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“No, it’s okay,” she said with a laugh. “I totally understand you being protective of your grandmother.”
“She’s not my grandmother.”
Leah pulled her brow together. “She’s not? You call her Gram.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. Why the hell did he just tell her that? “It’s just…I grew up with her grandson. So we’re sort of like family.”
Please just drop it, he prayed silently.
“Wow,” she said.
“Wow? What’s wow?”
“I don’t know,” Leah answered, stirring her drink with her straw. “It’s just, I thought it was really nice of you to do all that work around the house for her when I assumed she was family. But, now that I know she’s not…I don’t know. It’s even nicer of you, I guess.”
Da
Even if he wanted to talk about this, which he didn’t, there was no way he could ever explain why he did what he did for Gram. It had nothing to do with being nice. The truth was, he could work in her house every hour of every day for the rest of his life, and it would still never be enough.
“So, you work near here?”
Da
Their first piece of common ground: prohibited topics of conversation.
“Yeah, about fifteen minutes from here.”
“What do you do?”
“I own an auto repair shop. D&B Automotive.”
“Really?” she asked, squeezing another lemon into her iced tea. “That’s interesting.”
“You think so?”
“Sure.” She shrugged, and Da
“No you don’t.”
“Well, it might not be interesting to me,” she said through a laugh. “But I’m sure it is to someone who’s into cars, which I’m assuming you are.”
Da
“I’m a teacher.”
“Really? That’s interesting.”
She sat back against the seat, folding her arms.
“I’m serious!” he said. “That really is interesting to me. I couldn’t do it. You must have the patience of a saint.”
Leah shrugged. “There are good days and bad days, just like any other job. I’m sure there are days that try your patience at the shop, right?”
“True,” he said. “But I’m allowed to curse at the cars.”
She laughed before she shook her head at him. She had the prettiest laugh. It made him want to spend the rest of the afternoon finding ways to get her to do it again.
“So, what do you teach?”
“Tenth-grade English.”
He scrunched up his face, and Leah rolled her eyes.
“Clearly, your favorite subject.”
“Is it anyone’s?” he asked, and she scoffed, throwing a sugar packet at him.
“Jerk.”
He gri
“Believe me, I’m just getting warmed up.”
Da
“What are you doing?”
She glanced up. “Cutting my lettuce.”
“Cutting your lettuce,” he repeated.
“Mm-hm. I always do.”
He put the pepper down, watching her. “May I ask why?”
Leah reached into her salad and held up a piece of lettuce that was the size of his palm. “You can’t really bite lettuce, so either I can attempt to cram this ridiculous thing into my mouth like a savage, or I can cut it into respectable, human-sized bites.”
Da
“Totally doable,” he mumbled incoherently.
“Mmm. Not to mention extremely attractive,” Leah said, and he chewed his mouthful of food, smiling triumphantly.
“You have dimples when you smile.”
“Yes, I’m aware,” he laughed.
When Leah didn’t respond, he said, “So, was there a point to that comment, or were you just stating the obvious?”
She kept her eyes on her salad as she continued to cut. “Just stating the obvious, I guess.”
He laughed softly before he leaned on the table with his forearms. “Dimples turn you on.”
“What?” she scoffed.
“Oh, sorry. I thought we were still stating the obvious.”
“Oh my God,” she laughed, pointing at him with her fork. “You are cocky as hell.”
“Nah, not really. I just like it when you blush.”
“I’m not blushing,” she mumbled, pressing the backs of her fingers against her cheek.
He smiled before he said, “So, what’s the deal? Gram said you used to live in her house?”
Leah nodded. “We moved when I was twelve, though. It was so nice of her to let me see the inside. Up until that point, I still kind of felt like that house was mine.” She shrugged bashfully. “Silly, huh?”
“Not at all,” he said sincerely.
She took a deep breath, seeming to contemplate something before she said, “Like in the side yard. There was this block of concrete that cracked all the way through when my dad dropped his toolbox on it, so he had to remove all the broken pieces and re-pour it. And my sister and brother and I—we all put our hands in it while it was drying.” She smiled. “We were pretending we were movie stars. And so my mom came out and caught us, and we totally thought she was going to yell at us.” Leah shook her head as she said, “But instead she leaned down and put her hand in it too. And then we all wrote our initials underneath with a popsicle stick, and my mom wrote the date.”
Leah looked down at a strand of her hair as she twirled it through her fingers. “Obviously you know it’s not there anymore. When I first saw that it was gone, I got really upset, but then I realized I’ll always remember that story, even if there’s no physical proof of it in that yard. Just like everything else that happened in that house.” She released her hair and looked up at him.
It felt like his heart stopped beating.
Say something.
“If you really think about it,” she said, “most of the memories you have from when you’re small aren’t actually yours. They’re given to you by other people, either from a picture, or a story, or a video. We’re told or shown that it happened to us, and it becomes one of our memories. But that day with the cement?” She shrugged. “That was the first memory that was actually mine.”
He blinked at her, nearly choking on the words that were stuck in his throat.
“Anyway,” she said with a wave of her hand. “It was just really nice of her to invite me in. It was the highlight of my day. Everything pretty much went to hell after that.”
“Right,” he said distractedly. “You lost the bracelet.”
“Well, that, and then the flat on I-95.”
Da
“Tell me about it. It’s even worse in the middle of a snowstorm.”
He pulled in a breath between his teeth, shaking his head. “I forgot it snowed that night. What did you end up doing?”
“I called Triple A and waited over an hour for them to get there. I was starving. I was so tempted to eat the food I’d just bought for Christmas di
The second the words left her mouth, she dropped her fork and covered her face with both hands.
Da
“What did you just say?”
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. You did not need to know that.”