I Want to Live Here Episode 37

"You're not my boss," he snapped, emphasis on the you're.

“I didn’t say I was,” I said. “I said-”

“I know what you said, just hush.”

I looked to Judith to intervene but she seemed to be enjoying watching us square off. Right, she doesn’t get in the way. Hush. So much softer than its New York equivalent, 'shuddup,' yet he still managed to infuse it with a threat.

“I said ‘again,’ Tim. As is, ‘over at Abigail’s again’ ‘cuz you’re there a lot and it looks like you were the one with her car when her sister was here looking for it .”

“What’s it to you? It’s none of your business.”

Tim was probably right about that but I couldn’t stop now. “It’s her sister’s business and I was trying to help her.”

He glared at me. Tim’s ferocity comes from a pair of furious blue eyes set far back under a shelf of thick brows. He had a nose like a drawbridge and a heavy, dirty blond mustache that hid his upper lip but not the snarling shape of his mouth. I don’t know why he disliked me so much but he had from the start. Judith said I didn’t know how to talk to him; I was too direct and too bossy. I was a snob. He scared me with his sinewy fury and I panicked just a little every time I spoke to him. Lately, I’d learned to hand him the work orders as if they were love notes left by the good witch of the south and had stopped trying to prioritize them.

“Pete Levine had her car,” he said at last, his snaking mouth stretched to a grin. He loved the upper hand as much as I did.

“Who the fuck is Pete Levine?”

“Her mechanic, you moron. I took her car up last week and left it while she flew where ever she was going.”

“And you’re just getting it now.”

“That’s what it looks like to me. Look like that to you, Judith?”

Judith laughed.

“Why don’t you two make a new year’s resolution to learn how to work together?”

What? And put an end the Civil War? Involuntarily, Tim and I exchanged glances and tiny grins. No way.