“Quitter.”
Sullivan sounded so disapproving, Kia almost missed the affectionate way her lips quirked upward.
Kia woke her phone up so she could type Sullivan’s answers, because she could not memorize how to make a dacquoise cake in the apocalypse.
“Age and birthday?”
Sullivan’s birthday was coming up soon.
“You’re only six years older than me,” Kia blurted. “That’s nothing. When we were in school, I thought you were so… grown up.”
“You were a child when you started the program.”
“I wastwenty.”
The difference between twenty and twenty-six had meant something. But now? They were both grown-up business owners. Kia had caught up. If Sullivan had thought of her as a kid before, maybe now she could think of Kia as a woman. Kia closed her eyes to press the thought out of her brain.
“So what’s your dream birthday?” Kia asked. “I might have to plan something for you. I mean, you are my wife and all.”
“I’d have a partner.” She didn’t addreal, but the way her shoulders dropped implied it. “They’d take me camping.”
“Don’t you go camping all the time?”
The real issue was why someone would want to sleep outside with bears, snakes, and serial killers, but Kia didn’t bring that up.
“For my birthday, they’d plan the whole thing. I’d just wake up and they’d say,We’re going camping, and they’d have everything ready.”
This was obviously more personal to Sullivan than just getting eaten by bears on a trip someone else planned. This was about being cherished. Kia guessed no one had cherished Sullivan like this. It clearly made Sullivan sad. Despite Kia’s adamant aversions to getting eaten by bears and poisoned by tent-dwelling snakes, Kia knew there was no world in which she didn’t take Sullivan camping for her birthday.
chapter 14
It was theend of another night at Mirepoix, and Sullivan was in and out of the refrigerator rotating inventory, first in, first out. From across the line stations, Opal gave her a look.
“I know. I know,” Sullivan mumbled. “Blake?”
Blake dropped his phone on the stainless steel counter, then pushed it behind a stockpot, which did nothing to hide his guilt.
“Outside. We need to talk.” Tonight was the night Sullivan fired him. She really would do it this time.
Behind the restaurant, the Bois rested in darkness, the quiet interrupted by lugubrious howling. Kia would probably think it was wolves… or werewolves. Sullivan shook her head remembering the horror with which Kia had pronounced the wordsnakes, shivering as though one were crawling on her at that very moment. Sullivan hadn’t laughed. It was a real fear. It had still been comically endearing.
Blake began apologizing before they’d had a chance to sit down on one of the outside dining tables.
“I know I shouldn’t have been on my phone.” Apologies poured out of him. “But people were talking shit about Mickey on Insta,” the boy pleaded.
Mickey was his pit bull mastiff mix, which was currently howling his loneliness from the back of Blake’s pickup.
“People were saying pit bulls are vicious and Mickey should be put down.”
Mickey was as vicious as a bag of cotton balls and about as smart.
Social media did this. Some jerk online took twenty seconds to bash pit bulls, and this kid would risk his job to defend the dumb bag of cotton balls. He was lucky. Some jerk trolled his dog; Sullivan’s girlfriend had turned their life into a stage play. Blake must have seen the look on her face, because his words came like a dam breaking.
“Are you firing me? Please don’t. I’ll be better.”
She had to fire him, but she didn’t have the energy tonight. She’d been thinking about losing the Bois. Living with Kia was fine right now. She’d expected Kia to be a presence, to leave glittery clothes on the bathroom floor and pools of corn syrup on the stove, but Kia was immaculately tidy, quiet, and often gone. But eventually Kia would hire loggers, and the Bois would be decimated. Trees turned into scrap lumber. Every time she thought about it, she wanted to cry.
“This is your last chance. Now take Mickey home before he pisses off the whole neighborhood.”
