I hummed in response.

A few more minutes passed by. Dex fiddled with the knobs on the radio. If I wouldn't have been paying so much attention I would have missed his quick glances to the backseat.

"Ritz."

"Yeah?"

Without an introduction or a ramp that apologized for being nosey, he asked, "What'd your ma die of?"

There was a knot in my throat I hadn’t felt in a long time—a very long time. Such a long time that it was laced in rust and spider webs, foreign in my body. In the same way I’d avoided telling people about my parents being gone, I avoided telling them how Mom died, and mostly, people didn’t ask. Mortality is a delicate subject. Most people don’t like to get reminded of how fragile and unstable life is. Mom wasn’t even near forty when she first got sick.

People asked about my family if they cared to get to know me. Most of the time I didn’t get close enough to establish that type of relationship with anyone. I liked people in general but with life and work as unstable as they were, leaving people behind or getting forgotten hurt too much. I lived the last few years of my life being friendly and cordial.

But I was tired.

And Dex had cared enough to ask.

"Breast cancer." Something that constantly scared the crap out of me but I didn't admit that.

He let out a long, suffering sigh from his nose. His free hand went up to pull his cap off his head, tossing it onto the center console. “Fuck," he groaned. "How old were you?"

Just answering pierced me a little. Just a little. I'd accepted what happened a long time ago. "Sixteen. My brother was eleven."

Dex hissed long and low. Turning to glance at me out of the corner of his eye, his gaze was heavy and curious. "Fuckin' kids," he murmured in that low register.

One kid raising another kid with only the weary monitoring of yia-yia. Even before my mom had died, she'd been sick for a couple of years. By the time the aggressive disease had gotten to be too much, I'd already felt like a thirty-year-old in a teenager's body. Deep in my bones I knew that my life would have been completely different if my dad wouldn’t have left.

I would have still gotten sick and maybe Mom would have still had useless mastectomies, and pesticides shot into her veins, and for all I know, she would have still passed away. But maybe the paragraphs that had been written in between Mom and yia-yia’s deaths wouldn’t have been so roughly drafted and eventually published. I may have still been in Florida, with a college degree, and married with the Golden Retriever I'd always wanted. And maybe Will would have done something else with his life that didn’t involve running away to start over.

But like the few other times when the pity party started without my permission, I reined the thoughts in with a restrained mental lasso. I rarely went down that path of what-ifs. They were pointless and painful, and I’d come to accept that my life was the way it was because… it just was. It was the brew of a million decisions and possibly fate if you believed in it.

I didn't. Then again, I didn't believe in a lot of things anymore.

I had to swallow back the knot in my throat, push the focus of my family off while I still could. My brain leeched onto the first topic that came to mind. “Are you looking forward to the expo, Charlie?”

He made a choking sound. “Charlie?” Dex glanced at me through the rearview mirror, one eyebrow raised like he couldn't believe what I'd just called him.

Maybe I shouldn’t have called him that out loud, but I’d already said it and I knew Dex wasn’t going to let it go. Plus, I thought it was kind of cute. It softened up the impression I had of him. “Yeah. Charlie. Charles. Charles Dexter.”

He grunted. "Dex, babe. Not...that."

"It's a good name," I told him. "No need to get extra grumpy about it. It's not like your first name is Leslie or Clancy."

Out of all the things he could have picked up on, like the fact that I thought his first name was a good one, he went for the obvious. “You think I’m grumpy?” he asked.

I didn't like lying and it wasn't like he'd kick my ass for telling the truth. I think. He'd probably leave me in Houston or fire me...

“Well you aren’t going to win any congeniality awards when you’re pushing customers out of the shop and always grinding your teeth away.” I thought about bringing up his not-so-sweet actions but I’d told myself I didn’t want to go there anymore.

And Dex snickered. “You tellin’ me I’m an ass**le?”

“Grumpy with a side of extra grumpy.” Did that really just come out of my mouth?

He shook his head, biting his bottom lip in a way that looked pensive. “Huh,” he paused like he was searching for words to explain his nature. “I have a temper.” Like I didn’t know that. “It’s hard for me to shake things off.”

“Like what kind of things?” I asked though it wasn’t my place to. This was something I’d talked to yia-yia about multiple times. The inability of a person to let go of things that harmed or bothered them. Everyone was guilty of it. "I can keep a secret."

I swear I think he laughed nervously. “Well, when do you want me to start, babe? The day I said that shit to you? My ma had rung me up and said that Pa had called.”

Okay, it was safe to assume he wasn’t a fan of his dad. That I understood. Simply thinking of my dad had almost ruined my day in the past, too. Check. That was acceptable. “Okay.”

“The day after that? I found out my property taxes were goin’ up—“

“You get that pissed off about property taxes?” I asked him incredulously.

“They went up a f**kin’ ton,” he explained like that would make perfect sense.

"You were in a terrible mood, looking at me like I ruined one of your tattoos, all because your property taxes went up?"

Dex had the decency to grunt. Decency only because tracing the root of his anger to taxes was so absolutely ridiculous it didn't need to get cemented into a fact. I hoped it would have been something better, more worthwhile. Like...finding out his girlfriend had cheated on him or something. That I could understand.

“Then I'd found out that somebody was stealin' from the bar," he added in afterthought.

"Someone was stealing from the bar riles you up that much?"

Once again, he grunted.

Oh boy.

"The day after that, I got into an argument with Luther about him messin’ around with girls who aren't old enough to rent a damn car on their own, “ he prattled on until I blew a long breath out of my lips.

The idea that I could and probably should keep my mouth shut was right there, telling me to not bother saying anything. I couldn’t do it though. It wasn't my place to give him advice or call him out on things he could fix. I had a whole list of things I should fix about myself but I'd never bothered picking it up to look it over.

“Dex? I completely understand that you get pissed off about stuff, but I don’t think it’s worth you getting so mad. You can fight your property taxes, right?” He didn’t say anything. “You’re smart, you can figure out a way to find out who's stealing. And Luther sleeping with girls that young…”