Chapter 3 #3
I shrugged but then remembered that the camera was watching, so I pretended to write something down. “She probably knew that I would have tried to talk her out of it, so she was sneaky…or are you asking why she left us?”
He nodded and I started to answer, but then glanced down at my phone. I didn’t always respond to everyone, but I did always check when I got a notification. After all, I was the only person that Willow had to depend on now and the text I’d just received was from her.
“Where are you?” she’d asked.
“Work,” I wrote back.
I focused on Everett. “You were asking…sorry, hold on again.” My phone had whistled three more times and I looked at what she had sent now. My heart pounded as I processed it. “Oh, geez! My sister is in the hands of the police!”
“No, I didn’t get arrested,” she said when I called her. She was using the overly patient voice that I hated, the one she also adopted when she was giving me unwanted makeup tutorials. “I got detained, but they just needed to ask me questions and now I’m free to go. Can you pick me up?”
“Where are you?”
She told me the name of a small town and I shook my head as I heard it. “That’s an hour away.” It would probably take a lot longer tonight, since it had been snowing so much. “Why are you there?” I asked, and I could almost see her shrug as she answered.
“I went out with some people.”
“Friends from school?” No, it couldn’t have been. She never saw anyone from high school, not anymore.
“Can you please come get me? You know how much a rideshare is going to cost.”
I was briefly gratified that she was worried about money, but then I focused on the fact that she was correct about the cost and that also, it wasn’t likely that any driver would have gone so far to pick her up at this time of night and with the weather so bad. “Are you at a police station?”
“I’m at a bar, but I can’t stay. It’s not right since I’m underage,” she said piously, but then she told me the rest. “The cops also told me I had to get out soon and they only let me wait in here because I said that my sister was on the way. You are, right?”
I would have to go. I couldn’t let her stay there and I didn’t want to pay for a long ride, if she even could have gotten one.
But I also couldn’t afford to take off early from my job.
“I’m done in an hour,” I said. I looked at the big clock on the wall under the blinking red light of the camera.
I wasn’t supposed to be using my phone, either, and I turned away from the lens. “You’ll have to wait until then.”
“I guess I will, but drive fast,” she urged. “I’m almost out of minutes so I’m hanging up.” She did.
I looked across the reception desk to where I’d made Everett Ford stand at the door. “My sister went out,” I said.
“Why do you sound happy about that? I thought she got arrested.”
“Apparently, she was only detained.” I realized that yes, I was smiling, despite knowing that I’d have to make a two-hour trip tonight and I was already low on gas.
I’d been trying to make it until payday before filling up.
“I’ve been so worried about Willow sitting in our motel room by herself, but she went out and I think she had fun. ”
“It’s all fun until the police detain you. Why are you two in a motel room?”
“I thought I explained that I lost the house. That’s why I don’t have to worry about utility bills anymore,” I said.
“I’m not sure how it was allowed, but my mom had taken out loans and she used our home as collateral.
She really must have saved up a lot by not making any payments on anything, and she could have used that money to travel far away by now.
” With her salary and with what I’d been giving her out of mine, she would be set for a while.
“Are you being serious?”
“Yes,” I answered. “Why would you think I was joking?”
“Not joking, but just telling me a story,” he said. “You don’t seem bothered by any of this. Are you on a medication that flattens things out?”
“That’s not any of your business, but no. I have been taking a lot of over-the-counter pain relievers because I’ve been having bad headaches, but nothing besides that. I just don’t get too upset by things.”
“Really? Nothing?”
“I get nervous,” I admitted. “When one of the kids acts up in class and I have to be stern, my heart beats really hard because I’m not good at dealing with it.
I got the same way when you were having your breakdown on the floor of Woodsmen Stadium, and I had to tell you that you couldn’t go out and interact with impressionable children. ”
He had stepped back as I’d said that and the doors rolled open again, bringing in more snow. “Damn! Where’s the sensor on these? Where am I supposed to stand?”
“You can come forward about eighteen inches. I’m trying to keep you out of camera range,” I said, tilting my head to indicate the device on the wall. It was an old one and its constant whirring sound was very soothing, a problem for people who were trying to stay awake at the reception desk.
