11. Hunt
— ? —
Hunt
I made it to the edge of town before I had to pull over.
She’d told me to go home.
So I’d gone. No arguing, no bargaining, no showing up at her door with more words she didn’t want to hear. I’d done exactly what she asked, exactly the way my therapist had been telling me to do for weeks. Listen. Respect her boundaries. Show her that her words actually matter to you.
But the highway stretched out ahead of me, empty and gray, and I couldn’t make myself drive it.
What was on the other side? The house we’d shared, full of her absence. The unit I’d resigned from. The life I’d built around work and money and things that had never mattered as much as I’d pretended they did. None of it meant anything without her.
Everywhere else is just places you aren’t.
I’d meant it. Every word. And now I was facing the reality of what that meant: there was nothing for me back home. Nothing that mattered. Nothing that would make me forget the way she’d looked at me, standing on that porch with her arms crossed, telling me to leave.
The sign at the edge of town said Primrose, Population 612.
A whole town of people, and one of them was Nora.
I turned the truck around.
The decision wasn’t really a decision. It was more like gravity, pulling me back toward the only thing that mattered. If she wanted me to go home, fine. I’d make this home. I’d stay in her orbit, close enough to prove that I meant what I said, far enough to respect the boundaries she’d set.
The town looked different in the evening light. Quieter. Main Street was mostly empty, a few cars parked outside what looked like a diner, a handful of lights glowing in windows. Small. Intimate. The kind of place where everyone knew everyone and strangers stood out like sore thumbs.
I found the inn on my second pass through town. Primrose Motor Lodge, the sign said, with a neon vacancy light that flickered uncertainly. The woman behind the desk looked at me like I’d come in on her shoe.
“Room for one?”
“Yes ma’am.”
She pulled a key off the pegboard without hurrying. “How long you staying?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
Her eyes narrowed. She was maybe sixty, with gray hair pulled back in a severe bun and reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. “You wouldn’t happen to be the fellow who drove up to Nora Smith’s place this morning, would you?”
Word traveled fast. “Yes ma’am.”
“The fellow she told to leave?”
“Also yes.”
She stared at me a beat too long. Then she took my credit card, ran it with more force than necessary, and slid a key across the counter. “Room twelve. Checkout’s at eleven. There’s a continental breakfast in the lobby if you’re still here in the morning, but I wouldn’t count on the good pastries.”
The room was exactly what I’d expected from a motor lodge called Primrose.
Thin carpet, a bed that sagged in the middle, a television that looked like it hadn’t been updated since the nineties.
I stood under a hot shower until the mud was gone and my fingers were pruned, and then I lay on the bed in my clothes and stared at the ceiling.
What the hell was I going to do?
The money wasn’t a problem. The Anderson money was never a problem. I could stay here for months if I wanted to, buy a house, set up a whole new life within walking distance of the woman who’d told me to go away.
But that wasn’t the point. The point was proving that I’d changed. That I could be different. That I was willing to do whatever it took to earn back her trust.
And I couldn’t do that from a hotel room.
There was a particular vertigo in it. I’d spent my whole life being good at things.
Fast hands, and the right instincts when a situation went sideways.
It was the one thing I never had to question about myself, that whatever else I got wrong, I was competent.
And I was about to trade all of it to become the man who couldn’t work a gate latch and couldn’t do the one thing that actually mattered, which was convince a single woman I’d turned into someone worth staying for.
For the first time in my life I wasn’t going to try to be impressive.
I was going to be bad at it, in public, for as long as it took, and let her watch me refuse to quit.
The next morning, I discovered what it felt like to be a pariah.
The continental breakfast was exactly as advertised: a few pastries, some coffee that tasted like it’d been sitting for hours, and a clear plastic shield that the woman from the front desk used to guard the best selections whenever I came near.
“Those are for other guests,” she said sweetly when I reached for a muffin.
“I’m a guest.”
“Those are for other other guests.”
I ate a stale croissant and drank bad coffee and tried to figure out my next move.
The town was worse. Every person I passed on Main Street either ignored me completely or stared at me with open hostility.
