“Five minutes!” she yells back.
Gigi’s five minutes usually last two hours. The house is otherwise empty, Mom and Merc not answering when I call out their names.
With a sigh, I walk back out and sit on the steps of the porch, trying to find my calm center.
Something will come up, I tell myself. An opening in one of the stores. I tend to panic easily, lose my patience when things aren’t going my way.
Which means I spent most of my childhood and teenage years raging and waging war with the world. Things rarely went our way—what with Mom losing her job time and again, with Merc getting sick all the time and Gigi going through a shoplifting phase that had Mom in tears.
And as for me… I had my phases, too. Like that day when I left home and started walking along the highway, not knowing or caring where I was going.
Or when I took Mom’s decrepit car and drove into a wall. I’d been going real slow, thank God. I came out of it just fine—but the car was a total loss. No idea how that is possible, but there you go.
Back then I really wanted to escape. From the bullying, the hopeless trudge of everyday routine.
And now the mere thought of leaving has me breaking out in hives.
Funny how we change over the years. How our priorities change, our perspective shifts. The idea of not being here when my family needs me is unthinkable. The idea of not being present to look after them, to keep an eye on them, to watch my brother and sister grow into adults, finish school, find their way…
I rub my bare arms. The sun is sinking low over the roofs and trees, and the breeze is drying the sweat on my back, cooling me down.
Someone is walking down the sidewalk. He stops a few feet away from me.
“Hey, I know you,” he says, and smiles.
The sun is behind him, lighting up his brown curls, casting his handsome face in shadow. “I’m not sure…” I start even as I realize that he does look familiar.
“Today. At the drugstore.” He shoves his hands in his pant pockets and tilts his head to the side. “I was waiting in line, and I saw you.”
“Right.” I nod and look down at my hands, grinning. “You have a good memory.”
“Not really. But it’s easy to remember a pretty girl like you.”
I glance up at him, surprised at the rush of pleasure and the heat flooding my cheeks. “Thanks.”
Hey, every girl likes to hear she’s pretty now and then, right? Especially after years spent wearing frigging braces and being called names.
Yeah, Zipper Lips wasn’t the worst of my nicknames back then. Things improved since I removed the metal from my mouth, but I’m still the ugly duckling in this story.
“You live here?” He parks his hip against the open gate and nods at the house behind me.
“No, I just like sitting on the front steps of strangers’ houses.” I tuck my hair behind my ears, wipe the sweat off my nose. “What are you doing around here?”
He shoots me an easy grin. “I know how it looks.”
Does he? And that would be…?
I laugh. “Like you’re stalking me?”
It slowly dawns on me, even with my sunbaked brain, that I’d never seen him before today. The coincidence of meeting him twice in the same afternoon is kind of strange.
“Well…” His grin widens. He turns and points down the street, at Mr. Collins’s small brown house. “I’m your new neighbor.”
Seriously? I realize I’m gaping and shut my mouth before a fly wanders in. “That’s, um… that’s nice.”
“Nice? That’s all I get?”
Even I can figure out when a guy is flirting with me, and he certainly is. His tone is light and teasing, that grin he’s wearing lighting up his eyes.