Hide Your Fires

10: Break

“Hallie, you can take your dinner break now,” Taylor calls to me on Tuesday night at around seven while I’m standing behind the counter after just cashing somebody out at the register.

“Oh, that’s okay. I don’t mind working through my dinner today,” I assure my boss as I start to organize the buttons and zippers that are displayed in the glass case to the left of the register.

“Hallie,” She laughs. “It’s Tuesday night- nobody is going fabric shopping right now. You can take a break.”

“I don’t want to,” I tell her. “And I can clean up the shelves, which I haven’t done in a while.”

“I did it yesterday,” She approaches the counter, giving me a suspicious look. “What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?” I ask her dumbly.

“I mean why don’t you want to take your break? You’re acting weird,” She accuses me with a pointed look.

“It’s just that I’m not very hungry,” I inform her innocently, continuing to pointlessly straighten up all of the expensive buttons and zippers. I’m not sure why these ones are expensive but only the best of the best get put into the display case so there must be something awesome about them for them to be there. “I’m fine, Taylor.”

“How long have I known you?” She wonders, tying her hair into a knot at the base of her neck. “I don’t know, but I do know when something is the matter with you. What’s up?”

I let out a long sigh, stand up straight, and lean against the counter with the metal corner of it digging into my lower back through the thin fabric of my cotton dress. “It’s nothing, it’s just on Tuesdays, this guy likes to run into me at the diner and I just don’t want to see him today.”

“A boy?” Taylor beams teasingly. “What’s his name?”

“Uh, Tate,” I mumble. “He’s my brother’s friend and he keeps trying to talk to me which was totally fine until he helped Matt sneak out of the house and then brought him back home blackout drunk. So yeah, I’m not his biggest fan right now.”

“Isn’t your brother young?” She wonders with a grossed out up turned nose.

“Yeah, he’s fourteen, but he hangs out with people from all grades. Tate is my age,” I explain. “And he’s kind of nice and a bit charming but he’s still just so irresponsible it’s insane.”

“I can see how you’d want to avoid him then, considering how you’re Miss Responsibility over here,” She teases me even though I know she’s being serious.

“Exactly,” I say. “So yeah, I don’t want to take my dinner break.”

“But I really want coffee,” Taylor whines with a pleading look. “And I can’t leave the store tonight- I have to cover all of the bills before tomorrow.”

“I told you that you shouldn’t have waited until the last second,” I gloat with a small laugh as I grab my jacket from the hook beneath the counter and sliding it onto my arms because I already know that I’m going to go for coffee. Not only for Taylor but I could use a coffee right now too, with all of the work I’ve been doing lately.

Jude’s been getting a cough in the past two days so I have to stay up with him until about midnight, giving him some kid’s cough medicine and waiting for him to fall asleep and then I have to go back into my room to work on sewing up the clothes for another few hours before going to bed myself. And then, whenever I’m in the same vicinity of Matt, he’s begging me to relent on the amount of chores he has to complete during the week.