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“You have five seconds to tell me why the hell Chrome’s brother showed up at my restaurant offering to help me wash dishes and relocate asshole customers’ spark plugs.” She said all this with the phone wedged against her shoulder as she arranged coffee mugs on a rack to ensure all their handles were facing out at the same angle.
Through the line, the phone jostled, and the sound cut out briefly before returning. “Spark plugs? What time is it?” A faint click resounded of what Molly imagined was a lamp’s chain being pulled harder than necessary, and Drea’s groan progressed from a pained rumble to a shrill bark. “No, no lights!”
“Is that Chrome next to you? Oh, who am I kidding? Of course it is.” Molly planted her hand on a hip popped all the way out in indignation. “Good. It’ll save me the trouble of cross-interrogation.”
“Molly?” Drea attempted to clear some of the morning grogginess from her throat. “It’s a little early, love.”
“He’s going to be here in thirty minutes!”
A sleep-roughened voice a good octave and a half lower than Drea’s, and about ten times as alert, planted itself in her ear. “Who?”
“Brass!” Molly shrieked into Chrome’s ear, not giving a lick about what her elevated decibels did to his eardrums, seeing as how he was most likely one of the maestros of this fiasco. “Which means you now have”—she drew her phone away from her ear to check the time—“my mistake, twenty-eight minutes to tell me which one of you two co-conspirators thought it would be a good idea to volunteer him for dish duty.”
Chrome shifted the phone, and low muffled murmurs clouded the line for the eternal length it took her to get all her ceramic soldiers neatly in order. Really, did those two always have to do everything as a couple, even strategize toward what would most likely be a united front while being rattled awake by a predawn ambush? Molly was just about to start refilling the saltshakers, when Drea’s voice returned to her ear.
“All right, you’re on speaker. We’re both here. Now, please, start from the top, and be gentle,” Drea pleaded. “You’re obviously far more caffeinated than we are, and as much as I love healthy competition, there’s no way in hell either of us could catch up to your level of coffee intake this early in the morning, not with your black-market-coffee-bean access.”
“Speak for yourself. I always keep some in-case-of-emergency nitro cold brews in our mini-fridge.” Chrome’s voice drifted closer, as if he had stepped away briefly, and was then punctuated by the classic tsss of a well-timed can tab popping open.
“Ignore him.” Drea groaned, though Molly didn’t miss her friend’s whispered, “Give me a sip.”
Molly stress-fidgeted with the salt jug’s wide-necked lid, wondering why the hell she opted for the seven-pound containers with their dysfunctional pour spouts instead of the twenty-five-pound bulk bags she could just rip open with her knife. She gritted her teeth and gave the lid one more firm yank, only to have salt erupt all over the counter, cascading like sand along the stainless steel. She pinched her eyes closed and pulled her bottom lip into her mouth.
Freaking figures.
“Please tell me you two had something to do with Brass volunteering to wash dishes at my restaurant. And if you could square away your story in”—she peered at her phone again—“twenty-five minutes, that’d be great.”
“I haven’t spoken to him. Have you?” Drea clarified before questioning the only one of them related to the man in question.
Chrome’s voice rose through the shuffle of salt as Molly scooped the mess into a bin. “No. I mean, not about that. Other shit, sure, but I’m not about to pry,” Chrome added.
And boy, did she latch onto that nonanswer with the talons of a raptor.
“Pry into what, exactly?” Molly’s mental clock ticked off in immeasurably loud intervals, filling the quiet that stretched through the phone. “Chrome? What don’t you want to pry into?”
A deep-chested sigh filled her ear. “Winter’s not exactly Brass’s favorite time of year. He can get a little . . . moody.”
Well, this was certainly news to her, though why she was inclined to file it away as something significant she wasn’t sure. She knew next to nothing about the man, so anything that offered her a peek behind the curtain seemed like a sort of private treasure. Something she should guard and keep safe. “I get that,” she replied. “Seasonal affective disorder can be a real bitch, even for those stalwart New Englanders who brag about wearing their flip-flops through six inches of snow just to grab their morning Dunkin’ Donuts.”
“Ooh, Boston Kreme! That’s what I want!” Drea shrieked.
Molly wrenched the phone away from her ear. After that, she finally had the good sense to put the call on speakerphone. Her overcaffeinated nerves could only handle so much before the sun was up, and she’d just about reached her limit. “Drea, please focus. I’m in crisis mode here.”
“Yes, of course. Sorry.”
Chrome cleared his throat. “Look, Molly, if it’ll help any, I have no idea why Brass swung by your place?—”
“How? How in the hell would that help any?” She curled her fingers in air quotes for no one’s benefit but her own.
“But,” he enunciated, “where’s the harm? If he’s trying to fill his days with something productive and chooses to do so with you, well, I could think of far worse ways to spend a few hours.”
“That’s because you don’t know me that well, or what he’s about to walk into with this place,” she countered, cringing when the salt grated like sawdust beneath her pacing stride. “The job I posted is for a dishwasher. It’s about as far from glamorous as you could get in a kitchen. And we hadn’t even talked about the pay yet. That’s even less glamorous.”
It wasn’t glamorous, so much as criminal, a poignant comparison that kept floating to the surface, doing its best to twist her insides into karmic sludge. She wasn’t about to volunteer that bit of internal agony, however. She did have standards, or so she imagined.
An audible vibration skittered over her skin, disrupting her salt sweeping. Was that a . . . laugh?
She swiped at her bangs with a grouse, if only to give her hands something to do other than throw her phone into the freezer.
