All It Takes by Sadie Munroe Read Free Book Online Page A

long it was all broken and faded by the weather. Christmas decorations, most of which were star-themed, which killed me a little bit, were dragged away and dumped. But bit by bit, the piles began to shrink. Hours later, when the sun is just starting to dip, I call it a day and we head inside to wash the worst of the grime off. And that’s an adventure in itself, because it’s not like the bathroom was miraculously spared from the hoard.
    Afterward, finally, we step out onto the porch together, and I close the front door behind us and slide the key into the lock.
    “Well,” he says, pulling his jacket back on even though it is still really warm outside. “Is it cool if I come back tomorrow?”
    I boggle at him. Is this guy
serious?
I was ready to just hand him a twenty and hope for the best.
    “Dude,”
I say, so relieved I’m almost ready to cry. “Of course. You worked your butt off. Of course you can come back.”
    “So I’ve got the job?” he asks, but I can already see the grin he’s trying to smother as it pulls at the side of his mouth. His eyes meet mine, and I can’t help but laugh.
    “Oh, shut up,” I tell him. “You know you do.” And he honestly did. Between the two of us, we must have hauled three or four dozen bags of garbage to the curb, all of them stuffed full to the brim, and put even more than that into the Dumpster. There had just been so much stuff. It had been everywhere, all over the backyard. Bins and boxes, covered with tarps that weren’t doing anything to protect them from the elements. Nearly everything that my mother had stored out there had been destroyed by rain and dirt and god knows what else.
    It was heartbreaking. I don’t even know how long things have been like this. Had the stuff she’d been storing back there gotten to that state of disarray and decay while she was still alive? For all I know, it could have been out there for
years.
    But, together, we’d managed to haul out a good chunk of it. Not a huge amount, not enough for the backyard to be even close to clear enough for me to use it as a sorting area, like my plan had been, but it was still a whole lot better than it had been before. And it was so much more than I could have done in one day on my own. Hell, to be honest, it was more than I could have done on my own in a week.
    “Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, and pulls one of his hands out of the pocket and gives me a little wave. “Same time work for you?”
    “Are you kidding?” I ask. I know this guy’s been through some shit, but this is ridiculous. “Get in the car, Ash. I’m taking you for dinner.”
    “You . . . what?” He’s looking at me like I’ve grown another head. Possibly one that belonged to a lizard. “What are you talking about?”
    “Dinner.” I say the word slowly, but I smile to let him know I’m teasing him. “Din-
ner.
The last meal of the day. I’m buying you dinner.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you worked really, really hard, dude,” I say, starting to get exasperated. “And you offered to come back. And because we didn’t even stop for lunch. I don’t know about you, but I’m
starving.”
    “But . . . we had lunch.”
    “No,”
I say. “We had a couple of crappy bagels that I swiped from the B + B’s breakfast buffet. They were dry and gross. Would not recommend. What I want is a big, greasy cheeseburger. So are you going to get in the car, or are you going to follow me in yours?”

    ***

    It took a lot more cajoling than I expected, but I eventually got Ash into my mother’s old station wagon. I figured that way if it crapped out on me again, I’d have him there with me, at least, until I dropped him back at the house for him to pick up his car.
    I don’t think he realized what my plan was until I turned into the diner’s parking lot.
    “Uh . . . I don’t think this is a good plan,” he says as I pull into a parking space right by the front door.
    But I just turn off the engine and pull