Sunshine and bleeding hearts

I sat down in my office, dying to look at my phone to see if John had responded yet. I reached for the drawer, and then the door slammed open, nearly giving me a heart attack.

“Hey! I’m back. Did you miss me?” Sunny called, bounding in, a beam of a smile on her face.

“You scared me! I didn’t think you’d be back this early.” I said, pulling my hand back from thr drawer and placing it on my wildly beating heart.

“You didn’t get my message? I said I’d be back before lunch.” She paused for a moment, and studied my face. “What are you up to? You look like you’ve been caught with your hand in the cookie jar.”

“I did get your message. It’s just that you’re on Sunny time, and before lunch could mean four o’clock. And I’m not up to anything, I was getting to my to-do list before going out to help Maurice with the pizza.”

“You and your lists.” She said, rolling her eyes as she crossed the room to sit down at her desks. She wiggled the mouse and her computer came to life.

“I know, I know, but you know if I don’t write it down, I don’t remember it, and then the next thing I know, the electricity is getting turned off because I forgot to pay it.”

“I remember that. In the middle of the softball dinner we were hosting. What a fun night.”

I laughed as I recalled my earlier days of business management. “It was kind of fun.” I admitted.

I opened my drawer and ignored my phone. I saw the blinking light indicating I had some sort of message, but I didn’t want to look. Sunny could read me like a book, and I didn’t want her knowing anything was going on. I reached for my to-do list and my contact book instead.

“Rose was supposed to work tonight but called off last night. I guess her mom, like, made her a doctors appointment?” I said, mimicking her, knowing Sunny would laugh – and she did. “Gabby stopped in this morning for breakfast and offered to cover, so we’re good there.” I said, marking the “find a replacement” note off my sheet.

“Gabby’s a good worker.” Sunny said. “Hey, Noah won tickets to the pier and wants to go Sunday. Wanna go?”

“I dunno.” I said, playing stupid. “You know me and amusement parks. Beside, who will cover both of us?”

“Jooooohn’s going.” Sunny said, teasing me, knowing how I acted around him.

“That still doesn’t change the fact that I hate amusement parks and we both can’t leave at the same time.”

“We both left yesterday and the store is still standing. You know Mona and Maurice are always bugging us both to take time off and trust them. And, we should. You’re going to burn yourself out Lanie. There are plenty of kids staffed to help them, we close early on Sunday’s anyway, and I know it’s hard to believe, but the shop isn’t as hard to manage as it was before. Besides, if you don’t come then Noah is just going to invite one of his guy friends and I’ll be stuck listening to boy talk all day long.” She mock pouted.

“Fine.” I caved. “But consider this your birthday present. AND I’m not riding anything, so don’t even ask.” I paused for a moment. “You know Sun, we really should consider hiring a few more people. The Mo’s work really hard for us – like they get even less time off than we do.”

“That’s because even when it’s their day off they still come in. This is their world.”

“I know, but still. It’d be nice to get a few more grown up’s in here. Officially promote the Mo’s to managers and be able to switch days off with them – even if they use their days off to come in here. And we could make more money if we were able to deliver pizza’s during lunch. Just two or three more bodies. College students maybe?” I asked.

She nodded. “You better give heads up to Mona, you know how she gets, but I’ll work on putting together a help wanted ad, I can post it on craigslist.”

I glanced back down at my to-do list. “Oh, hey. Some guy named Matt called me. What did you tell him we’d do for him?” I asked, trying to keep the suspicion out of my voice, but knowing it was there. Slice of life had done several volunteer projects before, but we hadn’t done much lately because… Well, because even after all this time, I was still trying to get a grip on things and I wasn’t comfortable doing too much. Sure, we did some fundraisers and such, but that was the extend. However, Sunny was always trying to volunteer us for something. Bless her bleeding heart, but it did sometimes get annoying when I had to play the bad guy and turn people down.

“Oh, Matt.” She said, smiling and turning towards me. “He’s super cute, super tall, friend of Noah’s from school. Anyway, he works with inner city kids – which is totally adorable…”

“Sunny, get to the point.” I reprimanded. Sunny was also always on the hunt to fix me up and tended to go on and on about how cute a guy was or his good qualities.

“OK, geez. He works with inner city kids and talked about how they were doing a healthy cooking class and he wanted to teach them that good food could be healthy. I mentioned that we make several healthy pizzas and how we own the business. He was impressed because we were so young and wanted to know if he could bring some of his kids over to talk to us about running a business and to show them how to cook some healthy stuff.”

I sighed. Loudly.

“Oh come on Lanie.” Sunny scolded. “It’d be like, one night, all we would be out is the cost of the ingredients which we could write off anyway, and some time. We’d be doing a good thing. Helping people.”

“I’ll talk to him, but I’m not making any promises. Time is scarce as it is.”

“I figured we could do it on a Sunday evening, after we closed. I was thinking it would be fun if we had it once a week for like a month maybe, and at the end had them come up with their own healthy pizza recipe contest. We could come up with some little prize and maybe even feature their pizza on the menu and…”

“So we went from one night to four nights, and from just the cost of ingredients to coming up with a prize?” I asked. I was shaking my head but also smiling. “Get out of my office, your heart is bleeding all over my floor.” I joked.

“Oh whatever.” She said, closing down her computer. “You’ll call him back and tell him yes, correct?”

“Yes Sunny. But let’s just commit to one night for right now. These kids could think cooking is totally stupid and I’m not wasting my time on kids who aren’t interested. We’ll gauge their reactions and then maybe turn it into something. If only a few kids are interested maybe we could set up some sort of mentoring thing.”

“You know some of Noah’s students are pen pals with some of his? To show how they can live so close to each other but be so different, and yet the same too? Really neat program. Hey, maybe at the end of this we can do a pizza party and have the groups meet and our kids could cook and…” Sunny was taking off again.

“Sunny. Go help Maurice.” I said, cutting her off.

“Aye aye, Captain.” She said, saluting me and walking towards the door.

“And hey, Sunny?” I asked, and she stopped at the door to look at me. “Clear Sunday’s day off with the Mo’s. And do me a favor and ask them if they have a number for a Rachel at their church? She called this morning about baking goods for breakfast but didn’t leave any contact info.”

She nodded and turned on her heel to walk out. I shook my head and chuckled. Sunny’s bleeding heart was what got her into business with me, I know. She couldn’t stand to see me in so much pain at the thought of losing it. I loved her for it, but I also knew that it got her walked on often, and I had to keep her reigned in sometimes.

I knew I was supposed to work on the schedules, and I opened up the spreadsheet on my computer to plug in the names, pulling out the list of requested day’s off Mona gave me. I also pulled out my to do list and added “talk to the Mo’s about hiring lunch time help” at the bottom. Then I saw the note to text John, and realized I still hadn’t had a chance to check my messages. I quickly pulled out my phone.

John: Are you open tonight?

Tonight? I felt the nerves jumble in my stomach, and once more wished for someone to talk to about all of this. I had never really been on a date. This was a date, wasn’t it? Maybe not, but he was definitely flirting with me, so if anything it was like, a pre-date if such a thing existed. I could go out with him tonight, but Sunny had just got home and I knew she’d want to hang out, and in the back of my mind I think I had read in some women’s magazine that you weren’t supposed to make plans for the same day – it made you seem too available.

Can’t tonight, have plans. Tomorrow work for you? Later – around nine?

I set my phone down and got to work on the schedule, but not even two minutes later it was buzzing on my desk.

John: Sounds good. Meet you at Barleys?

I resisted the urge to squeal like a pre-teen girl.