February 16th 2020
Chapter 47
Their Careers to Earn
As much as Lucas had enjoyed his three-day weekends, even if he was working at the bookstore on those, he was getting to think that he would enjoy this new schedule of his a lot more. He still had a day where he had no classes, only this semester it had landed on Wednesdays, which would make it so that he would be driving out to school two times two days in a row instead of four. He didn't mind the drive, not all the time, though his Friday drives had gotten to feel like more or a chore than he cared to admit. Now he'd have two days at the bookstore, two at school, one at the store, and two more at school, and he'd start again… He could deal with that.
His days at the store might have been slightly different, but at least the people remained the same. Maeve would be a constant throughout. On weekends they would be joined by Aarti and Mona, and on Wednesdays now as on Mondays, it would be them and Julia and Tanner.
"How did that even work out?" Lucas asked Maeve when he showed up that first Wednesday. She paused her search at the computer and turned to him.
"How did what work?"
"Winston was working Wednesdays…" he pointed out. Maeve smirked. "What?" Now she laughed. She repeated what he had just told her, holding her thumbs and indexes together at the thumbs to create the letter W, which she waved at every word. She was looking at him now like she really wanted him to use another W word, the better for her to point it out to him. He just stared back, gave a nod, and turned to walk away, like he wouldn't give the satisfaction. "Okay, okay, come back, geez!" she laughed, and he returned to her counter. "It's not like I had a choice to shuffle things around, or there wouldn't have been space for you and you'd lose a day. I asked Winston if he'd switch a couple of his days and he said yes, it's not a big deal. Happens all the time."
"Yeah, but it was his day, he had his whole routine, he told me once…"
"Look, I can't talk about it, he's just… He's going through some personal stuff, okay? He couldn't come in to work anymore, so it was kind of a 'one's misfortune' kind of thing."
"Oh…" Lucas blinked.
He didn't know Winston very well, except that when he wasn't working at the bookstore, he was at the supermarket where he and Maya and Sam shopped every week. One day, Lucas had gone in to pick up something on his way to work, and he'd been wearing his vest, which Winston of course recognized. The two of them had gotten to talking, confirming that they not only worked at the same store but on the same floor and with the same people. He was in his fifties, maybe sixties, Lucas wasn't sure, but he was pretty sure he'd never met a single person who was so well and widely read as him. He had a knack for book recommendations like no other, which he heard about through the rest of his weekday crew.
Now that he thought about it, he wasn't sure he'd seen Winston at the market for a couple weeks now. He figured he was on vacation, but now…
"Look, can you just sort of… keep it to yourself?" Maeve quietly asked.
"Absolutely," Lucas nodded. "If you talk to him though, tell him I said hi?"
"I will," Maeve smiled and nodded.
"Hey, so I was thinking we could all hang out sometime. You've been to a couple movie nights, but I was thinking it could be fun to have the others there, too."
"Like a store mixer?" Maeve grinned.
"Something like that," Lucas slowly nodded, considering the suggestion.
"But just our floor," Maeve added, which might as well have been 'just the best floor.'
"Oh, for sure," he laughed.
"Great! We should totally do that. Weekend after next maybe, or… No, wait, you have a day off in there? Fiancée's birthday, yeah?"
"Yeah," Lucas nodded.
"So, two weekends after next?"
"That should work."
They spent much of that morning, the four of them, tossing ideas back and forth about they might pull this off, what they would want it to be. There were definitely two schools of thought in this, between Team Maeve, who wanted games, and themed outfits, and Team Julia, who just wanted them to get together, have some food and hang out, maybe watch a movie or something, but nothing more involved than that.
"I don't think they're going to let go of this," Tanner told Lucas at one point, as the two of them watched the girls tossing looks to one another, like they were looking for the ideal tactic to get their side to win. In his head, Lucas could hear Rosa's voice calling for someone to protect the books, and he bit back on the urge to laugh it gave him.
"Right, you take Julia, I got Maeve?" he suggested, and they parted on a couple of bumped fists, both soon occupied with customers even as they kept an eye on their 'target.'
The more the day progressed, Lucas found himself thinking about his new classes, the ones he'd had so far, and how they carried on from those he'd taken in the fall. His second semester had only just started, and it felt as though the simple act of being here today, on this different day, really drove home how things were moving forward for him, with school. Whenever they'd have a new semester, there would always be that period where everything was new, and then days and weeks would pass, and they'd hit their stride. It sort of felt like that, but on a bigger scale. He'd stopped thinking of it as him going off to his new school four days a week.
