Chapter 23
SLOANE
The salad is not a salad. It's a pile of cheap shredded cheese, sliced ham, and quartered boiled eggs with a few leaves of iceberg thrown in and half a cherry tomato balanced on top like a hat.
I ordered it because it was the only item on the menu that didn't involve gravy or a bun, but I should have known the word "salad" means something different in Duster.
I'm in the booth by the window that faces out rather than in, so that anyone who wants to film me has to come around and do it obviously. So far, no one has.
The week has been quiet. No reporters at the sanctuary gate and not that many strangers aiming their cameras at me.
Either the news cycle has moved on or Princess Pigpen has been demoted from headline to filler, and I'm not above taking the small win.
I'd almost talked myself out of coming here tonight — it was a close call between the diner and another packet of Monterey Jack.
I've gotten used to mostly ignoring my phone so I'm reading instead.
It's the vineyard romance. A woman called Grace has inherited her grandmother's failing winery in Sonoma and has had to come home from New York to sort it out.
The sommelier who's been running it in the meantime is a woman called Tessa who resents her for showing up and trying to fix things, and they've been circling each other for a hundred and forty pages with a specific kind of tension that I'm absolutely here for. It's very good.
The only problem with the book is the cover. The two women on it are kissing, and the title in pink script across the top says A Taste of Her. Subtlety is not the author's strong point so before I left the motel I did a thing I'm not entirely proud of.
I took the Bible off the bedside table, pulled the dust jacket off it, and slipped it over A Taste of Her.
It fit, more or less, once I'd folded the flaps in.
The gold-lettered HOLY BIBLE now sits on the front of my sapphic wine-country enemies-to-lovers romance, and the actual Bible is naked under the bedside lamp.
"Honey."
I look up. Ruthie is standing next to the booth with a coffee pot in one hand. I'm beginning to wonder if she ever goes home.
"Mind if I sit down?"
I frown at the strange request, then remember to smile. "Oh. No. Of course, go ahead."
She slides into the booth across from me and sets the coffee pot on the table. "I owe you an apology, young lady."
"You don't —"
"I do. What happened in here the other week wasn't right.
You came in for a meal and I sent you out the door with a box.
That girl had no business taking pictures of a stranger.
" Ruthie shakes her head. "I've known Maggie Dawson since she was a little girl in braids standing next to her mother at the counter, and when she came down here last week and told me what you'd been through, I felt about two inches tall. I'm sorry."
I don't know what to say. I've had a lot of apologies in my life — the guilty kind from boyfriends, the formal kind from assistants, the insincere kind from my mother when she knows she's in the wrong but doesn't want to actually admit it. I haven't had a lot of the real kind.
"Thank you," I say. "Really."
"You eat here anytime. You sit anywhere you want. Anyone so much as holds up a phone I'll have them out the door before they know what hit them." She jerks a thumb over her shoulder. "Larry the fry cook has a cousin in the sheriff's department and he loves to use that fact. You're safe in here."
"That's — thank you, Ruthie."
Ruthie smiles and picks up her coffee pot. She's about to stand and then her eyes land on the book. She settles back.
"Well," she says, in a completely different voice. "Well, well, well. Are you reading the Good Book?"
"Oh." My voice has gone up half an octave. "Yeah. Just — you know. A little. Here and there."
"Well, isn't that something." She puts her hand flat on the table.
"I've been a Christian my whole life. I was baptized in a kiddie pool behind my aunt's trailer in 1968 and I've been in church on a Sunday morning every week since, bar two when my Sunday manager was off sick, and I have never, not once, picked up that book for leisure.
I read it for the sermons but I didn't know anyone read it for fun. "
"I wouldn't say fun, exactly."
"Well, what would you say?"
My eyes shift down to the book. "It's calming. It's, um. Yes."
"Calming." She nods slowly, like this is a thing she's turning over in her mind. "I never thought of it that way. Which part are you reading?"
"Which part?"
"Which book, honey. It's a whole library in there."
"Oh. Of course." My mouth has gone dry and I suddenly can't think of a single book in the Bible.
And then — thank god, or thank Phil Collins — a band name floats into my head.
"Genesis," I say, snapping the book shut as I'm fairly sure Genesis is at the front and I'm somewhere in the middle. I slide the book into my purse.
Ruthie waves a hand. "Oh, honey, don't let me stop you from reading."
"No, no, I was just about to finish this delicious salad anyway. I just got a bit caught up in — the book. The Good Book." I'm smiling the way people smile when they're having an internal crisis and hoping it passes for pleasant.
She taps the table. "You know what? We should have you at church."
"Sorry?"
"Our church. First Baptist, out on the Cawley road. It's not much — red brick, little steeple, room for about sixty if you squeeze — but we've got a service every Sunday at ten and a small choir. I think you'd enjoy it."
"Oh, I — thank you, that's so kind, but I —"
"The choir's not great. I'll be honest with you. We're about four altos short and Dennis Hurley's been the lead tenor for twenty years and he can't find the key most weeks, but it's cheerful and friendly and you'd be welcome. No one in there's going to take your picture."
No idea what else to do, I nod. "I'll think about it."
"You think about it. Sunday at ten. And you tell me if you come, and I'll pick you up from the motel. You don't want to be walking that road in your church clothes."
"That's very kind."
Ruthie slides out of the booth, picks up her coffee pot, and gives me a little nod. "You enjoy your Genesis, honey."