2. Sunnie
SUNNIE
Imade it about a quarter mile up the road before I heard the truck.
I’d been walking with my book against my hip and a half-empty thought in my head about whether I’d done something back there, or only imagined I had. Then there was an engine behind me, slowing.
I didn’t turn around. I kept walking. The truck rolled up next to me and matched my pace.
“You want that ride yet?” Ross said through the open passenger window.
It was the man from earlier. The one who’d looked at me like I mattered. Nobody had ever looked at me like that before.
“You’re going the wrong direction.”
“I know.”
I stopped moving.
So did the truck.
I looked at him through the window. He had one wrist over the top of the steering wheel and he wasn’t smiling, exactly, but the corner of his mouth hinted at a smile.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Town.”
“Why?”
“Lunch.”
“You eat lunch at this hour?”
“Some days.”
It was 11:30. He hadn’t been going to lunch. He’d been going back to the outfitter, and he’d changed his mind. Now, he was telling me he was going to lunch, which we both knew was a lie, and he wasn’t even bothering to pretend it wasn’t.
I should walk back to the cabin. I should tell him no, thank you, and turn around, and put my book back in my lap. I should go back to being the woman who watched things happen to other people.
I opened the passenger door and got in.
The cab smelled like coffee and the faint chemical edge of river gear. He pulled forward without asking where I wanted to go.
“The Soda Jerk,” he said. “That work?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Diner. Best burgers in town. Also the only burgers in town.”
“Fine.”
He glanced over at me. “You don’t talk a lot.”
“I’m talking.”
“Sometimes.”
I turned my face toward the window so he couldn’t see the smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. The river was on his side of the truck, running flat and slow through the trees. On my side, just road and trees and the white line. I watched the white line.
I’d never been the woman in the passenger seat of a man’s truck before. I’d been the woman in the back of a friend’s car. I’d been the woman driving herself. But I’d never been the woman a man went the wrong way for.
It was making it hard to think.
“How long have you been at the cabin?” he asked.
“Few days.”
“How long are you here?”
“Few more.”
He nodded. I watched it out of the corner of my eye. He had the kind of jaw that did something even when he was just nodding.
“What do you do back home?” he asked.
“I’m a freelance editor.”
“What does that mean?”
“I clean up writing for businesses. Websites, marketing copy, content platforms. They send me a mess and I send back something that doesn’t sound like a robot wrote it.”
“You good at it?”
“Yes.”
He glanced at me. “That was fast.”
“I’m good at it.”
The corner of his mouth twitched again.
He drove. The road narrowed and the trees closed in over the top of the truck, forming the green tunnel I’d come up through four days ago in Suri’s sedan, when I’d been a woman on a vacation I hadn’t quite agreed to.
Now I was a woman in a stranger’s truck, and the same trees looked different.
The road opened. The Tudor-style inn and the pancake house appeared on the right, the way I remembered them—long porches, dormer windows, carved wooden signs.
Across the street, the low building with the flickering neon ‘EATS’ sign was apparently the diner.
I hadn’t known that the first time through. I’d assumed it was closed.
“That’s it?” I said.
“That’s it.”
“It says ‘EATS’.”
“Used to say ‘SODA JERK’ in the other window. Sign broke maybe six years ago. Nobody’s fixed it.”
He pulled the truck into a gravel lot between the diner and the feed store I’d noticed when we drove past on our way into town—the one with the chicken feed sign in the window. He killed the engine.
I reached for the door.
“Wait,” he said.
I waited.
He got out, came around, and opened my door before I could. I’d seen men do this in movies. No one had ever done it for me.
I stepped down out of the truck. He was close. Closer than the door required. I could see the tattoos on his arms in full daylight now—black ink, dense, running down the right and across part of the left. I didn’t look long enough to read any of them.
He stepped back. “After you.”
I walked in front of him. I felt his eyes on me the whole way to the door, and I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to stop looking or if I wanted him to never stop.
The diner was about a third full. The man behind the counter looked up when we walked in. He was big—broad shoulders, the kind of arms that stretched the sleeves of his shirt—and he had a face that didn’t change when he saw Ross. He just nodded once.
Ross nodded back.
The man looked at me. Held it a second longer than was casual. Then he went back to the order he was running through on a ticket pad. The only thing that changed about him was that I felt fairly certain he was now tracking us in his peripheral vision.
“Booth okay?” Ross asked me.
“Sure.”
