Chapter 16

With spring growing to summer, the outdoor patio at Sassie’s is the most popular place for customers to sit and where they leave the best tips. It’s also where Gary catches me leaning in the corner of the door, reading articles about acquiring fundraising sponsors on my cell phone. He tells me he’ll write me up if he catches me with it again. I grin at him overeagerly with a thumbs-up before tucking the phone away. At this point, there’s not much left for me to be afraid of.

“Got a three-top at thirteen,” the hostess tells me as I’m refilling waters for one of my tables. I acknowledge her and roll back around to my left, barely acknowledging the patrons. “Hi, my name’s Cassandra, and I’ll be your server today.” I flip open the beer menu. “Would you like to start off with something from one of our taps?”

I glance up from the list of beers and do a double take. “Vince.”

“Cass.” His closed-lip smile is secretive, and with his sunglasses on, I don’t know where he’s focusing, but I self-consciously tug on my skimpy top, trying to cover up as much skin as possible. “Long time no talk,” he says breezily.

We haven’t spoken in about a week. Not since the winter have we gone without a text, phone call, or me tagging along as he works. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to put this baseball game together,” I say in a flurry, hoping he doesn’t catch my lie of omission—that he is making me face things I’m not ready for. “You’re out in the sun,” I tease. “Visiting from the Underworld?”

“Yep.” He gestures to the men across from and next to him. “This is my cousin Nick and my friend Ryan.”

“You guys in the death business too?” I ask.

Nick, a stereotypical Jersey Italian, shakes his head. “I’m in HVAC, but my brother works there.”

“Tony?” I ask.

“Yep.” He removes his sunglasses so I can see the bit of resemblance between Vince and Nick. “You know him?”

“Yeah, I ran into him a couple of times while I was hanging out at the funeral home.”

“Huh,” he says, his eyes toggling between Vince and me. “You like being there?”

I laugh. “That’s a stretch.”

Vince’s mouth quirks to the side, and my joints go loose, my tongue thick. I like him. That’s not a stretch.

Ryan, with sandy hair and a beard, frowns. “Gives me the creeps.”

When I agree, he tilts his head up, smiling at me with one eye closed against the bright sunshine. He hovers his hand over his brow as his gaze drifts over me. It’s not gross, more or less curious. “Hey, Cass.”

He says my name overly familiarly, and I slant my head back.

“Don’t remember me, do you?” he asks.

I shake my head, and he runs his hand over his beard. “We graduated together. You were in my Spanish class freshman year.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t remember.”

The beard covers up the lower half of his face, but even without it, I don’t know if I would be able to recognize him. He shrugs. “Eh, you were too smart for me. I barely passed that class.”

I squint, trying to recall the teacher’s name. I snap my fingers. “Se?ora Garcia.”

“Yeah.” He grins. “You sat two rows over from me. You had shorter hair then,” he says, angling his hand by his ears.

I’m shocked he remembers all that, and with the way Ryan leans back in his chair, folding his arms smugly over his chest, I briefly think maybe it means something more than a fleeting memory.

“Drinks?” I ask, peering down at Vince. He pulls his focus away from Ryan and orders a beer. The other two follow, and I’m barely away from the table when I hear Ryan ask, “Is she single?”

Once I return with their beers, there’s a weird tension at the table, and I don’t try to engage in any more chitchat. I take their food orders and leave, even though I’d really like to stay and talk to Vince. I float from table to table, occasionally sensing attention on me, but every time I turn to Vince’s table, they’re talking among themselves. I shake off the imagined awareness and drop off the check with quick goodbyes.

When Nick and Ryan leave the table, Vince sticks around, his sunglasses gone. He holds on to my elbow to keep me in place as he hands me the folio. “I think Ryan liked you in school.”

It comes out like a quasi-accusation, and my tone is more defensive than I’d like it to be. “I honestly can’t remember him.”

“He obviously remembers you.”

I lift my brow. “What’s that tone for?”

He scratches the side of his head, where his hair is shorter. After a few weeks, I’d finally strong-armed him into a hairstyle from this millennium. “I don’t have a tone.”

“A little bit, yeah,” I say, and he shrinks back apologetically.

“Sorry.”

Maybe it’s my stress-addled brain or the weird air between us, but I blurt out a long-held secret. “Besides, I wouldn’t have noticed other boys. I sorta had a crush on you.”

