2. Lori
Lori
"I know you," says a voice at hip height, out of nowhere.
I look down.
She looks around six years old. Maybe a tall five.
She is wearing a sequined unicorn T-shirt that has changed from personal beef with the overhead fluorescents, denim shorts pulled over leggings because apparently nobody explained Texas November to her, and the most aggressive pair of rainbow cowgirl boots I have ever seen on a human her size.
She’s got one front tooth missing. She tilts her head, serious as a tiny inspector who came a long way to ask a few questions.
"You're the lady in the picture on my daddy's phone," she says, pointing.
The cornflakes box in my hands suddenly weighs four pounds.
"The one with the pretty hair down. He looks at it,” she continues.
"He — what?"
She shrugs. "He thinks I don't see. I see everything."
Three days since Tuesday night. Three days of telling myself the cowboy at the diner is a hallucination. The hat. The eyes. The moment he takes my picture and says yeah, that's the one.
I have done excellent work since then, frankly.
I stop looking at the door at Jason's, no longer expecting to see him again.
I stop flushing when Tonia mentions any first name beginning with the letter C.
I am, more or less, back to being a woman who can stand in front of a wall of oats without recalling, in any unwelcome detail, the small white scar at the corner of a stranger's lip.
Or I am. Until ninety seconds ago.
"What's your name, sweetie?" I ask the kid.
"Cadie. With a C, not a K. I'm six." She holds up six fingers as supporting evidence.
Cadie. Six. The kid he is answering for. The one he calls Pumpkin on the phone.
A cart wheel squeaks behind her.
Carson rounds the endcap.
Same beat-up brown felt hat pushed back on his head, like a man who comes in for milk and is already over the errand. Same jeans. Same day-old stubble. He sees Cadie first. There you are, writing itself across his face. Then he sees me.
The cart rolls one inch. Stops.
The heat on my neck is instant, like he reaches across the aisle and presses his palm on it.
He watches the color climb with the same not-quite-smile he wears at the counter last Tuesday, except this time he looks a little caught himself.
His kid just sells him out. We are both adults here. We both know.
"Hi," he says.
That's it. Hi. Like he is also a little out of breath in his own quiet internal way.
“Daddy, she's the lady on your phone, right?”
Daddy. I will think about that later.
"Cadie —" He shifts his weight onto the cart.
"What?"
"You can’t just say that." He takes a glance at me.
Cadie, unrepentant, looks me up and down like she has already decided what I am to her.
"Your bun is the prettiest one I've ever seen," she says.
“Aw, thank you.”
My hand goes to my bun before I have a vote in the matter. It is up today, scraped tight, because I do not wash my hair this morning and am not anticipating, you know, this. Carson's eyes follow my hand and stay half a second too long.
"Kid's got an eye," he says, a light eyebrow lifted. Like a challenge.
He thumbs a box of frosted somethings back onto the shelf, one-handed. The leather ring on his right hand catches the light. It is not a wedding band; I check, and hate that I check — his present tense for his daughter and past tense for nobody else is its own answer to the question I do not ask
He looks at me again.
"Don't come into this part of town much," he says, "which is starting to look like a planning error on my part."
I take the cornflakes box I have been clutching like a shield and set it in my basket as though that was the plan all along.
"This is the part where you tell me your name," he says.
"I have a feeling you already know it," I say. "Small-town quirk."
"I know what your name tag says when you're working." Same low, even register. "That's not the same as you giving it to me."
It is my turn to arch a brow. He waits for me out. His daughter watches the volley like a small umpire with a sequined unicorn on her shirt.
"For three days I've been telling my kid the lady from Jason's is real and not a hallucination," he says, quieter. "Come on, blue eyes. Gimme your name."
I tilt my head. "Earn it."
He considers me under the fluorescent lights. Then he walks toward me.
When he speaks again, he pitches it for me. Low enough Cadie misses it. Low enough I feel it at the base of my throat.
"You've got a mouth on you in the cereal aisle.
And you blush like a woman who hasn't been looked at properly in a long time, and the second I look at you a beat too long it climbs your neck and turns you pink to your ears and I can't think about anything else.
