who had requested that the patch on his Jiffy Lube uniform read, “Short King.”
Renee, the office manager who ordered the patches, had tried to helpfully translate it to “Chaparro,” and Fuentes had about flipped, insisting that was not what he was going for.
Despite quite a few of the employees having fun nicknames on their patches, mine was plain old “Tucker.” I didn’t have the humor or the imagination to come up with something clever, particularly when I’d first started, which was right after Ava and I had gotten the blue house.
I hoped one day I’d be back in it.
Fuentes could read my frown any day and asked, “The old lady still not letting you back home?”
“She’s having a tougher time this round.”