He picked a booth in the back corner. I slid in across from him. He handed me a menu. I opened it without reading it.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Why?”
“You went quiet.”
“I’m always quiet.”
“Quieter.”
I set the menu down. “I don’t usually do this.”
“Do what?”
“Get in trucks. Go to diners. Any of this.”
He didn’t say anything to that. He just looked at me across the table with that steady look he had—the one that didn’t ask for an explanation but made me want to give him one anyway.
“I came on this trip with my friend Suri,” I said. “I read on the couch the first three days. I went on a walk this morning because I couldn’t read for a fourth day. That’s the whole story. I’m not a person things happen to.”
“You walked the wrong way,” he said.
“What?”
“This morning. You said you walked the wrong way. That wasn’t nothing.”
“It was a wrong turn.”
“Was it?”
I didn’t answer.
A waitress came up with a coffee pot and a smile that was a little too bright. She glanced at Ross with a quick lift of her eyebrows that meant something between who’s this and finally, and then she turned the wattage on me.
“What can I get y’all? I’m Tara, by the way.”
“Cheeseburger,” Ross said. “Fries. Sweet tea.”
“Same,” I said. “Water.”
Tara nodded and left. I watched her go and noted that she hadn’t asked how I wanted the burger or the fries. Like she already knew the answer was whatever Ross was having.
That had to mean something. I just couldn’t decide what.
“Has she known you a long time?” I asked.
“Year.”
“That’s not a long time.”
“It is in a town this size.”
The man from the counter came over with our drinks. He set them down without spilling either one and put his hands flat on the table, just for a second, like he was deciding something.
“Ross,” he said.
“West.”
“You don’t come in for lunch.”
“Today I did.”
West looked at me. “I don’t think I’ve met you.”
“Sunnie Jensen. I’m staying up at the Alderman cabin with a friend.”
He nodded. He didn’t smile, exactly. His face softened by maybe one degree.
“West Calloway. I own the place.” He glanced at Ross. “Your usual?”
“Already ordered.”
“Both of you?”
“Both.”
West’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile. “All right then.”
He went back to the counter.
I looked at Ross.
“What was that?” I asked.
“That was West.”
“Why did he come over?”
“He likes to know who’s in town.”
“It felt like he was vetting me.”
“He was.”
“For what?”
Ross picked up his sweet tea, took a long pull, and set it down again. “For me.”
I gaped at him.
He didn’t look away.
I picked up my water and drank it slowly to give my face something to do, because if I didn’t I was going to say something I couldn’t take back. He watched me drink. He didn’t pretend not to.
The waitress came back with our burgers and set them down with a flourish. I looked at mine and realized I wasn’t hungry. I picked up a fry anyway.
“How do you know Kyron?” I asked, because I had to say something.
“We’re partners. A group of us owns the outfitter.”
“All of you live here?”
“Now we do.”
“What does that mean?”
He picked up his burger and set it down again without taking a bite.
“I haven’t lived anywhere long in my life.
Military family growing up. Then I moved around for work.
I came through Wildwood Valley a couple of years ago for a construction job that didn’t work out, and Bishop—that’s another partner—offered me a position as a guide.
I took it. Partnership came after that.”
“How long have you been a partner?”
“A year.”
“Do you like it?”
He thought about that longer than I expected him to. “Yes,” he finally said.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure today.”
It was the most honest thing anyone had said to me in a long time. I didn’t know him at all, and I couldn’t figure out why he was being honest with me. I couldn’t figure out why I wanted to be honest back.
“I haven’t done anything I wanted to do in two years,” I said.
He went still.
“I went to college because my mother wanted me to,” I said.
“I took on every client that came my way the first year because I didn’t know how to say no.
I told my landlord last month I’d renew my lease because he asked.
I came on this trip because Suri asked me to. I don’t actually know what I want.”
“You wanted to walk this morning,” he said.
“I wanted to get off the couch.”
“That’s wanting something.”
I stared at him.
He picked up his burger again and took a bite. He chewed. He swallowed.
“What time are you supposed to be back at the cabin?” he asked.
“There’s no ‘supposed to.’ Suri’s on the river.”
“All afternoon?”
“Probably.”
He set the burger down. “I’d like to show you something. After lunch. If you’ve got the time.”
“What is it?”
“A spot on the river. Not on a trip route. Just somewhere I go.”
I looked at him across the table. I watched the way he was holding very still, like a man who’d decided to ask something and was patiently waiting.
I’d spent years saying no to things.
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded once.
We ate.