I had come in through the office entrance, so I had completely forgotten about Elvis—a flashy blue and gold Macaw with an extensive vocabulary. He had belonged to Mr. Morrow, the man who owned the garage before Michael. Mr. Morrow kept the bird in his body shop, and when he died and left the shop to Michael, his children re-homed the bird.
Elvis slowly took a turn for the worse, becoming lethargic and pulling out his own feathers. This didn't stop until two years later when Mr. Morrow's son, Buddy, called Michael and asked if he would be interested in letting him live in the garage again. Michael agreed, and here we were, twenty something years later with Elvis still at the shop.
"He's the shop mascot, isn't he?" I said as we walked more fully into the garage.
He smiled at my question, and then I watched as his smile broadened at whatever caught his attention. "I knew you were here," Uncle Michael said.
I glanced that way to find Jesse Bishop standing there, smiling at both of us. He was dressed so nicely that I knew he wasn't there to work. He looked so handsome that I instinctually straightened my posture. Jesse was just like his dad when it came to a love for building motorcycles, and he was usually up to his elbows in grime and grease. I could hardly look at him when he was all clean-shaven and sharp-looking.
"What's she doing here?" Jesse asked, talking to his dad but staring straight at me.
"She's gonna be working here for a couple of months."
"Working here?" Jesse asked, surprised.
"Office stuff," I said. "Marketing research. Your dad's letting me try out some ideas."
Jesse shrugged a little as he crossed the space between us, reaching out to give me a casual hug. We were on the side of the garage with most of the workspace expanding out toward my left. There were a couple of people on the other side of the room, but they were too far from us to hear what we were saying. Elvis has become preoccupied with something near his perch and was now bobbing up and down and looking in the other direction.
"I can't believe my dad finally talked you into coming to work for us," Jesse said, looking at me with his arm still around my shoulder.
"Looks like you're all spiffied-up," I said, breathing in his clean, masculine smell as he hugged me.
"I even scrubbed under my fingernails," he said. He thrust his big hand in front of me as if I should see for myself. I reached out for it and gave it a thorough inspection, turning it over and noticing that his nails were indeed grease free.
I tried my best to ignore the nervous feeling I got from touching him. I glanced up, and we made eye contact. He had light green eyes—the most beautiful eyes that had ever been put in a human being. Jesse's eyes. I was convinced he had the only pair like them in the world. He wasn't as tall as my boyfriend, but he was thicker.
I still had his hand in mine when Elvis made the sound of a doorbell and said, "Come on in!" indicating that someone had just come in the main door.
"Everyone else gets a nice greeting," Uncle Michael said with a smile. "Except for Jesse, he gets sirens. Uncle Max taught him that."
I was laughing at that and hadn't even seen who came in the door, but then I heard a woman's voice.
"I thought you were just coming in to get your glasses," she said. I turned to find Tammy Gwinn standing there, looking straight at Jesse with a wide-eyed, in-a-hurry expression. "Where are your glasses?" she asked.
"Hey Tammy," Uncle Michael said.
"Hi," she said, smiling at Michael and then quickly at me before looking at Jesse again. When she first glanced at me, she looked annoyed by my proximity to Jesse, but she recognized me quickly. We had met each other a few times before, and she knew I was Jesse's cousin.
"We've got a wedding to go to," she said with another rushed expression aimed at Jesse.
He walked over to his workstation in search of his glasses. "She's a bridesmaid," he said as if to explain his girlfriend's fussy behavior. He took a pair of wire-framed glasses off of the counter and put them on his face, adjusting them before focusing on us again. Tammy had come into the room by this time, and I turned to find her standing in her lavender colored, satin, floor-length dress. Her blonde hair was teased to perfection and sealed to an indestructible finish with about a can of hairspray. I knew her as Jesse's girlfriend, but I also knew her as the head cheerleader at UM. I went to all of Barrett's games, so I saw Tammy and her cheerleading squad on a regular basis.
"I got some dust in my eyes from the polisher today, and my contacts were bothering me," Jesse explained, coming to stand near us again.
"You ready?" Tammy asked with no regard to his comment.
He nodded and went to stand next to her.
My heart broke. I wasn't a woman-hater, but I did not like Tammy Gwinn, and I didn't want my cousin to like her either. I didn't know what he saw in her other than a perfect exterior.
"I'm glad you're coming to work here," Jesse said, smiling at me as he started to pull his girlfriend toward the door.
"You're coming to work here?" Tammy asked, glancing at me with newfound curiosity.
"Short term," I said with a shrug. "Office stuff. Marketing analysis."
"Oh, that's right, you're a math and science person."
A nerd. That's what she was thinking. I could see it in her condescending smile. Everyone else in the room thought her smile was totally genuine, so I pretended I thought so too and gave her a fake but genuine-looking one of my own.
"We should get together sometime," she said, surprising me. "You're dating Barrett Hall, right?"
