She took the turn and the trailer fishtailed behind her. She’d forgotten all about it. Fortunately, it righted itself and she gunned the motor onto the small road, watching the truck pass the turn in her rearview mirror. It was no time to get complacent, though she had to keep driving until she could get to a safe turnaround spot. That way, at least she’d be pointing in the right direction to get reliably into town, where she could drive straight to the sheriff’s office.
They drove for about ten minutes until the quiet around them took over and it felt like they were well and truly safe. Colleen slowed the car and did an eighteen-point turn to reverse her direction and face the highway again.
This time she drove slowly, wary of the trucker’s return, even while the possibility seemed excessively unlikely.
“Once when I was little, a guy pulled up to the intersection in my neighborhood and said, ‘Did you ever see one of these?’ to all of us kids playing,” Tamara said. “I didn’t go over, but Amy Williams and her sister did—and he was … exposing himself. They went home and told their mom and she called the police and my mom totally freaked out.”
“Did you freak out?”
Tamara considered that for a moment. “No, I wondered what it looked like.” She looked at Colleen. “I mean, I’m not sorry now that I didn’t see—it was just that at the time, that was all anyone could talk about and I couldn’t even picture what it might look like.”
“Unfortunately, I can.” Colleen shuddered at the idea of a grown man doing that to children.
“Me too. Now. It’s really messed up to do that to kids.”
“People are sick.”
“More people than you think, probably,” Tamara agreed, then closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the seat. “Weirdos are everywhere. It’s more weird not to be weird.”
“You may be right.”
“Pretty sure I am.”
Colleen turned left on Birch Street and was surprised to see that not only was the diner not there but it also looked like it never had been there. There was a gas station and a crummy wooden house, and the rest was overgrown brush. “I could have sworn this was where it was.”
“Did you say the Henley Diner?”
“Yes.”
“Right there.” Tamara pointed not at the diner but at a billboard so small, with lettering in script, that it was hard to read at all. But the building in the picture was unmistakable. “Turn around and then go right. It’s a half a mile away.”
“Thank goodness one of us can see.” She carefully maneuvered the car around and followed Tamara’s directions until, sure enough, the familiar old diner came into view. Blue-gray wood slats outside, a chimney shaped like R2-D2 pumping out delicious scents, and a small assortment of old pickup trucks and a few scattered practical college student cars in the parking lot.
This was the place.
It was hard to believe they had left her house in Frederick only that morning. Of course, her hunger and the fact that she’d had only crap food were probably contributing to her disorientation.
But something told her everything was about to take a turn for the better. A good meal, a great dessert, a few more miles across the border into North Carolina, then they would stop for the night and get up bright and early to start again in the morning.
Hopefully, then things would fall in line with her carefully mapped-out plans.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bitty
Dear Stranger,
Everyone should have somebody to write a suicide note to. People kill themselves and leave suicide notes behind every day. Always addressing their children, parents, friends, anyone. I don’t have anyone to write mine to. So I’ll write it here, and whoever reads it … well, I guess you’re my closest friend.
I’m currently writing from a booth at my college diner. That’s why I’m using this cheap spiral notebook paper. It was all they had at the drugstore. Do they still call them “drugstores”? I always wonder if that’s somehow politically incorrect or something. Anyway, if I’d thought more carefully ahead, I’d have gotten better paper. And something to put it in, I guess. I’m not sure where to leave this.
I’m not very good at drama, I guess.
Though, boy, I sure had a lot thrown at me this week. I mean, the truth, now that I look back on it, is that I’ve been putting up with a low-level hum of bullshit—yes, I said bullshit—for a long time, but I ignored it, pushed it away, whatever. I was the dutiful wife, right?
So dutiful that I apparently had zero idea who my husband was or what he was capable of.
I guess that’s the first thing you should know about me: I’m a blind idiot who doesn’t even know her husband of thirteen years, and I’m not very good at planning suicide.
We’re not off to a good start, are we, New Friend?
Oh well. I’m a letdown for everyone, always have been. A fraud, even when I didn’t know it. There’s no reason I should be any better to you than I am to anyone else.
So, getting back to the point, I’m here in the Henley Diner, in a sticky vinyl booth that’s probably been torn for twenty years, and is imbued with the smells of every greasy thing that was ever fried up here.
A year ago, if you’d told me I’d be here, ordering fried green tomatoes and pecan pie, it would have felt like a slap. Not me. Not Wilhelmina Nolan Camalier. (I never had a middle name, because my parents were so set on me keeping their last name that they forced the issue by planning for it to at least be my middle name when I married.) (By the way, not having a middle name is kind of a drag when you’re in school and all your friends think there’s something weird about you because your parents were too stingy to give you more than one name.)
Anyway, I’m not exactly sure why I came here, of all places, two hours east of my house when my plan was to go south. For some weird reason, I wanted to see it one last time. I guess it feels like the last time I was sure I was happy was here.
No. I’m kidding myself. You probably saw right through me, huh? Close as we are? This isn’t a place of great joy for me, it’s just the last place I ate really well. When I ordered my fried chicken with mashed potatoes and broccoli, and consumed all but the greens in about six minutes flat. That was the last time I had fried chicken, incidentally. In fact, it was the only time, and I loved it the way they warn people not to try heroin because they’ll love it. But that was a bad day too, though not so bad as this day, and I came here for comfort food and I got it. The place has hardly changed.
