By a Thread: A Grumpy Boss Romantic Comedy Page 28

  I’d speak to my mother about him soon.

  But first, I took a red pen and underlined the new text I’d added under the Fraternization Policy.

  Employees will not pursue relationships with designers or other vendors.

  I was already standing when Ally stuck her head in the door. “Dom? Ten-minute warning for your meeting across town. Dalessandra is heading down to the car now.”

  I nodded briskly, sliding my arms into my coat.

  “Here,” I said, slapping the paper into her hands.

  “You’re such an ass, Charming,” she called after me as I headed in the direction of the elevators.

  I was. And the sooner she accepted that, the better.

  47

  Ally

  I was up to my elbows in drywall spackle and feeling like a DIY badass when the ringtone I’d assigned to the nursing home cut off Maren Morris’s voice singing about bones and foundations.

  I answered the call with my elbow and rested my face against the phone on the lid of the toilet. The last time I’d been in this position had been the infamous Tequila Lesbian Night. I focused on that fact rather than the instinctive fear that gripped me every time the home called.

  “Ally?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Braden. Hey, no emergency or anything. We’re having some trouble settling your father down for the night. We were wondering if you’d mind stopping in?”

  “Of course,” I said, checking the time. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s all right. Just agitated.”

  “I’ll be there in half an hour.” My father, the man who had only raised his voice when the Mets were playing or when he was shouting “Bravo” in a concert hall, suffered states of agitation where nothing short of strong sleeping meds could calm him.

  The nursing home was a mile from me. The buses didn’t run as often this late on weeknights, and it was too late to call Mr. Mohammad and ask to borrow his car. Walking it was. I bundled up in Dad’s old ski jacket, pulled on the thickest socks I could manage inside my sneakers, and hit the sidewalk.

  It was cold enough, windy enough, for my face to sting.

  At least Dad hadn’t fallen. At least he wasn’t sick. At least I had a job, temporarily, that could handle a lot of the expenses. At least I was finally making progress on the house. I counted my blessings as I power-walked my way through Foxwood.

  So much had changed here since childhood. This street was one eighth-grade me had peered at through the school bus window while I planned my grown-up future. Spoiler alert: My imaginings had never looked like this.

  My life in Boulder was one my eighth-grade self would have approved of. I had friends. Boyfriends. I worked jobs that I loved and took time off to live.

  I spotted the big house all aglow on the corner behind its brick pillars and greenery and felt the familiar tug of longing. I’d loved this house and what it had represented my entire life. A family lived there. Two parents, kids that played outside and climbed trees and sold lemonade on the sidewalk. The Christmas light display drew crowds every year.

  Now there were grandkids and Sunday brunches and holiday celebrations.

  I paused on the sidewalk.

  They were hosting tonight. A weeknight dinner party probably running late because everyone was having too much fun to leave. Glasses of wine. Candles. The faint notes of a jazz record spilled outside to me.

  A fierce longing hit me hard enough to have me turning away. I wanted a home and a family and friends who didn’t mind a wine hangover on a Tuesday morning because we weren’t ready to end the fun.

  I missed my old life. Missed the comfort of believing my father was happy and healthy. Missed being able to breathe. To be selfish. I missed being able to go out for drinks on a Wednesday or take a friend out to dinner. I missed cooking for a cute date that I was excited about. God, I missed sex. I missed not having to know my checking account balance down to the penny.

  I turned my back on the big house and followed the sidewalk away from someone else’s perfect life.

  Thirty-nine-year-old me didn’t have a future.

  There was only now. And I’d be grateful for every minute I had here with him.

  The lights of the nursing home glowed ahead of me. Part of me hoped that the nurses had been able to get Dad settled. That I could just sit quietly with him while he slept. But Braden was waiting for me and buzzed me in the front entrance.

  “Thanks for coming down,” he said, briskly leading the way toward the memory wing. “Usually he doesn’t give us much trouble, but he’s pretty stirred up tonight. He took a swing at the nurse when she came by with meds.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I breathed, trying to catch up to his long-legged strides.

  “Not your fault or his,” Braden assured me.

  Fault, no. But responsibility was different. Violent patients could be removed from the facility and placed in secure mental wards. Deena was just looking for an excuse to give him the boot. There wouldn’t be knitting lessons and dance classes and chair yoga and comfort foods in a secure facility. There wouldn’t be a piano for Dad to play on his good days. Or staff who filled his Christmas stocking with his favorite treats.

  It was late, and the lights were low in the hallway, making the crash that came from my father’s room even more jarring. I pushed past Braden and hurried into the room.

  Dad was on his feet in his cast, dumping his clothing out of the dresser into a pile on the floor. The pile already included everything that had lived on top of the dresser, including his Bluetooth speaker, a digital picture frame with a lifetime of memories, and a framed photo of the two of us on my high school graduation day.

  The glass was broken, and there was a jagged tear over my beaming face. I’d had a world of beginnings in front of me then. Now it was just one more erasure of the only thing I’d ever been completely sure of in life: My father’s love.