He was helping an old woman looking for something for her granddaughters in mid-afternoon when he looked up and discovered Maya, standing just a few feet away, looking on with that 'I like to watch you do your job' smile of hers. It was hard for him to keep going without tipping his hand and smiling back, but he focused and saw the woman through her shopping until she was good and ready to head down to pay for her selections. When she was on the escalator, Lucas turned back and went to find Maya, who had passed the time by browsing some of the table displays.
"Find anything to your liking?" he asked.
"You're just walking right into it, aren't you?" she smirked without looking up yet.
"You mean because now you're going to say something like 'as a matter of fact, I was looking for a tall cowboy type.'"
"You're so good at your job," she turned that smile up to him now.
"Speaking of which, aren't you supposed to be at yours?"
"This whole grace period before Stage Ready's kickoff is doing wonders for unplanned visits to see you when waiting until evening just doesn't feel doable," she shrugged.
"Can't argue with that," Lucas gave a quick look around the floor before allowing himself to sneak a quick kiss. "I'm going on break soon."
"So I did time it right," Maya declared, looking satisfied.
A few minutes later, he made his way down to the small café near the magazine stands and spotted Maya waiting for him at one of the tables. She was just finishing talking to a girl who moved on toward the elevators after waving to her. After she'd gone, the smile on Maya's face seemed to lose some of its glow for a moment, regaining it when her line of sight came in contact with him, and then the smile was back and more genuine than before.
"Who was that?" Lucas asked as he approached and sat across from her.
"Amy Welch, from junior high, remember?"
"That was her?" he blinked, looking back to see if he could still see her. He had known her, long before Maya did, from just being in school with the rest of them, in elementary school, and then again in junior high, but then when they'd moved on to the ninth grade she'd ended up going to a different school than the rest of them and so they hadn't heard from her in… well, eight and a half years, more or less.
"Yup," Maya confirmed.
"So, I'm guessing she's still kind of…"
"I was really hoping the years would have been kinder to her personality, but here we are," she sighed. "You're much better company, so let's just ignore that, yeah?"
"Are you sure?" He couldn't help it. He'd seen that look on her face a minute ago, and now he couldn't forget that he'd seen it. He had to acknowledge it.
"Stop that," she pointed to his face with a small smile.
"Stop what?" he casually asked.
"Pouty fiancé face," she gestured in the general area of his head. "You know how some kids at school got, when TXNY started to get attention?"
"Oh, yeah," he nodded. How could he forget? Even back then, his primary motivation seemed to ensure that no one would harm her, in any way, and that whole situation had just been… unpleasant.
"Right, so put that through the Amy Welch filter, with eight year's inflation and… yeah… It's not a good mood to be in, and the only way to banish it is to ignore it and move on, until it shrivels up and dies." He took this in and finally decided to accept it. "This one's for you," she indicated one of the two cups on the table. He'd seen it, but then he'd just as soon forgotten it was there, distracted by the Amy aftermath.
"Thank you," he pulled it to sit in front of him on the table.
"How's your day going?" she asked.
"Are you sure you don't want to wait until tonight? What if we have nothing left to discuss?" he teased.
"I think we're good," Maya chuckled. "In case of emergency, I have a whole slew of backups, each more embarrassing than the next and involving all those awkward teenage moments I'm sure Sam would love to hear about."
"Or… there's always the wedding," he redirected with a laugh.
"Oh, is someone getting married?" she played cluelessness.
"Couple people," he nodded.
"Which people?"
"The ones sitting at this table."
"Well that's… Hey, that's us," she grinned. "Would explain this ring on my finger," she wiggled her hand about.
"Would do, yeah," he nudged her foot under the table. She smiled on for a beat, but then he could see the thoughts shifting on her face, the thoughts in her mind practically legible over her features, like she was telling herself 'stop deflecting.' She looked up at him again. "Wasn't because of her, was it?"
"No, well maybe it was, a little, or it just sort of… reinforced why I came out here in the first place," she confessed. He sat up a bit now.
"Maya, what's going on?"
"Just wanted to talk… about a few things… stuff that's been sort of getting at my brain the last couple days." It wasn't the first time, and he usually picked up on it, but she'd gotten it past him this time around. "So, I packed off to work from home the rest of the day, even though it's really nothing, I mean at this point I'm not so much working as double checking, and triple checking, so that by this weekend…"
"Maya…" he cut in, knowing how long that sentence could run if it was given traction in any way. "What's got in your brain right now?"
TO BE CONTINUED
See you tomorrow! - mooners
