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“You’ve talked to her?” I ask him.
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Got a call for a tow off the highway a few nights ago and there she was.”
“Did she seem… okay? I mean, how was she?”
“She’s…” He shrugs. “She was Jovie. Same old, sad Jovie. I gave her a lift to her dad’s and that was it. We didn’t talk much.”
“She was sad?”
“I assume so if she was coming back here,” he says, scratching the back of his head. “And she always was a little, ya know?”
I peek back through the window. “Yeah, I know.”
Jovie emerges from the stockroom with a stack of new action figures in her arms, nearly running into a rambunctious young boy as she rounds the corner. She hops back without dropping them and lets him pass with an instant smile on her apologetic face.
My knees always turned to jelly over that smile before. Now is no different.
The kid continues on and Jovie pauses to watch him go. Her smile slowly fades and she returns to her task of restocking the line of figures along the bottom shelf in the corner.
A hand waves in front of my face and Tucker snaps his fingers.
“Earth to Will!”
I blink out of it and glare at him. “What?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Stare at my cousin like that.”
I scoff. “Since when do you care what I do to your cousin?”
He stands a little taller. “You make a fair point… but really, if she finds out I told you, I’m a dead man. You know what happens to men who cross Jovie Ross.”
My gaze falls on her again and I get an eye-full of her tight rear as she bends over to adjust a row of dolls. “Yeah, I know…”
Tucker slaps my shoulder. “Dude…”
I glare at him again and he takes a step back. “It’s fine, Tuck. I won’t tell her you told me.” Nausea wrecks my stomach. “Not sure I can even bring myself to talk to her at all, to be honest…”
“Well, good.” He nods. “It’s been like five years anyway. You can’t have much to say to her in the first place.”
“Four years,” I correct him. “Four years next month.”
And there are a lot of things I’d like to say to Jovie Ross if I could, actually.
Tucker tugs at my arm. “Come on. We should get back to work.”
I dig my heels in for another moment as Jovie wanders back behind the counter. She smiles again at the woman with her son and rings up a little toy dinosaur, her fingers soaring across the register. It’s almost like she never left at all but the black hole in the pit of my stomach reminds me otherwise.
She’s been home four days and she didn’t bother to even tell me. She went out of her way to hide it, too.
Fine. That’s fine. If she doesn’t want to explain herself to me, then that’s fine. I don’t need to know why she’s back or what she’s doing now or why she took off in the first place.
Nope. Don’t need to know.
I’m fine with it.
This is totally fine.
