19. Lori
Lori
The first morning in the rental arrives with the harsh glare of a sun that feels entirely too bright for the hollow space I now call my own, pulling me from a restless sleep into the reality of my choice.
The rental smells like paint primer and somebody else’s menthols, which is exactly the atmosphere a woman dreams of after leaving the only house that ever felt like home at midnight.
I carry my belongings inside. The place I rent has one folding chair by the window and one counter with nothing on it. Three bedrooms, with the other two empty like my last rental. The room I pay for has a mattress on the floor courtesy of whoever lived here before me.
I set the duffel and box down. Then I stand in the middle of the kitchen and listen to the silence.
No lullaby from down the hall.
No six-year-old’s bare feet in the hall at some ungodly hour demanding to know why nobody consults her about breakfast.
No low voice in the kitchen or almost-touching that is a language on its own.
I pull Cadie’s paper crown out of my jacket pocket and smooth it flat on the counter.
QUEEN LORI in gap-toothed capitals, with glitter everywhere.
The construction paper is already going limp at the folds, the glitter is getting into the creases of my fingers and will be in the lining of this jacket for a while. I do not want to ever clean it out.
The crying follows me from the truck. I do it quietly, out of habit, which is its own kind of pathetic because there is no one in this house to be quiet for. There is no one in this house at all.
I wash my face before I lie on the bare mattress and stare at a water stain on the ceiling shaped roughly like Florida.
I can’t sleep.
The second day brings the same hollow routine, the diner bell ringing with a cheer that does nothing to fill the space Carson leaves behind.
Day 1.
I open the diner at 5:30 p.m. because he needs a morning body and I need a reason to be up and do something before dawn.
The bell over the door rings at 6:08 a.m. and my entire body pivots towards the sound.
Coffee pot in one hand, rag in the other, heart doing something completely unauthorized somewhere near my collarbone.
It’s just Ronnie from the feed lot. Eggs over easy, wheat toast, no butter.
I pour his coffee, take his order and smile.
I ask about his daughter’s spelling bee.
I do all of it on autopilot, which is the gift of three years at the same job: you can fall completely apart on the inside and still function.
The bell rings dozens more times before closing.
Every hat, every pair of boots, every man broad enough through the shoulders to trick my stupid hopeful eyes for two seconds before the door swings wide and he is not there.
Carson does not come.
I want him to. I want him to walk through that door with the hat against the frame, his annoying dimple, a terrible joke, the whole unfair package.
I want it badly enough that it embarrasses me, because wanting him here means I left somewhere I wanted to be, and the clean little story I told myself in his kitchen about being a burden falls apart the second I hold it up to any light.
At closing, I count tips in the parking lot.
$62. I drive to the rental and eat a packet of saltines standing at the counter.
I fill the mug from the tap because there is no coffee pot in this kitchen and nobody who makes it right.
No coffee in a mug left at the end of the counter by a man who watched me make mine once and remember how I took it.
I drink the water. It tastes like nothing, and that is the whole problem.
The porch light clicks on when I step outside to check the lock.
I lie on the mattress and think about what I left behind, because that is what the brain does at one in the morning when there is nothing else to occupy it.
A kitchen that smells like coffee grounds and laundry soap.
A man who tears up every check I write. A six-year-old in rainbow cowgirl boots who says my name like she invented the word.
I survive the first day.
By the third day, the silence in my own head grows louder than the diner's rush, and the armor I wear begins to show its first hairline fractures.
Day 2.
The bell rings nine times before lunch. I keep my eyes on the ticket pad for the seven.
I look up for the other two — a man in a brown hat who turns out to be sixty with a white mustache, and a truck door slamming in the lot that sounds exactly like Carson’s F-150.
It is a different truck. My stomach drops.
Every truck in this county sounds like his, a fact I do not consider when I sign a lease five miles from his front door.
I take orders and smile. I ask Mrs. Perkins about her grandkid’s ear infection and put ranch dressing on the side for the new fourth-grade teacher.
I am fine.
Spectacularly, professionally, entirely fine.
I use this word as a load-bearing wall my whole adult life and it has not failed me yet.