  “Get out of here, Claudia!” Dad limped toward me, crushing the photo under his cast. “Haven’t you taken enough from me?”

  “Dad.” I held up my hands. “I’m not Mom. I’m Ally. Your daughter.”

  “You stole it, didn’t you?” he demanded. The sound of crushed glass under his feet made me wince.

  “Dad, come over here so I can clean that up,” I begged.

  “You took my father’s pocket watch! I had it in that drawer, and now it’s gone. I want it back, Claudia. I want it all back!”

  “Mr. Morales, why don’t we check your nightstand for your watch?” Braden suggested, trying to coax my dad away from the glass.

  But Dad wasn’t open to suggestions. “You think you can just leave and take everything from me? I want it all back. You ruined everything!”

  I felt hot tears cutting tracks down my still cold cheeks.

  “Dad, please.”

  He took another step in my direction and stumbled.

  I reached out to steady him, but in his eyes it wasn’t me, the girl who had loved him her entire life. It was the woman who had built a family and a future on lies and then abandoned it all.

  I saw his hand pull back and registered the sound of the crack before I ever felt the pain blooming bright and white-hot.

  The man who had insisted on trapping spiders and setting them free in the backyard backhanded me with every ounce of strength he could muster from his frail body.

  Stunned, I stumbled backward.

  Braden hustled in, another night nurse on his heels.

  “No! Wait,” I insisted, stepping between them. Restraining him would only make it worse. My eye and cheek felt like they were on fire. Shame and sadness made an ugly brew in my stomach. It was selfish, but I knew that seeing them restrain him would very possibly break me into a thousand pieces.

  I reached for my work phone and with shaking hands cued up the song.

  The battered speaker on the floor picked up the piano tune and began to play over tiny slivers of glass.

  Dad’s breath was coming in heaves. T
he anger was still in his eyes, and I bumped the volume higher. We stared at each other for a long minute while the familiar song wove its way around us. His shoulders slumped, the violence and agitation slowly leaving his body as if he recognized that it didn’t belong inside him.

  His fingers began to move rhythmically against his pajama pants. Tears slipped from the corners of his eyes, and I felt my heart break yet again into more microscopic shards.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the nurses. “It’s him playing,” I explained.

  Carefully, I reached for his arm again. This time, he didn’t fight me as I guided him out of the glass and over to the bed. I took off his slippers, his glasses. The nurse helped me tuck him under the quilt his mother had made decades ago.

  His hands continued to follow the song on top of the worn blue and brown patches.

  “I think I’d like to play piano tomorrow,” he said softly.

  “You can absolutely play tomorrow,” the nurse promised him, brushing a wisp of hair off his forehead.

  But promises didn’t mean much these days.

  * * *

  I sat with him for another hour to make sure his sleep was sound.

  While he snored softly, I put down the ice pack that Braden gave me and pulled out my phone.

  The urge to call Dominic was overwhelming and disconcerting. It made no sense. He didn’t know about my father. We weren’t together in any sense of the word. But just thinking about hearing his voice pushed the urge into compulsion territory.

  Biting my lip, I debated for another minute before settling on a text.

  Me: Hey. Do you want me to pick up breakfast for you on the way into work?

  I hit send and immediately felt like an idiot. He was my boss. Not my boyfriend.

  My heart gave a kick when his response lit up my screen.

  Charming: That depends. Can you spell ‘fuck off’ with danishes?

  The smile tugged at the corners of my mouth, and my chest felt a little looser.

  Me: You’d be amazed at what I can spell with breakfast foods.

  Charming: Your talents know no bounds. But I already have our breakfast planned. Just bring your annoying self.

  Me: Okay. Hugs to Brownie.

  He responded with a photo of Brownie sprawled across his legs on the couch. Dominic was wearing sweatpants, and there was a fire in the fireplace. It looked so cozy. So safe. I had to swallow around the lump in my throat. There was no cozy and safe for me. Just a long walk home on a winter night.

  I left the ice pack at the empty front desk and headed for the front doors with Dad’s laundry in a bag.

  It was bitterly cold and almost midnight. Fat clouds blotted out the night sky.

  The doors closed behind me, cutting me off from the warmth, and I took a deep breath of lung-shocking cold.

  “Yo, Ally.”

  Braden was leaning against a sedan in the parking lot. He held up a bottle.

  I hunched my shoulders against the cold and shuffled over.

  “We keep this in the locker room for after tough shifts,” he said, pouring a shot of Fireball into a little Dixie cup.

  “I will accept this emergency Fireball,” I told him.

  “That was tough in there.”

  “Yeah.” It came out as a gasp. The yummy burn in my throat was an improvement over the choking sensation of six months of suppressed tears lodged in there. “He thought I was my mom, his ex-wife… or wife.”

  “I noticed she’s never come to see him,” Braden said in that nice, non-pushy way of his.

  “She left us about a hundred years ago. It’s always been just him and me.”

  We were quiet for a long beat. Lazy snow flurries drifted silently down from that midnight sky.

