It wasn" t until I heard the door latch lift, cringed and turned my back to a cold blast of air that I realized I was being abandoned. Or was he just going outside to get something? The door slammed shut and I scrambled to my knees. Mice in the darkness being my first fear, I fumbled with the fire, the poker and sticks of wood, until I had a good blaze going again. When there was enough light to see a matchbox next to the lamp, I lit the wick too, turning the flame high enough to reach the top of the chimney.
On the floor beside the rug lay his shirt, neatly folded, and a red silk rose he" d placed on top.
Abandoned.
He" d never even asked my name.
I hadn" t asked his.
“What the fuck?” I said to the empty room.
I kicked the pile. The fake flower rolled into shadows and the shirt landed in a rumpled heap.
I left without either.
Jolie was not going to think about it. She would lose herself in work, concentrate on that and the hell with the rest of it. She grabbed a desktop tower from the front shelf.
Wi-Fi problems the service ticket said. She set the tower on the back bench so she could hook up the test station. Her hands were shaking so much she couldn" t get the mouse plugged in. She threw down the mouse and went into the office. Normally, she tried to avoid her father" s room. She worked at a laptop on the workbench or at the computer in the retail space. It made sense to be out where she could hear customers come in, get to them right away. No one could grab something off the retail shelf and run. Truth was this little town might have its thieves, but stealing was rare.
He" d been dead three months now, and it might have been her imagination, but the office still smelled like him. The scents of leather, Old Spice and coffee brought him close enough that she half believed he was here in some way. His battered leather chair wore an aura of him, the seat faded to white right in the dented spot his body had carved out over the years. On a metal shelf, repair manuals for every sort of electronics were arranged in alphabetical order, many coverless from use and age.
A small kitchen of sorts was arranged atop a waist-high wooden file cabinet in the corner. His single-cup coffeemaker, a mini microwave. Instant coffee, instant cocoa, a box of tea. Jolie wanted tea. When she picked up the mug he kept especially for her, she had to bite her lip and pinch her fingers hard on the bridge of her nose to hold back a tide of emotions. She wanted to deal with those even less than she wanted to sort through what had just happened online.
“Really, how could he just leave me like that? Without a goodbye,” she said aloud.
She ripped the top off the teabag box and ripped paper from the bag, filled the cup with water and slapped it in the microwave. She paced the office and fumed.
Fine. He was gone. She was a fighter and she would fight her way through this. She just thought he might have put more fight into staying, at least staying long enough for her to get there and say goodbye.
The microwave beeped. She grabbed her mug and fled to the safety of the front desk. When she set the mug down, she noticed the scene painted on the mug changing.
The eagle that had been sitting on the ground spread its wings above a vast blue lake.
Heat changed the scene-she" d forgotten that. She could almost hear her father" s voice-a lazy drawl, words paced in his peculiar sense of rhythm-the sense of awe conveyed when he" d first shown her the magic. “Watch this now, Jolie girl.” She" d been in high school then, morose over the fickleness of a boyfriend who dumped her for the first cheerleader to bat her eyes at him. Jolie" s father-single dad, sole fixer of broken toys, scraped knees and assorted childhood ills-had been at a loss when it came to broken hearts. Or so he" d thought, but the mug, a simple gift that said I love you when she" d been feeling unlovable, had been the bandage she needed to move on.
And how, she wondered, was she supposed to get through the rest of all life was going to throw at her, without him there to show her the way.
Chapter Three
Jolie finished the wedding photo and the Wi-Fi repair by midafternoon. She was the boss. She could close up and go home early anytime she wanted. But her dad never closed before five and there wasn" t anything exciting to go home to. She decided to try tackling the accounting end of things. Dad had a meticulous nature that helped him keep things organized. He" d had his pension to help keep the bills paid. Jolie had neither.
When she added up the incoming for last month and then the outgoing for the third time, she gave up hoping to pin the result on an error. The latter was still twice as big as the former.
Paperwork, she decided, was not going to improve her mood. She shoved the calculator, along with the folder full of receipts and bills, back into the desk drawer and slammed it shut. And, masochistic soul that she was today, she latched on to the safest of the unsolvable problems life had tossed her way.
“What was with that rose he left? What was a rose supposed to mean?” Her fingers itched to grab the mouse, log back in, and track him down. But she" d never asked his name.
You hooked up. You played. You went your own way. That was how it was in the Quarterz.
“You don" t leave frickin" roses behind,” she told the empty room. She looked at the clock. Quarter past three.
She was not going to give in to the itch to go back. It wasn" t entirely an itch just to tell what" s-his-name what she thought of him. It was an urge to be there. An urge not to be here. A safe-out of her real life.
She knew how messed up that was.
She got up, dug some cleaning supplies from the closet in back, and waged war on dirt-dusted inventory in the retail area, cleaned windows, vacuumed the floor. She was tackling a stain on the carpet in front of the counter when the bells on the door jangled.
Sienna, her best friend from high school days, took one look at Jolie in her newly shiny shop and asked, “Bad day?”
A lump the size of a basketball took up residence in Jolie" s throat. She lifted one shoulder in a half shrug and got really serious about scrubbing the stain.
Sienna locked the door and sat cross-legged beside Jolie.
“Where are your kids?” Jolie asked.
“Denny" s mom has them. Thank god for Grandma.”
“Tell me about your day,” Jolie said. “Tell me something funny the kids did.” Haul me back to reality, is what she was thinking.
“Why don" t you do yours first? Tell me a funny story about a customer.” She pondered that for a minute. What would Sienna think of the Quarterz? There are some things, she decided, even your best friend shouldn" t know about you.
“I don" t want to do mine at all,” she said.
“It sounds like we" ve both had the same kind of day.” That wasn" t likely.
“Go get in your shorts and sneaks, Jolie. We" ll run away from it all for a while.”
“It" s not closing time yet.”
“It" ll be just about that by the time you change and get back. I" ll watch the shop.”
“You" ve put in a full day already between your kids and your job. I don" t want to pile more work on you.”
“Oh, yeah. The workload here will finish me off.” Jolie winced.
“Sorry. Will you just go change?”
Sienna set a wicked pace. Jolie welcomed the burn, raced after Sienna all the harder in the hope of catching the mindless escape that came from stripping life down to its most basic needs-breathing being uppermost in her mind.
No matter how fast she ran, she couldn" t outrun flashes of the scene at the Quarterz that kept replaying on a mental screen. Elements of the encounter were too disturbing to escape. The turnover of questions chasing through her thoughts outpaced the turnover of her stride on the sidewalk. Why that pure surge of desire when a stranger" s hand covered her mouth, a muscled arm yanked her against him? Why the flare of heat when she" d first realized the leash bound her to him in a way she couldn" t escape? Why was she still thinking about any of it when she didn" t intend to go back?