The word tastes like my mother’s kitchen. Bleach and silence and a woman scrubbing the counter at midnight because if her hands are moving she does not have to sit down and need someone.
At closing, Jason sets a takeout box in front of me. Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans with the bacon and onion.
“I don’t order this.”
“Don’t say you did.” He wipes the register down without looking at me. “Cooler’s full. Take it home or throw it out. Either way, it’s off my counter.”
I take it home, and it’s the best meal I have eaten in two days.
I do not say thank you because my voice is unreliable right now.
Jason doesn’t wait for one because he has never once in three years required it.
Three years of shift meals, wrapped plates, coolers full, and I accept this man’s help the entire time while calling it professional courtesy.
It isn’t professional courtesy. It’s Jason being Jason.
I let people take care of me for years and call it something else so I don’t have to feel the weight of it.
The night stretches out long and quiet after Tina leaves, her words echoing in the empty rooms as I sit on the floor and let the truth of them settle into my bones.
Day 3.
It’s the end of my shift in the afternoon.
Jason slides a piece of pie across the counter.
Pecan, wrapped in foil, warm from an oven he fired up an hour ago.
Pecan pie is not on the Tuesday menu. He makes it because I am here and I probably look like I need pecan pie, and neither of us is going to acknowledge that out loud.
“Kid.”
I look up. He leans on the counter with both forearms, dish towel over his shoulder. I know this posture.
“I don’t know what happened. I don’t need to. But you don’t look like a woman who left something. You look like a woman who took the long way around to it.”
He doesn’t wait for a response. He pushes off the counter, goes back to the grill, and calls an order for table six, because that’s how Jason is. He drops the truest sentence in the room and then turns his back so you don’t have to come up with a face for it.
For three years, he does this.
For three years, I tell myself it’s because he’s my boss.
It isn’t. It’s because he is a decent man who slides pie across a counter instead of a lecture.
I take the pie home.
That evening, six-forty, there are three sharp raps on my door.
I know who it is before I open it.
Only one woman I know who knocks, if she does so at all, like she is doing the door a personal favor by using her knuckles instead of kicking it in.
Tina West is at the door.
She has a pie in one hand, using the same recipe she makes for Thanksgiving. Has a thermos of coffee in the other. Her feed-store jacket is zipped to the collar, her reading glasses shoved up on her head, and her boots are tracking mud across my linoleum without an apology.
She looks at me and I recognize the expression. I first saw it the day she came through Carson's kitchen door with a casserole and a bag of baby clothes. As if whether I belong to her stopped being a question a long time ago.
She doesn’t ask to come in. She just does.
“Lord, honey.” She scans the kitchen: the folding chair, the bare counter, the duffel on the floor where I dropped it three nights ago, the mattress through the bedroom door, the paper crown taped next to the light switch.
Her mouth presses flat. Not disappointment.
Closer to someone finding exactly what she expects and being annoyed at herself for being right.
She sits in the chair and opens the thermos. Pours coffee into the cap for herself, then into the chipped mug I have. A twin to the mug I left at Carson’s.
“Sit down.”
I sit on the floor because there is one chair and it is hers now. She looks at me on the linoleum and does not comment.
“I’m not here to tell you what to do, honey. I’m here because my son is sitting on his porch every night with the light on and I figured someone should tell you.”
The air goes out of me. I wrap both hands around the mug. The coffee is right. Three sugars, with a splash of cream. She either makes it from Carson’s recipe or asks him how I take it, and I do not know which is worse.
“I don’t know how to go back.” My voice comes out small. I hate it for being small. “Tina, I don’t know how to walk into that kitchen and say what I need to say. I don’t even know what the words are. I just —”
I stop. Swallow. Try again.
“I spend my whole life being taught that needing someone makes you heavy, and he is the first person I ever — I left. I walked out. He let me go. I don’t know how to undo that.”
Tina sets her coffee down. She has sharp eyes. Carson’s eyes, the ones that see everything. For a second, I understand exactly where he gets it. The quiet. The watching.
Her eyes hold silence instead of rushing to fill it.
“You go back the same way you came. One step. The light's still on.”