Three days hasn't made it any less of a problem. "
My pulse drops between my legs without permission. Three months untouched, maybe more, and a man in a hat tells me, in a grocery store, in the middle of his Saturday errands, that he thinks about me.
"Your name. Please."
The word please undoes something I spend four days putting back together.
"Lori," I hear myself say. "Lori Jones."
He repeats it once. Quietly. Testing how the name feels in his mouth. "Lori."
I feel it from the base of my throat to the soles of my feet.
"So," he says, easy. "About that planning error. Are you doing anything Friday night?"
I open my mouth to say no. I have the speech queued. I can't afford it. I do not have the energy in my body for whatever a man like you would expect after dinner.
"Carson, listen. I'm not really in a place to —"
"Dinner," he says, mild and immediate, like he sees the speech coming and is moving it off the table before I have to deliver it. "I feed you. You let me. That's the whole offer."
"I don't —"
"One dinner. Anywhere you say. I'll pick you up at 7 p.m. If you hate it, I drive you home at 8:15 p.m., no hard feelings, you never see me again." He tilts his head. "Anyone could survive 8:15 p.m., Miss Jones." Miss Jones travels down my spine, slow and deliberate.
It is a beg dressed as a shrug. He lays the exits out in advance. He gives me the door before I have to ask for it, and the laying out is what gets to me.
I open my mouth to say no anyway.
But Cadie tugs my sleeve. Both hands. I forgot she was even there.
"He LIKES you," she stage-whispers.
Carson closes his eyes for one full second. "Cadie."
"What? It's true!" She looks up at me with the absolute authority of a six-year-old. "He looks at his phone ALL the time. And he made me bacon TWO TIMES. Bacon is for Christmas. He never does it."
"Cadie."
"What? It's TRUE."
Carson drags a hand down his face. Looks at me. Concedes.
"The bacon part is true," he says.
A laugh bubbles up out of me before I can muscle it back. Louder than Tuesday. Just as surprised by itself.
"Okay," I hear myself say, still smiling. "One. One date."
"I'll take it," he says, low and quick, like he is catching the yes before I can think better of it.
Cadie's head snaps up. Round, bright eyes. "Can I come? PLEEEASE, Daddy, CAN I?"
And I laugh.
I laugh so hard a tear slides loose before I can catch it, and then another, because here, in the cereal aisle of Knippa's Grocer at quarter to ten on a Saturday morning, a six-year-old in rainbow boots has just invites herself to my first date since Ryan robs me blind, and her father is watching me come undone over store-brand cornflakes like he does not mind one bit.
I press the back of my wrist to my eye, still laughing.
"Oh, honey, no," Carson says to his daughter, but he is watching me laugh like he is enjoying himself. "Grown-up dinner."
"But —"
"Cadie."
I take a breath. I do not, exactly, stop smiling.
"She can come, Carson," I say. The words, and his name, leave my mouth ahead of any opinion I have about saying them. "I don't mind. Honestly. I'd like that."
Carson looks back at me.
He was not expecting that. His name in my mouth. Me agreeing to take his six-year-old on our date. The surprise sits clear on his face for a half-second before he tries to put it away.
"See!" Cadie says. "I like her. And she wants me there."
"You do. And she does," he agrees, letting out a small breath. "I'm outvoted."
He thinks it over for a few more beats, then turns to his daughter. "All right, then. Now go pick a yogurt. Aisle four."
"YESSSSS!" Cadie takes the win and goes. Rainbow boots squeak against the floor. One hand trailing along a shelf. She goes around the endcap.
Carson watches her go. He turns back, the cart between us, quieter now. The low, even register from Tuesday is back.
"7 p.m. on Friday. Wear whatever you want." His eyes drop once to my mouth and come back up. "I will make you not regret saying yes."
The drop is half a second, and it’s enough.
Heat sits low in my belly. Specific. Contained. Undeniable. We do not even shaken hands, and my body is already keeping tabs.
"Friday." I clear my throat. "Seven."
He nods once. There is that dastardly dimple. “I'll see you then, Lori."
Then he wheels the cart toward aisle four. Toward his daughter.
I stand in the cereal aisle with a date on Friday that I have already start building the case to cancel, with the back of my neck does not even pretend to cool down. My pulse takes a full minute to come back to normal..
