Page 48

“Sit there,” I said.

There were energy drinks in the break room. Leroy generally avoided them on his doctor’s orders, only keeping them around for me and the rest of the crew. If we didn’t have energy, we couldn’t work. He wanted to make sure that even when we were exhausted, energy was only a refrigerator door away.

I set my sights on the fridge. Energy drinks sure as rain wouldn’t solve the masses of Leroy’s problems, but they would at least take some of the edge off.

I grabbed three and hurried back to the office, planting them with a thud on the table. His pack of cigarettes had fallen to the floor during our scuffle and I scooped them up. I popped the top of a can and shoved it into his hand, then lit a cigarette for him and twisted it between his flaccid lips.

“Drink. Smoke. You’ll feel better.”

Leroy nodded. The whole altercation had taken up too much time. I would barely have time to finish the cabinets if I was going to make it to Daisy’s place on time. Shit!

My mood soured as I rushed through the work I still needed to get done. I must have paused every twenty minutes to check on Leroy. Lucky for me, and for him, he was slowly stabilizing. By the time I was through and ready to go, he had fallen asleep in his chair, a cigarette still burning between his fingers. I put it out for him and covered him with a spare blanket, hoping a good night’s sleep would get him over the worst of his withdrawals. And then I breathed.

Not in relief, but not in frustration either.

Everything just kept going wrong after that. The day started out shit, and by the gods, I knew it was going to end that way, too. I lost a screwdriver, ran out of sandpaper, and spilled varnish. The extra handles I’d found on Friday had grown legs and walked away somewhere, and I’d had to steal a handle from the cabinet in my own bathroom to fix the kitchen cabinet. But I’d figured it was better to deal with the minor inconvenience than give Leroy something else to complain about.

In all honestly, I just wanted to go to bed and forget everything and anything that happened in the past twenty-four hours. But since Daisy and I still weren’t communicating by phone, I had no way out of our date without just standing her up entirely, which would only cause more problems going forward. So I finished my work a lot later than I wanted to, showered more quickly than I should have, and set out on foot for Daisy’s place.

It would have been faster to take the truck, but if I didn’t deal with this black mood it would wreck her whole night. I hoped the muggy night air and the exercise would clear my head and the walk would put enough distance between me and my problems to forget them for a while, but I wasn’t too hopeful. Monday seemed to have it out for me, and I didn’t honestly believe that it would get any better from there.