Page 19 of First-Time Caller
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see your name on it.”
“I’ve parked here every day for years,” he defends, voice two octaves higher than usual. He drags his body the rest of the way out of his vehicle with a huff.
“You could have climbed out the back,” I offer, tilting my head to the side as he tries to slide his body free from the six inches of space between the vehicles. “Or maybe gone out the passenger side.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Is there a point?”
Jackson finally manages to free himself with one last grunt, bending at the waist and resting the palms of his hands on his knees. He wheezes out a deep breath and then stands, dark blond hair in complete disarray.
I should get to work early more often if this is the sort of entertainment I’m missing.
He points behind him. “She needs to respect the lines. That’s literally why they’re there.”
“The parking lines?”
“Yes. The parking lines.” He jabs his finger in the direction of the cars again. “Someone needs to hold her accountable for her actions. She can’t just flit through life, parking however the hell she wants. There are—”
“Lines. I hear you, buddy. No need to get worked up.”
He grumbles something under his breath.
“What was that?”
He grabs his bag from the ground and slings it over his shoulder. “I said, I think I liked you better when you were the grumpy one.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” I clap him on the shoulder and steer him toward the entrance of the radio station. “I’m still the grumpy one.”
Especially today. Maggie called at nine when my head was still buried under my pillow, screeching about a programming emergency. I can’t think of a single emergency for our radio show, short of that one hot dog commercial we had to take off the air because a guy named Winston kept talking about his wieners.
“You’ve been better lately,” Jackson says.
“With what?”
“Being a grump,” he answers, following me in, rubbing at where his shoulder bounced off the Volkswagen door. “You seemed happier earlier this week in the booth.”
I scratch roughly at the back of my head. “When?”
I know exactly when. When a woman got on the line and said she believed in magic and I thought maybe I could believe in it too.
Jackson raises one eyebrow. “The kid who called in. She asked for a boyfriend for her mom? You were smiling. I thought you were having a brain hemorrhage.”
“I smile.”
“Not like that, you don’t.”
“Whatever.” It doesn’t matter anyway. Whatever boost in morale I got from that call quickly disappeared during my next shift when Sharon from Federal Hill called in to talk about how her husband didn’t notice her new haircut. When I asked what sort of things she noticed about him, she told me she noticed when his paycheck was deposited in their shared account. My happy, optimistic bubble burst and I was dumped right back into the sea of sad, unfortunate love stories.
“Do you have any idea what this meeting is about?”
Jackson adjusts his collar. The scarf he wears every day in the winter is still hanging from the open window of his car, the forgotten remnants of a lost battle.
“I have no idea,” he says. “Maggie seemed pretty passionate though.”
