“Go sit down. I can bring those over.”
“Yeah, limping and carrying a tray full of drinks go great together.”
“I’m not limping.”
I tilt a brow.
She ducks her head and grabs an order pad. “Two hamburgers, a grilled chicken salad, and the gristle leftover from the smoked pork butt for Cooper. Got it. What kind of dressing, and how do you want those burgers cooked?”
“Twist your ankle?”
“Vinaigrette because it’s what you always have, medium for one burger and well-done for the other.”
“Or is it your knee?”
“What’s wrong with your knee, TJ?” Sloane spins on her stool and glances between us.
Tillie Jean doesn’t blink. “Banged it on my footboard again.”
“Before or after you fell off the roof?” I ask.
“You fell off the roof?”
Silence descends, but only for a minute.
Annika’s the first one to talk. “Again?”
“What do you mean, again?” Cooper yelps.
“Get up on the bar and pull your pant leg up,” Sloane orders. “Let me look.”
But Tillie Jean waves her away. “It’s fine. I twisted my ankle a little, and I’m in that stupid ankle brace just to be safe. If it still hurts tomorrow, I’ll make an appointment with Doc, okay? It’s tweaked. It’s not injured.”
“You can’t be walking around on a twisted ankle.” Cooper’s next to me now, peering over the bar like he can see his sister’s injury through the wood.
“And who’ll serve your food if I don’t?”
“If you’d told me you were hurt, I would’ve come over here and gotten my own damn drink.”
“I’m not hurt. I’m irritated.”
Okay, that’s funny. Cooper’s used that line every time he’s been put on the injured list since I joined the Fireballs.
Not that it happens often, but a guy can’t dive for every baseball the way he does at second base and not get injured a time or two.
He shoves me. “How’d you know she was hurt?”
“Live next door to a person long enough, they’ll eventually wake you up cussing at a parrot and falling off a roof at five in the morning.”
Mr. Rock pokes his head out of the kitchen again. He’s in a pirate hat over his hairnet too, though his doesn’t have mostly dead feathers like Tillie Jean’s does. “Were you chasing that damn parrot again?”
“He stole my keys.”
“Pop.” Mr. Rock puts his hands on his hips and glares at his own father. “If that bird doesn’t quit causing trouble, we’ll have to retire him.”
“Rawk! Eat shit and die. Rawk!”
Robinson grunts behind us. So does Trevor.
All of us made the mistake of sitting down after working out, and they’re rising to join Cooper and me at the bar.
“We can sit over here,” Robinson says, pulling up a stool next to Georgia.
“I’m fine,” Tillie Jean insists once more. “Who’s having the hamburgers? You two again? Fruit on the side, Robinson? Trevor, you want to upgrade your side to a salad with just vinegar because you’re insane, right? Go sit. Quit fussing.”
“The cussing’s a serious problem with tourist season, Dad,” Mr. Rock grumbles.
“It’s only a problem because people are afraid of words. What can words do? Not a damn thing.”
“Rawk! I’m gonna eat your pussy! Rawk!”
All of us turn and stare at the bird.
Pop Rock shifts in his seat and goes red in the face. “I didn’t teach him that,” he says gruffly.
“That’s not what Nana says,” Tillie Jean mutters under her breath.
The things I did not need to hear.
“Brain bleach,” Trevor says.
Robinson’s grimacing next to him. “I think I just lost my appetite.”
“Pop, Dad’s right.” Cooper grabs a tea off the tray, takes a sip, makes a face, and hands it to Robinson. “That one’s yours. Back to the parrot. He needs remedial training or he’ll start scaring the tourists away. Gah. That’s really sweet tea.” He sticks his tongue out and waggles it around like that’ll get the taste out of his mouth, then grabs another cup of tea and takes a big gulp.
And promptly sputters and chokes on it. “What the hell? Are these all sweet?”
Tillie Jean beams at him. “Yep.”
And then she does the most Tillie Jean thing possible and winks at me with another of her saucy grins. “Don’t worry. I would’ve warned you. I like you better. Hold on two seconds and I’ll get you the fresh stuff. No sugar and two lemons, just the way you like it.”
I’m twitching.
She’s flirting with me merely to annoy her brother, and I know it, and I’m still twitching. “We have to quit coming here,” I mutter to Cooper. “She’s gonna break both of us.”
He laughs. “Speak for yourself, man. The fun’s just getting started. But if she gets to be too much, let me know. I’ll make her stop.”
Right.
I need someone else to tell a woman to stop flirting with me.
I’d ask what’s wrong with me, except I already know.
It’s Tillie Jean. Tillie Jean is wrong with me, and she has been from the moment we met.
8
Tillie Jean
There’s exactly one cure for a long day, and it’s Aunt Glory’s whiskey sour, but replace the whiskey with fresh dark roast coffee and the sour with a little splash of Bailey’s Irish Cream, and then add more coffee, which is exactly what she does before serving it in my stein. She knows my mother worries about my caffeine consumption but also that I need a cure for a long day.
Probably I shouldn’t be on my second already, especially considering my dinner was a side salad—spend all day delivering greasy fried food to people, and it loses its appeal after a while—but the beautiful thing about Shipwreck is that I can walk home with one leg tied behind my back.
Preferably the leg with the achy ankle, but it’ll be fine tomorrow.
I swear. It’s only cranky because it’s tired, not because it’s anything more than tweaked. And I’m not drunk. I’m buzzed. Caffeine buzzes aren’t illegal, no matter what laws the town council tries to pass to get me to cut back when I fall off the wagon and back into the latte pool.
Buzzkills.
Sloane looks up from her phone and shakes her head at me. “You missed the dart board.”
“You wouldn’t know. You weren’t looking.”
She flashes her phone screen at me. “You’re trending in Shipwreck’s Facebook group. Dakota’s counting how many darts you get stuck in the wall.”
I glance over my shoulder at Dita’s son, Dakota, who’s out for a night with his wife while Grandma Dita babysits their four-year-old twins.
He lifts a beer. “Keep going, TJ. I got five bucks riding on you not hitting the board at all.”
“No cheating,” Vinnie Carpelli, a middle-aged electrician who’s been everyone’s favorite person at some point in the last few years, calls from across The Grog. “I got ten on her finishing out the night with a bull’s-eye.”