29. Emma
twenty-nine
Emma
Istood in the Psycho Burgers parking lot and looked at what was left.
Which wasn’t much. The fire started on a Saturday night and finished its work before sunrise, so by Tuesday morning all that remained was a skeleton of blackened cinderblock and the metal braces for the overhead sign.
The words “PSYCHO BURGERS” were still legible in singed blue above the drive-through frame, because the fire had gone up, not out, burning hot at the center and weak at the edges, like a disease that starts in the marrow and leaves the skin last. I watched the wind take a length of yellow caution tape and coil it around one of the burned-out menu boards, where it thrashed and pulled until it snapped loose and wandered into the empty lot.
He tried to sound sorry when he said, “Real shame, Ms. Steele. I used to bring my whole team here on Fridays. It’s a Kingman institution, you know?”
I nodded, then angled my head toward the building, as if I needed his memory to sync up with the facts in front of us. He didn’t take the hint.
“The fries,” he said, “were the best in the whole town. Not the burgers, if you’ll pardon me for saying so. But the fries…” He shook his head, reverent. “I don’t know what you did to them.”
I shrugged. “It was the oil,” I said, though it wasn’t.
Adam had used the same recipe for five years, the same bulk potatoes from Sysco, same frozen bags as everyone else.
The trick was keeping the oil hot enough to scare the water out, but never so hot the potatoes went brittle. I didn’t care. I never liked fries.
He nodded like this was a confession, then checked something on his clipboard. “So. That brings us to the main event.”
He tore a check loose from the pad, the carbon slip catching on the glue at the top, and handed it over.
I took it with my right hand and didn’t look at the amount, but I’d already seen it through the carbon: $5,000,000.
00, payable to “Steele, Emma.” It looked like a lottery number, the kind of thing that could change a whole family tree.
In my family, it meant something different: a way out, prepaid.
Garrett asked, “Do you want to walk through it one more time? For my notes.” The way he said it, I could tell he’d been briefed about my lack of sentiment. He was hoping for tears, or at least a little nostalgia.
I shook my head. “It’s all in your report,” I said.
I’d left Adam’s body in the kitchen. The fire had eaten the security system, the receipts, even the digital backup in the office safe. What the fire couldn’t erase, the water from the fire hoses had carried out to the street and down the storm drain. Nothing left to argue about.
I put the check in the inside pocket of my jacket and zipped it up. It was a tailored jacket, but not expensive. The kind of thing you wore when you wanted people to notice you, but not remember. I had picked it for this morning, and only this morning.
“I’m sorry about your brother.” Garrett said, “What will you do next?”
“The property in the mountains is sold.” I looked at the building one more time, let the sunlight bounce off the char in the windows, and then said, “I’ll let you know.”
He nodded and made a little note on his clipboard. He never looked me in the eye again.
In the lot behind us, Samantha waited in the back seat of the SUV, headphones jammed over her hair, tablet lit up in her lap.
She had Adam’s eyes, and sometimes the set of his mouth, but none of his patience.
She was clicking through some video about a petting zoo, the volume loud enough that I could hear the animal noises through the glass.
I walked to the car, opened the door, and slid in without starting the engine.
I just sat there, hands on the wheel, and watched the white edges of my knuckles catch the light.
I didn’t look in the rearview. I didn’t look at the building.
I waited until I could hear Samantha’s breathing through the headphones, then I turned the key.
The engine rumbled awake, louder than it needed to be, but it was the only part of the day that felt honest. I waited for the “seatbelt” icon to go solid before shifting to reverse.
Samantha didn’t look up. She was drawing something on the tablet, her tongue caught at the corner of her mouth, eyes flicking back and forth as she tried to get a line just right.
I watched the side of her face in the mirror and thought about the things she would remember about today, and which of them would matter when she was old enough to tell the story to someone else.
The drive out of Kingman took twelve minutes if you caught the lights right.
I spent the extra minute thinking about nothing at all.
Or maybe not nothing: I thought about the column of numbers in my head, the insurance payout at the top, the cost of the Santa Fe rental in the middle, and the bottom line in red—enough to live on forever if we kept the burn rate low.
I thought about Samantha’s new school, the way the principal had spelled her name wrong on the enrollment email.
I thought about the way the sky above the highway looked like it had been stretched by hand, the blue gone so thin you could see the grain in it.
At the first stoplight outside town, I reached for the crumpled napkin wedged into the center console.
The rental address was written on it in my own handwriting, blocky and sharp, every letter the same size as if I was trying to teach someone to read.
I smoothed it out and set it on the dash, next to the check.
They looked like artifacts from two different lives. I didn’t care which one would stick.
The SUV’s sun visor held the printed confirmation for Samantha’s new school.
The edges were already starting to yellow in the heat, but the ink hadn’t faded.
I ran a finger over the school’s name. It sounded like a punishment, but the place had decent reviews.
They had a pool. That’s what Samantha would remember.
A mile later, she pulled off her headphones and said, “Are we going to the new house?”
“Yup,” I said. “Santa Fe bound.”
She thought about that, mouth working through the shape of the words, then asked, “Will there be a pool?”
I said, “I’ll look into it.”
She put the headphones back on and went back to her drawing. I didn’t ask what it was. I already knew.