“You what?” His posture changes from the annoyed-shoulders-back thing he does to this one that’s forward and amused. “How do you sort of have a crush on someone? You either do or you don’t.”

“I didn’t know there were rules.”

He shrugs. “Should’ve read the rule book. So, which one was it?”

“Does it matter now?”

“Yeah.” He leans into my space, his tongue licking his lower lip, capturing all my attention.

I barely resist curling my index finger into the bottom hem of his T-shirt. “Why?”

“You don’t know how protective your brother was of you, do you?” he asks, almost like he can’t believe it himself, then huffs. “He told all of us he’d murder us if anything ever happened.”

“Happened? Like…”

“Like if any of his friends, any of us on the team, thought about you as anything other than his little sister, he said he’d kill us, and…” He lets out a breath, licking his lips again like he’s nervous. “He was my best friend. I wasn’t about to ruin anything.”

I think back to those little moments between Vince and me. Mere seconds I assumed meant nothing to him but were everything to me. Like when Ray let me tag along with them to a late-night Wendy’s run, and Vince and I shared the same Frosty. When Vince let me butt in front of him in the cafeteria lunch line anytime we had lunch during the same period. When he saw me in the stands during their play-off game senior year, grinned, and pointed his bat at me with a wink. It was silly and sent my heart straight into the sky.

Maybe those moments meant something to him too.

And the mere idea sends my heart straight up into the sky all over again.

Playing it cool, I knock my shoulder into his arm. “Ray would never have actually done anything. Especially to you.”

“That’s what you think.” He shakes his head. “You were his favorite person. He definitely woulda killed somebody if they ever hurt you.”

I inhale sharply. “You saying you would’ve hurt me?”

“Back then?” He rakes his hand through his hair. “All teenage boys are assholes. Inadvertently hurting people comes with the territory.”

I’m feeling bold. Bolder than I have in a very long time. “And now?”

“Now? I hope I’d never inadvertently or advertently hurt anyone, especially you.”

I snicker. “Advertently? That’s not a word.”

He heaves a sigh, though his eyes sparkle in amusement. “You know what I mean.” And to drive the idea home, he brushes my hair behind my shoulder, grazing my bare skin in the process. “And I like your long hair now.”

I do know what he means. He remembers me from high school, remembers me enough to know how I’m different now. To know how, in some ways, I’m not that different at all. He’s telling me he knows me better than Ryan does, better possibly than anyone else, so much so that he’s not going to push me on this topic when I don’t say anything else about it. About this thing between us.

He stuffs his hands into his pockets. “I saw your post yesterday with the pile of clothes. Getting rid of a lot of stuff?”

I wrote another post yesterday in light of my mom wanting to suddenly clear out the house. She’s been almost manic lately. Every time I come home, she’s got more bags at the front door for me to put in my car and take out. “It’s like she’s trying to erase something. Or him. I don’t know which.”

“It’s better than her staying in bed all day,” he says.

“I guess. But soon, we’ll have nothing left. She’s even gotten rid of her prized Christmas china.” I scuff my shoe on the concrete, defeat curling my spine over. “She’s taken down every picture of Ray in the house and moved anything of his to boxes in the closet.” It stings not to have evidence of my brother’s life around me. I want to remember him any way I can, but she doesn’t want to, and I hate it. I press my hand against my throat, tears clogging my windpipe. “I just…I don’t get it.”

He curves his hand around my neck and squeezes gently. “Breathe.”

I inhale deeply through my nose, closing my eyes for a moment as my lungs fill. One side of Vince’s mouth is tipped up when I open my eyes to him. It’s my favorite of his smiles, the one that feels only for me.

“You’re okay, Cass,” he says, the sentence I’ve come to hear over and over in my head when I need reassurance. Hearing it in person, though, is the most potent way to receive it. With his hand on me, I have trouble not melting into him, but I pull myself together.

I force myself to step back from him, his hand dropping from me, and I straighten my spine. The slight movement shifts my uniform, my shirt lifting to show more skin at my stomach than I’d like.

Vince’s attention dips there then lower to my legs, quite a bit of them on display because of the short kilt and thin white knee-highs. “You look good.”

I bat him away. “Get out of here.”

He laughs and walks back inside to exit via the front door. I watch his retreating figure until he’s gone, the sensation of his hand on my neck lasting much longer than it should.