Sheltered (Yours to Keep #2)

1. Lori

Lori

There are two kinds of small towns. In one, nobody really cares about anybody.

In the other, everybody knows everybody to a degree that should probably be illegal.

The Hill Country Precinct sits at the edge of a town small enough to cross end to end in sixty minutes, and we are firmly the second kind

Which makes it faintly humiliating that I sit in the County Sheriff's Office on a Tuesday afternoon in November, explaining how a town this small misplaces an entire man.

Autumn in the Hill Country is supposed to be gold and green, the live oaks holding their leaves while the rest of the country burns off into brown. Not in my book.

"Hey, Lori." The deputy at the front desk says my name before I give it. He half-rises, nodding. "Sheriff's expecting you. Go on through."

That is the trouble with a town this size. You do not have to tell anybody who you are. They know you already. Or, they have been forming their narrative of you for years.

Sheriff Coleman is fifty-something, built like a man who has spent most of his decades in this chair. A hat on the desk beside his keyboard. The worn-in patience of someone who has run a small town through two-and-a-half decades of small-town crises.

"Miss Jones."

"Sheriff."

"Have a seat. We'll go through it once more. Just to make sure." He gestures me into the seat across from him without standing up. His chair squeaks when he leans forward.

I sit forward on the edge of the chair. The chair is sized for a man twice my width and sitting back would mean disappearing into it, which is not the impression I am trying to give.

He runs the name through his system. Ryan Carter. He runs it twice. He turns the monitor a few degrees so I can see what he sees, which is nothing. Same result both times.

"No driver's license under that name. No record. Address pings back to a P.O. Box that has been closed for eight months."

"That's about what I figured." My breath leaves me in a long, thin stream.

"You figured?"

Yes, Sheriff. I wanted to say. Since the Sunday in August I came home from a double shift and found my apartment exactly as I had left it, minus a duffel bag, an ex-boyfriend, and $12,460 in a credit-union savings account I built one tip jar at a time.

"The crumbs were always there." I keep my eyes on the screen. It is easier than looking at his face. "I just refuse to deal with them."

He gives me the small, sad smile a man gives you when he would like to break news gently and knows there is no kind version of it. It makes the whole thing worse. I look at the dust on the metal desk instead.

"Lori." He uses my first name like an apology. "I'll be straight with you. Some of them play a long game. By the time someone comes in to file, there's usually nothing left to find. Not much I can do about a name that might not even be a real one."

I keep my face steady for both our sakes and run the numbers in my head. Nearly a year in a one-bedroom over the hardware store on Main. Seven years of double shifts, $12,460 gone, $41 left. Rent due in three days.

I sign my name twice where Coleman points. The signature comes out steadier than I have any right to. He shakes my hand. His palm is dry and unrushed. Like this sort of thing happens all the time to small-town girls who gambled on love and got an empty bank account instead.

"You take care, now. You let me know if anything else surfaces.” He gives me the small polite smile again.

Nothing else is going to surface. We both know it. I take it because I’m not going to be the woman who makes a small-town sheriff feel worse about a case he cannot close.

The air on the precinct steps is sharper since I go in. Somebody a few blocks over burns a brush pile and the woodsmoke lays out flat across the whole valley. It gets like this in November.

A man across the street loads a fifty-pound sack of feed into the bed of his truck with one hand. He sees me and tips his chin. I tip mine back. Automatic. The small civility in a small town you get good at without trying, no matter what kind of shit day you are having.

I stand on the step longer than I need to. My phone is heavy in my pocket. I know who I want to call. I know what voicemail I will get when I do.

I try again anyway.

Four rings. Ella's voicemail. The recorded version of my sister sounds breezy and brisk, because she made the greeting before the move, before Tyler, before she became a stranger.

"It's me again." I keep walking, eyes on the sidewalk, because if I stand still on the precinct steps for another second I’m afraid I might do something embarrassing. "I — I was just, uh, checking in. Hope the baby's letting you sleep. Call me when you can."

I hang up before I can say anything I would regret.

What I really want to say is: Hey, Ella. Are you all right? I haven't heard from you in weeks. Is something wrong? Is the baby okay? I am here, please call me.

But I do not have the right to push. Pushing is what older sisters do for younger sisters, and I’m the younger one. I know my place at the door.