By the time I am at the register, the case is half-written.
Liv, the one who works the register, who has known me since I was in pigtails, slides a bouquet of cream and yellow roses across the counter at me.
"Tall fella left these for you, hon."
A small white calling card is tucked between two blooms.
CARSON WEST, FIREFIGHTER.
A station address. A cell phone number written in pencil on the back, slightly slanted.
I do not have the bandwidth to react to this in public.
I tuck the card into my back pocket and bag my groceries.
Through the sliding doors, I see them on their way out — Cadie walking backward, both hands waving, bumping into her dad.
Carson rights her without looking. One last look back through the doors at me he doesn’t pretend he didn’t take.
The six days between Saturday and Friday do not pass quickly.
I work the lunch shifts, and take extra shifts to keep me afloat.
While I wipe tables, I draft and redraft the calm reasonable text I am going to send Carson on Friday afternoon to cancel.
The roses on my kitchen counter have wilted.
My resolve wilts with them. The flowers are still pretty, though.
Hey. I'm really sorry. Something came up.
Hey. I think I made a mistake.
Hey. I'm not in a place where I can do this.
I delete every one before it leaves my drafts.
Ryan sits at the edge of every thought like the killjoy he is.
He is in every wall of refusals I build about Friday.
What if Carson’s like him? What if he's worse?
What if I learn nothing? But there is also the back-up plan Carson hands me.
I go, and if it's bad, at 8:15 p.m., like the man says, I bounce.
By Friday afternoon, the case for canceling runs out of arguments.
My rental is the smallest bedroom of a three-bedroom bungalow on the edge of town, two of the rooms currently empty.
Most of my belongings are still in the duffel bag I pack the morning I give up the room over the hardware store.
The landlord is kind and happy that one of the rooms is leased.
Inside my room: a mattress on the floor, a lamp, two hangers in the closet.
The kitchen, living room and laundry are shared, but with no other tenants, the rest of the house is mine.
The radio in the kitchen is on a country station I do not usually listen to.
The navy A-line dress is spread out on the bed.
It is the one nice thing I do not sell off in the weeks I sell off anything with a resale value.
I buy it at a consignment shop in Fredericksburg when I am twenty-two for a friend's wedding.
I have worn it to two Christmas Eve services since. It still fits.
I shower and put on actual lotion. I do my hair with the dryer my mother gives me at high school graduation. My hair, loose waves down my back, a style I have not worn in a year, all because a man tells me on a Tuesday night to leave it down, and the words have not completely worn off since then.
I do my makeup at the bathroom counter with the radio just audible through the open door. Mascara. A little color in my cheeks. A nude on my mouth. I lean back from the mirror.
The woman who looks back at me is one I haven’t seen in a long time. I almost don’t recognize her.
I am in the dress and barefoot in the hallway when the doorbell rings. The clock says six thirty-two.
He's early, I think to myself. Good thing I’m ready.
I grab my phone and sling my purse, and smile on the way to the front door. Hair down. Dress smoothed. A part of me I have been holding clenched for three solid months loosens one notch. Anyone could survive one date.
I open the door.
The porch is empty.
For half a second, I don’t understand what I’m looking at. My brain reaches for him and the porch returns nothing. No Carson. No car in the driveway. No Cadie peeking out from behind his leg.
The smile is still on my face.
Then I hear it. A small sound at my feet.
I look down.
A sleeping baby. Tiny, maybe only weeks old. Swaddled in a Moses basket, sleeping. A round cheek presses to the lining, with one fist curled by her mouth.
Embroidered in cursive on the blanket is the name: Junie.
The world goes silent — the radio in the kitchen, the wind against the bushes, the truck on a road three streets over — all gone. All of it.
A folded note is tucked between the blanket and the basket side.
The handwriting on the front, even from here, I would know in the dark.
I crouch. My knees do not feel like mine. My hand reaches for the note and pulls it before I know what I’m doing. I hold it folded for a moment. There is a part of me that already knows what it says, and that part is willing to sit on this porch all night not knowing for sure.
I open it anyway.
I love you. I can't come back. Please take care of her.