Nodding, Gus went to sit back down in his chair and finish his sandwich. When it was done, he washed up, put on gloves, and came over to prepare me for the new ink. As he did, he worked mostly in silence, music coming from a voice assistant speaker in the corner. It let my mind wander.
To Rebecca.
She was a really sweet girl and really cute. but she was young. Before that day, that thought had always stopped me. But while the tattoo pen buzzed to life and Gus began drawing on my skin, I found that I couldn’t keep her off my mind.
6
REBECCA
My mind was all over the place come Sunday. I couldn’t seem to get my thoughts straight or focus on anything I was supposed to be doing. Something as simple as making a cup of coffee baffled me, and I found myself just kind of standing at the machine, staring at it like I hadn’t used it about a thousand times in my life.
Normally, I loved being at the tattoo shop. I’d started working there on the weekends a few months before after taking occasional shifts during the week. Once Molly took over as the manager, she started moving schedules around and giving the older waitresses the weekend shifts.
It seemed like a sign that it was time to make the change. Though a bit frustrating at first, I didn’t really mind. Being at the tattoo shop on weekend evenings gave me much more experience with the atmosphere and a chance to learn more. It felt like an important step toward accomplishing my real goal of one day being an artist who worked here full-time.
I’d always called Gus my uncle, and when I was little, I didn’t know any difference between him and the uncles my friends at school talked about. It didn’t occur to me that he wasn’t actually related to me by blood and that he wasn’t my father’s brother but his best friend. When I did figure that out, it didn’t change anything for me. Gus was my uncle, no matter what anyone thought.
That came to mean even more to me after my parents died. Suddenly, he was all I had left in the world. And that was a terrifying realization. At first, it was only the shock of finding out that I’d gone from having two amazing, loving parents I was very close to in the morning to being an orphan. That hit me hard like I’d run headfirst into a solid brick wall. I was moving through my life, but losing my parents had crushed me, making it impossible for me to keep moving forward in the same way I had been.
But after a little while, that shock eased enough for me to really start evaluating my reality and coming to terms with what life was going to look like for me now. That was when it sank in. I was alone.
I had been an only child who loved the fact that I had all my parents to myself. And I was the light of their world. The three of us were a unit, a whole family in one little group.
Now I was just a woman with no siblings. The three of us had gone down to one of me.
I didn’t know my grandparents and never had. One set because they didn’t want anything to do with my parents after they married, and the other set had passed away before I was born. Although I never felt like I was missing out on anything or that my life was deprived in any way because I didn’t have them.
Now I didn’t have any relatives. I no longer had an anchor to my origins or anyone who shared a link with my parents. The entire family was reduced just to me.
It was a sobering feeling. My world changed in a fundamental way that could never be reversed, and I had to figure out who I was and what I was going to do in this new path.
This was where Gus became so vitally important to me. He’d always been around. He was a part of so many of my important childhood memories. Birthdays, holidays, even some vacations. He was there. I’d turned my back on him somewhat right after my parents died, feeling like this was a grief that was completely and uniquely mine, and that no one else should try to be a part of it.
I didn’t want anyone saying they knew how I felt or that they were grieving along with me. I was their only child. I was the one who lived with them and went through all the challenges and triumphs right there beside them. I was the one who now had to face the empty house and the clothes that still smelled like my mother’s perfume and my father’s pipe tobacco.