  “Do you have to write up a report about tonight?” I didn’t want to ask the man to not do his job. But I also didn’t think I could face another layer of jeopardy to my father’s residency.

  “We’re not writing anything up,” he promised.

  I slumped in relief.

  “Look, I know that this is a shit situation,” he said. “And I know that you’re doing your very best to keep it all together. But we all want you to know that when you’re not here, we’ve got your dad. We’re his family, yours too. And we’ll do whatever it takes to keep him happy and safe.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  Tears blurred my vision and battled the cold for supremacy. My eyelashes were going to freeze shut, and I was going to have to stumble home blindly. But my father had people who had his back and that made any temporarily frozen corneas worth it.

  “The rest of the staff want you to know that no matter what Deena the Bad Witch says, we want your dad here. No missed payments or late fees are going to make us treat him less than the best.”

  “Aw, crap, Braden,” I said, swiping an errant tear away with my mitten.

  “And one more thing,” he said.

  “I don’t know if I can take one more thing.”

  “Give me the damn laundry.”

  “It saves me money to do it myself,” I insisted.

  “Do you have a washing machine and dryer at home?” he asked.

  I considered lying. But just the thought of it had my neck flushing bright red. “No. But there’s a laundromat with Wi-Fi just a couple blocks away—”

  “You have better things to do than sit in a laundromat. We’re taking care of your dad’s laundry from now on. No charge.”

  “I can’t ask you to—”

  “You didn’t ask. And we didn’t offer. We’re telling you. Leave the damn laundry alone.”

  I bumped his shoulder with mine. “You’re kind of my hero right now,” I told him.

  He glanced down at his pants. “You think a cape would look good with scrubs?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Cool. Now get in the car so I can drive you home before you freeze to death out here.”

  48

  Ally

  “I look like I ran face-first into a bar fight,” I complained to my reflection. My face hurt. Worse. It looked like it hurt.

  The movies where the heroine gets backhanded and jumps back up to badassedly wipe the blood off her lips before grinning at the villain were total bullshit.

  I’d tried makeup. All of the foundation and concealer I had still couldn’t disguise the swelling and the darker bruises. There was no way Dominic would a) not notice that half my face was bigger and more purple than the other half and b) let me get out of explaining what had happened.

  I winced at the thought and then again at the pain the audacity of having facial expressions caused.

  As much as I hated to do it, I had to call in sick. There was no way around it.

  It was early enough that he wouldn’t be at the office for at least another hour. I wasn’t being a big ol’ chicken, I reminded myself as I dialed his desk extension instead of his cell phone. I just didn’t want to bother him with something as insignificant as my absence today.

  My neck flushed hot and splotchy in the mirror.

  “Hi, Charming. It’s, uh… me. Ally. I’m sick. I can’t come in today. But I swear I’ll make up the time. I can work late tomorrow or on the weekend or… whatever.” I remembered to cough, but it came out more like the honk of a wounded goose.

  My neck was on fire with lies. I bobbled my phone, dropping it into the sink. “Damn it!” I hissed, making a grab for it and disconnecting the call.

  I really needed to work on my lies. But for now, I had moisture-resistant Sheetrock to hang.

  * * *

  I spent the day hanging and taping Sheetrock in the bathroom and not answering my phone. Dominic called three times, and I let it go to voicemail each time. And, of course, listened to the messages immediately afterward.

  He sounded concerned, asking if I needed soup, then annoyed because who the hell was supposed to do all the work I was supposed to do? Very on-brand for Dominic Russo.

  I didn’t respond. But guilt at miss
ing a full day of work started to eat away at me. I tried to stuff it down with a turkey sandwich, made just the way my dad liked—with thin slices of apple topped with sharp cheddar. It was nice to have cheese back in my life.

  According to the nurse at the desk, it was a good day for Dad, which meant I couldn’t see him.

  Not with my face looking like this.

  Not if there was a chance that he’d realize the bruises came from him.

  By early evening, I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d watched my inbox overflow with its usual frenetic energy all day, but I hadn’t been there to take care of anything. Looming responsibilities made me feel itchy. I decided I’d put in a few hours of work tonight and start fresh tomorrow… if my face cooperated.

  I showered, dressed, and headed into the city. The night air was cold, crisp, and felt like snow. It was after nine by the time I let myself into the office with my keycard. The floor was dark and quiet. A ghost town compared to the daytime productivity.

  In a nod to the overwhelming quiet—and, okay, to make sure Dominic wasn’t pulling an all-nighter in his office—I tiptoed to my desk.

  The office was empty, and I was alone. I breathed a sigh of relief and flopped down in my chair. My desk had a stack of new files. My email inbox was demanding my attention, and I had nothing but a few uninterrupted hours to make some headway.

  I put in my earbuds, cranked up one of my favorite dance playlists, and dug into the work.

  The hand that clamped down on my shoulder half an hour later scared the ever-living shit out of me.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus!”

  “Who the hell did this to you?”

  The demand, growled over the volume of my music, nearly shocked me out of my chair and onto the floor.