Page 32 of This Love
She was right. “That’s a good idea.” I couldn’t necessarily access the files that were stored on the computer at home, but I had my phone on me, and much of our relationship was documented there.
She stood up and headed to her room. “I’ll put together a grocery list since it seems like you’ll be here a few days. I don’t think I can get by with a full-grown man on tuna fish and cucumber salads.”
“I’ll pick it all up when I have the photos printed.”
“It’ll be all right, Tucker. You’ve been fighting this battle for going on eight years, and you’ll fight it until the end.”
I sat at her table, thumbing through photos of Ava and me, the most recent ones first. The last two years had been so easy. Planting the flowers at our house. Setting up her home office. Moving in new furniture. Getting the keys to the house together.
Dinners out. Kayaking on Lady Bird Lake. Dinners at Big Harry’s Diner.
Then back to the last reset. We’d videoed some of that on our phones. I had her meeting Maya again, sitting among the flowers on her porch.
Hugging Big Harry, looking exactly like she had last night, lost in his enormous chest.
And before that loss. Sitting among her photographs. Learning to drive again.
So many moments lost to her. Left with me.
I had promised to be the keeper of her memories, and I wouldn’t waver now.
This was the time she needed me the most.
Chapter 12
Ava
The week following the wedding went slowly. Every day, I spent an hour or so with Tucker, looking at pictures and videos. Then, an hour with Vinnie, trying to figure out my camera and photo software.
But being with Harry was when I felt the safest. I knew he was ignoring his restaurant for me, so when another boring week had passed, I asked him to let me work there so I could do something with myself.
Big Harry’s turned out to feel more like home to me than the blue house. It smelled right, like fried food and beer. It was busy, and I liked seeing people for only a short while. With the variety of experiences, accents, and personalities in the diner, I was learning fast.
But today, I had trouble.
Big Harry told me to try to handle it, and he’d step in if he was needed. I liked that. He trusted me to figure things out, unlike Vinnie and Tucker and my dad, who all acted like I was made of glass.
I closed the cash drawer with a bump of my hip, dodged a bar back who was refilling the ice trough, and steeled myself to confront the four middle-aged men laughing at a table near the jukebox. The song playing was “All My Exes Live in Texas,” which was probably their doing.
I could totally believe they were up to their eyeballs in exes.
“You forgot one of the tickets,” I told them, slamming their pile of cash and printouts onto the middle of the table. “You gotta pay all four.”
A man with a bushy beard sat back in his seat, revealing a huge belly with the words, “My kid beat up your honor student,” stretched over it on a faded T-shirt.
Classy.
He sniffed before saying, “Now, little lady, it’s not our fault if we asked for three checks, and you brought four. We paid the three we said we would.”
They had asked for three, with two of them on one ticket. And I had messed it up. But still, I wasn’t born yesterday. Not quite.
“So, obviously you pay two of them together. Where is the unpaid check?” I stood firm, aiming the fiercest stare I could manage.
Maybe I’d seen these scumbags before in my life, maybe I hadn’t. They could have been regulars from way back.
But this crew hadn’t been in Big Harry’s Diner since my memory reset. I had too little rattling around in my head to miss that.
I also had deep abiding knowledge of every episode of Schitt’s Creek I’d seen in the last week. That and Harry’s battle documentaries were the only TV shows I’d watched so far, so I had room to store all the details.
