“Fuck me,” Elijah groaned. “Yes, where you put your oil normally has a lid on it, not aluminum foil.”
Is that what that was?
Avoiding Sadie’s eyes, I pointed at a cable. “Normally, when my phone charger looks like that, I get a new cable for it. Are cars different?”
“That’s the battery for it,” Elijah sighed. “And, no, it’s not meant to look like that.”
I decided I wasn’t going to mention the rust covering all of it and the amount of corrosion I could see.
Putting my best game face on, I shot Sadie a big grin. “It’s beautiful!” —at least it would be with a lot of work—“These are only little problems—” I was going to hell “—minor little cosmetic things that can be fixed easily!” I assured her, avoiding my family’s eyes.
“I thought so,” she beamed. “I was thinking if I got an old toothbrush and just gave it a little rub, most of that’ll come off, right?”
All the men stared at her with a mixture of horror and sympathy, then exchanged a look that assured me they’d be making it beautiful and safe for her. The interesting thing was, they all looked at Elijah afterward, giving him the lead on it.
“Pixie, I don’t think that’ll work,” he started, using the name Levi had called her. “We’ve all done up cars in the past, though, so we’ll help you out.”
It was the most diplomatic I’d ever heard him. Usually he just barked out orders or did whatever he wanted, and judging by the looks on the faces of the other men, they were thinking the same thing.
“Nah, I’ll fix it tonight—”
Jumping in before the men could say anything, I grabbed her hand. “Let them do it. They’ve got all the tools and stuff.”
“I promise you we’ll get it perfect for you, Sadie,” Gramps promised just as Grams joined us, seeing the car for the first time.
“Hey, who got the ten second car?” she asked, then spun around to glare at Gramps. “I swear, if this is your next attempt to do something stupid you’ve seen in one of those movies, I’ll shove the exhaust so far up your—”
“It wasn’t me,” he snapped, holding his hands up in front of him, then angling a finger in Sadie’s direction. “She bought it.”
“It’s beautiful, Sadie,” Grams beamed. “Hey, can we go for a ride?”
Literally every last one of us—the car’s owner included—yelled at the same time, “No!”The text I’d just received from Parker had left me feeling a bit happier. The liver hadn’t been damaged and was being transplanted into the young boy. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through, having such a major surgery and grieving for his dad at the same time. He had a long road ahead of him with his recovery and saying goodbye to a parent.
Moving down to where Sadie was leaning on the bar and discussing something with Elijah, I waited for a break in their conversation. “Hey, Sadie, can I ask you a question about your mom? Would you mind?”
“Sure?”
“How bad was it when you lost her?”
“Pretty bad,” she said, blowing out a breath. “She was a fun person, the cool mum, you know? At night, we’d make dinner together and be singing and dancing in the kitchen because she swore it took away the stress of the day. She was just one of those people who always turned a bad situation into one you could conquer.”
Elijah was watching her intently, listening to every word with a grim look on his face.
“I’m sorry, girl. I didn’t mean to bring up something that upsets you.”
“Nah,” she waved a hand, a sad smile on her face. “You’ve got to talk about people to keep them alive. Plus, Mum was just brilliant. Every time we wanted to do something, she’d encourage us to at least give it a whirl, saying ‘You’ve got to be in it to win it, innit’, so that we’d try everything once.”
That made the three of us chuckle. “You’re a lot like her, hey?”
“Yeah, I look like her, too.”
“What about your brother and sister?”
“My brother looks just like Dad, and my sister is a perfect fifty-fifty of both of them.”
“Where does your dad live?” Elijah asked, leaning closer to us.
“In Austin. He’s really busy, so he’s only been to see me twice.”
“Why didn’t you move closer to him? It takes, what, two hours to get there?”
Shrugging, she leaned her elbow on the bar and rested her chin on her hand. “Roughly an hour and twenty minutes. It’s only about seventy miles away, so it’s not that bad.”
Her tone had changed from when she talked about him previously, like she was a bit more guarded about him.
“What does he do?” Elijah asked carefully, picking up on what I had.
Clearing her throat, she blushed and looked everywhere apart from at us. “Uh, he works for the government?”