The man behind the counter at the general store suddenly remembered that they were out of everything I asked for.
The woman at the post office took thirty minutes to look up whether they offered P.O.
boxes, then told me the waiting list was two years.
At the diner, I finally got a break.
June Hobbs. I’d heard Nora mention the name once, back when we were still talking, and I recognized the woman immediately from the way she watched me walk through the door. Not hostile, exactly. More like she was taking my measure, deciding what kind of threat I posed.
“Coffee?” She was behind the counter before I’d fully settled onto a stool.
“Please. Black.”
She poured it without comment, then leaned against the counter with her arms crossed. “You’re him.”
“I’m him.”
“She know you’re still in town?”
“Probably. This place doesn’t seem like it keeps many secrets.”
June smiled at that, just a flicker. “No, it doesn’t.” She studied me for a moment. “You look terrible.”
“Feel worse.”
“Good.” She refilled my coffee without being asked. “You should feel terrible. That girl didn’t deserve what you put her through.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Do you? Because I’ve been feeding her breakfast for a month now, and I’ve watched her try to put herself back together piece by piece, and I’m not convinced you understand what you broke.”
I met her eyes. “I understand. I’m trying to fix it.”
“Trying isn’t good enough.”
“So I’ve been told.” I wrapped my hands around the coffee cup. “But I’m still here. And I’m going to keep being here until she tells me to stop or until she lets me earn it back.”
June was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded, once, like I’d passed some kind of test. “The grocery store’s hiring a delivery driver. Carl mentioned it last week. It’s not glamorous work, but it pays, and the routes go all over the county.”
It took me a second to understand what she was saying. All over the county. Including the clinic. Including the farm.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. You still have to get the job. And this town isn’t going to make it easy for you.”
She wasn’t lying.
Doc Hale, who I’d tracked down at the general store hoping to introduce myself, looked straight through me like I wasn’t there.
The women at the grange hall watched me through the diner window with actual binoculars and zero shame.
A kid on a bicycle rode past me and spat in my direction, and I was pretty sure someone had trained him to do it.
But the grocery store hired me anyway.
Carl, the owner, was maybe seventy years old with a weathered face and hands like baseball mitts. He looked at my application, looked at me, and laughed.
“You realize this job pays twelve dollars an hour.”
“Yes sir.”
He set my application down and studied me like a puzzle with a piece missing. “And you want it anyway.”
“Yes sir.”
He laughed again, shaking his head. “All right, Anderson. You start tomorrow. Be here at six. The routes go out by seven.”
I could’ve bought the store. I could’ve bought the block it sat on and the county road that ran past it and never felt the money leave the account.
My father had built an empire I’d been born on top of, and there was a version of me, the one Richard Anderson had spent thirty years trying to install, who would’ve thrown that around a town like this like a badge.
But the money was the one thing I had that Nora had never once wanted from me, and it was the one thing on earth that couldn’t buy back what I’d actually lost. So I took the twelve dollars an hour, and I meant to earn every one of them.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. The last three drivers quit because they couldn’t handle the roads. This isn’t a favor. It’s a bet on whether you’ll last a week.”
I lasted a week, and then another two.
The work was harder than I’d expected. Not physically hard, although hauling crates of groceries up farm driveways in the Texas heat was no joke.
But socially hard. Every customer looked at me like I’d personally wronged them.
Every delivery was an opportunity for someone to remind me that I didn’t belong here.
But I kept showing up.
I learned the routes, which roads flooded in the rain and which driveways had potholes that could swallow a tire, the names of the regulars and their orders and the particular quirks of delivery that made the difference between a successful drop and a complaint to Carl.
The first time I saw her in town was a Tuesday.
I’d been in Primrose two weeks by then, long enough that the grange ladies had stopped bothering with the binoculars and started using the window.
I was coming out of the grocery with a crate on my shoulder when I saw her truck outside the diner, and then I saw her, on the sidewalk, talking to June, the morning sun in her honey hair, and everything in me just stopped.
Half of Main Street stopped with me.