Mama Pearl scowled at him. “Shut up and don’t screw this up.”
Grinning from ear-to-ear, Tucker said, “Yes ma’am.”
~*~
“So who is Tucker?” Malika asked in a Girl, you’d better dish tone.
Who was he indeed? Friend implied more between them than the casual acquaintance they’d resumed since Corinne started working at the diner. She hadn’t expected that from him given her history with him and his friends back in high school. But he’d been one of the few people to be unfailingly nice to her since she came back, which said a lot about the kind of man he was. The fact that he’d volunteered to watch her son so she could go apply for a job certainly went a long way past mere acquaintance.
“I’ve known him since elementary school.” Which didn’t quite answer the question, but she didn’t know what else to say. Oh, yeah, he’s also my dance partner in this lunatic fundraiser. Yeah, no, she didn’t have the brain to think about that right now.
“Did y’all date?”
“What? No.” Tucker McGee had never been part of her entourage of male admirers. “I had a very embarrassing thing for his best friend for most of high school. Why?”
“It’s just, after the asshat paid his bill and you went back to the kitchen, Tucker got up in his face about the fact that he’d been rude to you.”
“He what?”
“Dickwad insinuated some pretty ugly shit about you, and I’m pretty sure Tucker was about to knock him ass over teakettle before the big crash.”
Tucker was defending her? Why would he do that? No one defended her. She was nothing to him.
“Come on. Pretty boy in a suit is all defending your honor and playing stand in babysitter. There must be something to tell.”
Corinne pulled into a parking space in the hospital lot and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment as another awful possibility occurred to her. “The only thing there is to tell is that he threatened Jefferson Barksdale, who absolutely did have a thing for me in high school and never got past the fact that I wouldn’t give him the time of day. His mother is on the hospital board.”
“Ooooh. But it was high school. Surely she’s not gonna take that out on you at a professional level.”
“Wanna bet?”
“Why should something so long ago matter so much?”
“You ever see Mean Girls?”
“Yeah.”
“I was Regina George.” The admission made Corinne want to hide under the seat.
“Shut up! You were not head bitch.”
“I really wish I were exaggerating. I was not a nice person in high school.” She sighed, thinking back to her biggest shame. “I betrayed my best friend.”
“How?”
“When we hit ninth grade, I broke her confidence and publicized some really embarrassing stuff about her. It secured my entry into the in crowd and ensured that she’d be an outcast for the rest of high school.” And then Corinne had followed the example of the popular girls above her and continually put her friend down in front of others, because being Queen Bitch had been more important to her than loyalty back then.
“I just can’t imagine you doing that.”
“I wish I couldn’t. I wish I could forget it.” She shrugged at the tension lodged in her shoulders. “Anyway, once I left town, I grew up. And once I had Kurt, I knew I had to be someone he could be proud of. But coming home…a lot of people haven’t forgotten what I u
sed to be like. And they won’t let me forget it either.”
“I’m sure it can’t be that bad.”
Corinne could’ve told her that today’s run-in with Jeff Barksdale was par for the course for her work day—at least when Mama Pearl wasn’t out front to intimidate people into behaving with the Eyebrow of Doom. But what would be the point? Whining about it wouldn’t change anything. She’d behaved badly for a long time. Had even, briefly, fallen back into that ill-fitting role on her return to Wishful before she deliberately gave up all of it. She’d long since accepted she had to pay for that on some level because of karma. “Hope you’re right.”
They climbed out of Corinne’s car and headed up to the hospital. Here, at least, Corinne knew she’d done something of value. She’d done good work during her clinicals. Hard work that had been appreciated. Staff and doctors nodded or waved in greeting as she and Malika made their way to HR. The recognition warmed her. Except for the odd person who’d come in for treatment and who knew her from back in the day, here at the hospital she got to escape the past. She wanted to make it a part of her future.