We hit the highway and let the desert flatten out behind us, the rear window turning the world into a heat shimmer. I let the check slide back into the jacket pocket, then set both hands on the wheel, ten and two, like I was seventeen again and the instructor was sitting beside me.
I drove for an hour, then two, and watched the gas gauge drop in perfect increments. Every time it went down another hash mark, I recalculated the odds that we would make it to the rental on one tank. I knew we would, but I liked the act of solving.
Somewhere past the third rest stop, Samantha fell asleep. She curled up on her side, tablet still glowing against her cheek, her hair pressed flat by the headphones. I watched her in the mirror, but only for a second. The rest of the time, I kept my eyes on the road.
***
The gas station was the kind you only noticed when you needed it, and then only because there wasn’t another one for twenty miles in any direction.
Two pumps, a canopy the color of old teeth, and a hand-painted sign on the window that promised “Beef Jerky, Cold Beer, Lottery Tickets, Restroom.” It was the “Restroom” that got us.
Samantha had woken up somewhere past Seligman, wriggled in the back seat for five minutes, then declared she needed to pee or she’d explode.
I pulled into the lot and took inventory. Empty except for a semi idling at the far pump, its cab rattling loud enough to vibrate the rearview. The desert air was already thirty degrees warmer than it had been at sunrise, and the plastic sleeve on the pump handle stuck to my palm when I grabbed it.
“Go in, find the bathroom, don’t talk to anyone,” I told Samantha.
She gave me a look that meant “I’m not stupid,” but said nothing, just slid out of the car and loped across the blistered concrete, arms swinging.
I watched her until she was inside, then set the pump and leaned against the driver’s door.
The sun was so bright it made the silver SUV look wet.
I pulled out my phone. No notifications, which was good.
I opened the dating app, thumbed through the recommended stack: two men holding up largemouth bass, one holding a baby that was either his nephew or a prop, one with a face I was pretty sure I’d already blocked in another state.
I skipped them all. At the bottom of the stack, the algorithm showed me Trace Jackson.
His profile picture was a bar patio, empty but for him.
The man had the kind of bulk that doesn’t come from gym memberships, but from a life spent in motion.
Black T-shirt, tattoos running down both arms, the right forearm visible and heavy with ink.
There was a scar through his left eyebrow that divided his face, and a crookedness to his smile that made him look both younger and older than his age.
His eyes were dark, not in the goth sense but in the way of someone who had learned early that you don’t get to pick your own genetics.
He didn’t look like Adam, but there was something in the way he sat—shoulders wide, arms balanced on the table, not crowding the camera but not yielding any space, either—that reminded me of him.
I scrolled to the next picture. Trace was leaning against a brick wall, hands in his pockets, head angled down but eyes on the lens.
He wore jeans that had seen better years and a leather jacket that fit like a second skin.
“President, Santa Fe, Jackson Brothers Motorcycle Club,” his profile said.
“No games, no drama, only the real thing. Looking for someone who can handle the truth, or at least the consequences.” The bio was short, but it had grammar.
A code. I understood it instantly, and then put it away just as fast.
I stared at the photo for a second longer than necessary, thumb hovering over the heart icon.
There was a chill that ran up the back of my neck and out to my fingertips, the body’s way of marking a potential threat even when the brain didn’t want to call it that.
I didn’t swipe. I just watched him watch me, the secondhand confidence coming off the screen like heat from a grill.
I closed the app when I heard the bathroom door slam open and Samantha’s sneakers squeak across the tile.
I slipped the phone back into my pocket and waited for her to cross the lot.
She squinted in the sun, hair wild, the corners of her mouth stained pink from the soda she’d snuck from the fridge that morning.
She didn’t look at me until she was a foot away, then said, “The bathroom smells like soup.”
I said, “That means they clean it.”
She considered that, then climbed back into the car, headphones already going up before the door was shut.
I filled the tank, replaced the nozzle, then went inside for a bottle of water and a receipt. The man at the counter wore a baseball cap that said “Born to Grill” and had the facial expression of someone who didn’t expect company. I handed him a twenty, didn’t speak, and left.
The highway east was empty but for us and the semi.
I let the truck pull ahead, watched the way the dust came off the rear tires and hung in the air behind it like a second, invisible trailer.
I thought about Trace, about the way his eyes tracked the camera in the photo, about the little dare written into the line of his jaw.
I thought about what it meant to be president of anything, much less a club with that kind of history.
I thought about whether I was better off matching with a man like that, or deleting the app and moving on.
Samantha was asleep again before we passed the exit for Meteor Crater.
Headphones on, tablet wedged between her knees, her hair stuck to the glass from where she’d pressed her face into the window to watch the last gas station fade away.
I looked at her, then at the road, then back at the dash.
The crumpled napkin with the rental address was still there, and the check was still in my jacket pocket.
I drove with both hands on the wheel, the white desert opening on both sides. There was nothing between us and the horizon, and nothing behind us that mattered. I let the speed inch up until the SUV hummed, then set the cruise and watched the numbers climb.
Somewhere out in the world, the Jackson Brothers were still running the numbers on me, even if they didn’t know it yet.
They’d find the name “Steele” in the payout records, or maybe in a gas station log, or maybe just in the nervous system of the country, where people like Adam and Trace and even me left traces that never quite got erased.
I drove east, not looking back.
If I’d known about the pool, I would have told Samantha the truth.
If I’d known what was waiting in Santa Fe, I would have gone faster.