The baby should be around three weeks old now. I haven't met her. Ella hasn't picked up or returned my calls.

I walk to Jason's diner twenty minutes ahead of a six-hour shift I am financially incapable of skipping, to get out of my head and get my hands busy.

The bell over the diner door does its small bright sound. Jason looks up from the register. He sees me, and goes back to running his receipts.

"Lori."

"Hey, Jason. Uh, how’s it going?"

"Before you ask." He does not look up. "I can't advance. Books are thin."

"I wasn't going to ask." I hang my coat on the hook by the kitchen pass.

"You were thinking about it."

Honestly? Yes, I was.

He makes a note in his book and stores the receipt in his pile. He then slides a plate across to my elbow without quite looking at me. Meatloaf. The Tuesday special. A roll on the side.

"On me. Take the back booth. You look dead on your feet."

"I haven't even started yet."

"I'm pre-loading you. Eat."

Jason is mid-fifties, gruff in the way of a man who has been managing teenage waitresses and Friday-night drunks for three decades and stopped explaining his attitude. He denies that he is kind, and he argues with you about it. I do not last here this long if I believe otherwise.

I do not say thank you because I know Jason will not accept it. I try.

I take the plate to the back booth. I sit down next to the window that gives me the light of the afternoon. I know the back booth like the back of my hand. I patch the upholstery twice with electrical tape. The Formica is worn pale in two places from years of elbows.

I catch my own reflection in the chrome of the napkin dispenser and immediately regret it. I wear no makeup since Ryan, a small refusal three months ago that somehow becomes a way of life . My bun is scraped tight at the nape of my neck, bags under my blue eyes.

It is the worst I look in a year, on the worst day of it.

I quit looking. There is nothing useful about wallowing in my own reflection.

The dinner rush hits at five-thirty and runs until 7 p.m. Somewhere in there I forget, for whole minutes at a stretch, about the precinct and Ryan and the $41.

The teens at table six want extra napkins, all of them, urgently.

The couple from out of town wants me to recommend something.

The regular at the counter needs to be told about the cobbler.

There is a particular grace in being needed all at once by people.

I love this part. I do not admit it on a different day.

By 7:50 p.m., Tonia — my shift-mate — wipes down four tables, and I pick up the dirty plates and glasses back to the kitchen.

There are side-works I should be doing, but I need to sit down after the rush we’ve just been through. So I bring a bunch of empty ketchup bottles to one of the back booths to refill. I can do that sitting down.

I pour the last of the coffee into my mug, then bring it to my booth along with a tray of sugar cubes, a cream bottle, and a roll. I sit down with a sigh that feels like setting down a ten-pound weight.

My ambition for the next twelve minutes is small and specific: be invisible.

This is roughly the moment the bell over the door rings.

I do not look up right away. The bell rings all night and Tonia covers it for the next quarter of an hour.

I take a bite of the roll. Then I look up.

Okay.

The man who walks in does not match the hour.

He is tall enough that I see his hat against the doorframe before I see his face.

Broad enough through the shoulders that the little diner reorganizes itself around him.

He pulls the hat off without thinking. Brown felt.

Beat up. I have not bought a new one in a long time.

Dark wavy hair underneath, pushed to one side from where the felt has been sitting on it.

A few days of stubble. Dark eyes. A small white scar at the corner of his upper lip that does something to the line of his mouth and draws the eye to a face otherwise put together with more luck than the average. An easy smile. A dimple on one side.

Beautiful.

And also, none of my business.

I look back at my tray. My pulse goes somewhere it has no business going. That is approximately the maximum amount of looking I have in me on a Tuesday.

He takes the stool two down from my booth and orders coffee at 8 p.m., like a man with nowhere he has to be. His voice is low and easy and Texan, and it lands somewhere below my ribs. He turns half toward me with ease.

"Should I order the meatloaf," he says, deadpan, to Jason, but he takes a glance at me, "or is that short for a one-way ticket to the toilet?"

It is, objectively, a terrible joke.

I laugh before I can stop it. A real one. It gets out before anyone can catch it on the way past, surprised out of me by a handsome cowboy in a hat, in a regular diner, in a town the size of a postage stamp.