“Are you going to get your sister?” he asked.
“Yes, soon.” I checked the clock again, and the hands had moved a little. Sometimes when I was here, it seemed like they were frozen in place.
“Did you say that she’s an hour away?”
I nodded in answer, and he nodded back. “Do you want company?”
“I’m not sure who I would ask,” I told him. “Jannie has to close down the bar, and most of my old friends—”
“I meant me,” Everett said. “I’m saying that I would go with you as company.”
“You? But don’t you have better things to do?
” Maybe not, since he was still standing a few inches out of the view of the camera to talk to me, rather than going home or going out to have fun.
“I mean, won’t you have things to do tomorrow?
You guys have a game in two days. Should you be out so late? Are you sure about this?”
“We have practice tomorrow but it doesn’t matter. I’ll wait for you in my truck and we can take that to go and get her. It’s good in the snow.”
“Are you sure about this?” I asked again, and he nodded and purposefully made the doors open so that he could leave. The camera outside that was supposed to show the parking lot didn’t work but I peered as hard as I could through the darkness to try to see if he was actually out there.
I saw him again when I buttoned up the front desk for the night and put out the sign saying that reception was closed until six the next morning, which was not my shift.
He flashed his lights when I emerged from the building but it wouldn’t have been hard to find him, even with the heavy snow falling.
There were only three vehicles in the lot: one belonged to the woman in room 103, another was my little car, and the third was obviously Everett’s.
It was very lucky that he had waited for me, because his tires seemed more than capable of handling this weather, whereas mine had smoothed out after a lot of miles and were just not as good at things like stopping in the snow and ice.
His truck looked brand-new and was not the one that I’d seen overturned in a ditch a few months ago, on the day of the field trip (and the vomit, et cetera).
“Are you really sure about this?” I asked for a third time, even more doubtful, after I had crunched my way over and opened the passenger door.
“Yeah, I’m not doing much else tonight.”
Ok. I got in and gave him my sister’s exact location, but then I asked if he wanted gas money. It was a bit of a distance, after all, but he shook his head in answer and pulled out of the lot.
“Like I said, I haven’t been drinking, and I also haven’t taken anything. Not anything illegal and no prescriptions, either. There are no problems with me,” he announced.
“When people say things like that, it usually means that there definitely is a problem. Like when your agent told me, ‘There’s no reason for concern,’ and there was a big reason. You were on the carpet—”
“That’s exactly why I’m letting you know that you don’t have to worry,” he interrupted me. “The first time we met, everyone should have been concerned but not now, not anymore.”
“Is that why you wanted to drive me tonight? To prove something?”
He was following the directions that led us out of town and we went a little way before he answered. “It’s galling when you keep bringing it up. That was, by far, the shittiest day of my life.”
“I don’t mean to keep talking about it. I guess it was memorable, meeting a celebrity—”
He snorted and I kept going.
“Then getting a new shirt because…you know why, and then seeing your car accident.”
“That accident wasn’t my fault. A deer ran out into the road and I rolled the damn car when I tried to avoid hitting it,” Everett told me.
“I won’t bring it up again, not any of it,” I promised, but then I kind of did exactly that. “Was it really your shittiest day ever?”
“Everything went wrong. What else could have happened?”
Any number of things, and I named a few of those.
“You threw up, but only on me and not on your boss. You didn’t get in front of the kids and say horrible things.
You weren’t hurt when the deer caused the accident.
You didn’t get arrested or even detained, and you didn’t do anything crazy after you left Jannie’s bar that night.
A lot went wrong, but things could have been so much worse. ”
“You’re an optimist.”
I wasn’t. I was just aware of the extent to which a normal life could suddenly morph into something that you had trouble recognizing. “Also, you still have your health,” I commented. “That’s an optimistic thing to say.”
“I have a little tendinitis in my shoulder. It’s from overuse, which is funny. I’ve thrown the ball more with the Junior Woodsmen over the past few weeks than I did in three seasons with the other team.”
“The real Woodsmen,” I stated.