Page 18 of Keeping It Professional

Sophie slumped where she sat. “I guess. I don’t know. I should get my own car.”

I shifted, irritated: there it was again. That doormat side of her I’d seen on the job. “You shouldn’t do that,” I said. “Try to please everyone. The truth is, you can’t, and some folks won’t like you. It won’t matter what you do, or how hard you try. They’ll walk all over you and it won’t change a thing, except you’ll have footprints all over your back.”

Sophie went tense. I guessed I’d touched a nerve. But she needed to hear it, or she’d never wise up.

“Clive’s the same way, always keeping the peace. And I keep telling him?—”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t.” Sophie stood up. “Maybe you should think about minding your own business.”

“Sorry. But being nice?—”

“I’m not beingnice.” Sophie spun away from me, then she spun back. She slapped down her hand on the hood of her car. “I’m not being nice,” she said. “I’m paying her back.”

“Paying her back for what?”

Sophie picked at a paint chip on the hood of her car. Her nails were short, blunt, but well-manicured. “She’s a good mom. She’s there for me. Always has been.”

“My mom’s there for me too, but I wouldn’t pay her tickets. Not my first week on a new job.”

Sophie fooled with her zipper. She turned away. “You don’t get it,” she said. “If I tell her I paid, she’ll want to know why, and I’ll have to tell her she got me booted. She’ll feel horrible. It’ll be a whole spiral. A huge, awful guilt spiral, and she doesn’t need that.” Her voice caught, and she swallowed. I frowned.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” She sat down again. For a while, she was quiet, watching the street. Watching the gulls raid the diner’s garbage. Then she checked her phone again and breathed a deep sigh. “Dad always used to handle their money, house payments, bills, and yeah. Parking tickets. Mom, she was bad at math. Lousy with money. And then he died, and it all fell on her.”

I straightened up. “Sorry.”

“Thanks. It was bad. His insurance paid out, then, I don’t know the details, but they found some damn way to claw it all back. They left us with nothing. Mom lost the house. We were sleeping in shelters, or in her car, and the whole time, she blamed herself, because she sucked with money. But it wasn’t her fault. She tried all she could. She worked two jobs, three. She got a lawyer. She got us our money back, or at least some, but she couldn’t let go of all we went through. If I told her they booted me over her tickets…”

I sat feeling stupid, and like a heel. I’d got one look at Sophie and thought I had her pegged, the Pollyanna idealist with a head full of fluff. I’d called her an airhead, childish. Naïve. The whole way I’d treated her, I’d based it on that. I cleared my throat.

“How old were you? When your dad died?”

Sophie sniffed. “Twelve. He went out to get milk. Some kid came and robbed the place, and he shot my dad.”

My stomach rolled: sudden loss. I knew how that felt. You went from one moment, your world was great, then you blinked for a second and it all fell apart. You opened your eyes on this blasted landscape, nothing where you remembered it. Everything trashed. You couldn’t go through that and not come out tough — and how tough was Sophie, that she’d come out smiling?

“My brother died too,” I said. “When I was ten.” I hadn’t meant to tell Sophie that, not now or ever, but I felt like I had to. Like I owed her, somehow. She picked up a flat rock and skipped it across the street. It bounced into a rain grate and disappeared.

“That’s awful,” she said. “How old was he?”

“Just turned nine, but he was the same height as me. People would look at us and go, are you twins?” I coughed, my throat dry. I’d almost forgotten about that. He’d looked so much like me, we’d switched places sometimes. He’d gone on my class trip. I’d written his English test. One time, he was scared to get his measles vaccine, and I tried to loop round and take his as well. If the nurse hadn’t noticed the prick from my first shot, I might’ve got double-jabbed, and him not at all.

“What was his name?”

I smiled. “It was Nick. But kids called him Lou.”

Sophie laughed. “Lou?”

“He had horrible handwriting, and this substitute teacher — she was handing back quizzes, and she thought his said Lou.” I hadn’t thought about that, either, for a long time.

“Your handwriting’s perfect.” Sophie nudged my arm. “Your reports are so neat, they look like you typed them.”

“We were different,” I said. “I mean, we looked the same. But Nick liked to read, and I was more sporty. I loved mushroom pizza. It made him barf. And our fights over the remote control, man, those were epic.” I laughed, then I stopped myself. It felt wrong to smile. Nick wouldn’t smile again, or crack a joke. He wouldn’t fight me for the TV.

“It’s good to remember them. Sometimes, at least.” Sophie scuffed at the sidewalk. Her lips twitched up. “You can’t think of them too much, or you get stuck in the past. But once in a while, it’s good to look back, at least on the good times. You can’t forget those.”

I closed my eyes and saw bright summer green, the park a block down from where we grew up. I saw Nick on the slide with his hair all mussed up, in hisStar Warsshirt, waving me over. It felt real for a moment, so real it hurt, then the crisp image blurred and blinked out. I opened my eyes again. “The good times,” I said. Remembering hurt, but it hurt worse that I hadn’t. That I’d let years go by with those memories buried, even the happy ones. Our days in the sun.

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