I nodded and she smiled. "I love Barrett," she said. "I hang out with all those guys." She glanced at Jesse. "We should all get together sometime."
Jesse shrugged at me, and I gave him a skeptical expression, which I changed to a smile as soon as Tammy faced me again.
"Sure," I said. "Maybe once the season is over and I get through my finals."
She smiled and shrugged before motioning to Jesse.
"Bye, y'all," Jesse said.
"Bye y'all!" Elvis called loudly. "Y'all come back!" he added as they let the door close behind them.
I smiled at my uncle and shook my head at the bird. I wanted to say something about how annoying Tammy was now that they were gone, but Uncle Michael was smiling and didn't seem annoyed at all, so I kept my comments to myself.
"Thank you," I said, hugging him. "I'm excited to get started."
He squeezed me tightly. "Thank you, Rose. I'm excited, too."
He held open the door for me, not knowing that I had to walk around the building to get to my car.
***
My roommate, Rebecca, was sitting in the living room when I got back to my apartment.
"Barrett called," was the first thing she said when I walked in the door. "How'd it go?" she added as I kicked off my shoes.
I smiled. "Good. I got the job."
She clapped and whooped for me, and I was still smiling about that as I crossed to the kitchen. Our small apartment had a peninsula separating the kitchen and living room, and I sat on one of the barstools, looking at Rebecca.
"And he's gonna pay me," I said.
"He is? How much?" she asked.
"Commission, I think. He was saying something about me taking a percentage, but I don't know. We'll have to talk about it." I stared at the wall behind Rebecca and said the words in a slow, dazed tone because I could not stop thinking about Jesse. I thought I had gotten the encounter with him out of my head, and I felt annoyed and agitated with myself that my thoughts kept going back to him.
I breathed a sigh, reminding myself to focus on the conversation with Rebecca, and she took it as a sigh of disappointment. She looked at me with a perplexed expression. "What's wrong? I thought you'd be happy about getting paid. I thought you were planning on doing it for free."
I smiled. "Nothing," I said. "It wasn't that. It was just a tired sigh." I swiveled in the barstool. "I'm going to take a shower."
"Aren't you gonna call Barrett back?" she asked.
I glanced at the kitchen phone that was hanging on the wall right next to us. "I think I'm gonna take a shower first," I said. "If he calls again, just tell him I'll call him back in a few minutes."
"You okay?" she asked as I began walking backward toward my bedroom.
"Yeah."
"Do you still want to go see a movie?"
"Yeah, why?" I asked.
She shrugged. "I don't know I just thought you looked upset for a second."
I shook my head. "Just tired," I said.
I didn't even need a shower. In fact, I was making more work for myself by taking one. I had plans to go to the movies with Rebecca that evening, and a shower just meant that I'd have to get dressed again. I didn't, however, see how I had any other choice. I had to do it in order to shock the thought of Jesse Bishop right out of my head.
When I was a little girl, I had a friend named Phillip who told me that when I got sad about something, all I had to do was take an ice cold shower, and it would wash the feelings away. The colder the shower, the better the affects. I was generally a happy person, but I had taken anywhere from thirty to fifty of these ice cold showers in my lifetime. None of them had ever fully worked to get rid of whatever was bothering me, but I still did it every time I felt overwhelmed just in case.
I started the shower running warm water just to ease myself into it. I stepped in and let the water run all over my face and hair, feeling like I wanted to cry over my lot in life but not letting myself. Technically, I had a productive day with the job and everything, but Jesse.
Jesse.
I knew there was a chance that I would run into him once I started working at my uncle's place, but I certainly hadn't expected to see him today.
He was the most wonderful man—the man of my dreams. He was smart, handsome, rugged, and athletic, and yet humble and tender.
Jesse Bishop.
He was all of these perfect, wonderful things, but he was also…
my first cousin.
I felt miserable as I let the water wash over me. I had been madly in love with Jesse for most of my life, and I hated myself for it.
A flood of memories hit me. The first was a conversation I had with a girl named Emily when I was in the second grade. She was older than me and had been cluing me in on the idea of boys and relationships and crushes. She asked me if I liked any boy, and I told her I liked Jesse, at which point she grimaced and told me that was disgusting and a first-class sin to marry your cousin or to even be attracted to him in any way. She gave me a lecture about it and told me I could never, ever think that way about Jesse again. She said she could think that way about Jesse because she wasn't his cousin, but I clearly couldn't.
Emily scared me to death that day, but she assured me she wouldn't tell anybody about what I said, which made me feel a little better. I still lost sleep over it.
I put Jesse out of my mind for years after that. I was around him all the time, but I had assured myself that I could never have feelings for him.
I learned somewhere during my adolescence that he wasn't really blood related to me at all, but that didn't matter since everyone (including Jesse) just thought of us as cousins.
I was able to keep my distance and keep him out of my thoughts until one dreaded night when I was fifteen.