I haven’t either. Oh, I know I look different, even though you would probably be kind and tell me I look just the same. I’ve told that lie to people too. Maybe there’s a certain symmetry to my coming back here. Full circle. At least closing one circle.
My friend Colleen and I sat in a booth—that one right over there, I can see it now. I sat with my boyfriend, Blake, and she sat with Kevin. We were on a happy little double date. I probably asked for my Diet Coke to be refilled six times along with everyone else, not feeling like I was actually drinking the equivalent of six sodas—half a case of sodas. Later that night, everything had changed, and I didn’t ever want to come back here.
I guess I could go into what happened that night, but why bother? I’d come off crazy, like I’m still upset about some dumb breakup that happened all those years ago. Which I’m not.
That’s not why I want to kill myself.
I don’t even want to go into the details of how I ended up at this spot, in this booth, having my last meal. It doesn’t even matter. My life is just like anyone else’s sob story. I was raised by a withholding mother, and an overprotective father who didn’t know how to talk to or interact with a young—or older—daughter. I did well in high school, never got in trouble, then went to college, just like you’re supposed to, then I graduated and married my boyfriend, thinking I knew the life I was in for, and was excited about it.
Happily ever after.
But that didn’t happen. I don’t believe in that anymore. I
remember when I did, as clearly as I remember believing in Santa Claus. And I miss believing in happily ever after just like I miss believing in Santa Claus. A lot of magic went out of life with the realization of how ugly and stark and unfair things can really be.
You’ve probably danced with that a little yourself, whoever you are. Seems like everyone has done their time with disappointment. I know some people have had it worse than me, much worse, but some have had it better. It’s not really about what everyone else is doing in life, or how they handle things, it’s about what you can handle and what you can’t.
I couldn’t handle the change in my life.
So everything fell apart, and now here I am, frustrated and alone, with no one to call. No one to cry to. No one to even write a suicide note to. I think that’s the most pathetic thing of all.
I have a gun in my car. There’s no way to say that without sounding dramatic. But I do. It’s a cute Smith & Wesson. Very girlie. I’m trying to decide where to do it. Maybe on the side of the bridge? Maybe in some pretty church. I don’t know yet. After I leave here, once my favorite diner now my Last Supper (pardon me the grandiose moment), I guess I’ll drive around until somewhere seems right.
CHAPTER SIX
Tamara
“I used to come to this place all the time when I was in college. It was cheap, greasy, and good.” Colleen collected her wallet and things, and opened the car door.
Tamara got out too, taking the little jump that was necessary to get from seat to ground.
“You went to school around here?”
“Yep. Small college right outside of town. So, basically, this is the college town right here.” She took a deep breath and looked around. The light from big ugly parking lot lights illuminated her face and she looked … alive. “I can’t believe how the same it looks.”
Tamara also looked around. There was basically nothing around. It didn’t look like how she’d always thought of college towns. She had been to Towson University once, when Vince was sure they could get into a bar there, and that had felt like a college town. The big long street was crowded with college students going from bar to bar. People played cornhole outside one bar, everyone was dancing inside another really loud bar, and at one place there had even been some semi-legit band playing.
The bar they had been assured they could get into, Lil’ Dicky’s, was a cramped hallway of a place. It was kind of awful, but still, it felt like what you expected out of a college area, full of energy. This was more like a place you’d hear that the walk-in fridge in the back was haunted. By old potato ghosts. Before they were chopped up and turned into French fries.
She laughed a little to herself as they went into the diner, and thought briefly about sharing her mental image of an evil Mr. Potato Head floating like Casper in the back kitchen, but she decided against it, figuring that was too weird, and would probably be a fast way to have Colleen call up her dad and say she was on drugs—or maybe just actual-crazy.
She didn’t need anyone else making him think that.
They were taken to a table next to a bunch of girls, all shrill and squealing at each other. Tamara wondered if Colleen was the type of adult that would tell them to calm down, or if she would just get really annoyed until they left or passive-aggressively change tables. If she had been sitting there with her dad, he would have muttered that they were a bunch of PILs, which stood for “Pigs in Lipstick.” It was a nasty term he used for the kind of girls who were generally average looking, but put on “a hot-girl costume.” Too much makeup caked on, fake hair color, usually wearing a dress or outfit two sizes too small and not made properly for their shape. The kind of accoutrements they thought made them hot, but really only made them cartoonish.
Every time he remarked on this, it stung a little. It just didn’t feel right for a man to talk about girls like that. Any girls, but especially not ones who were so much younger than he was. Plus it sucked because since he was always saying that kind of thing, now she noticed it whether she wanted to or not.
Now Tamara was thinking way too much about these girls she’d never know. Just a weird girl at the table next to them thinking about them.
Colleen, on the other hand, didn’t seem aware of them. She didn’t acknowledge the chatty volume at all and just opened her menu and said, “I could eat everything on this menu. One time, one of my girlfriends and I ordered six different things just to share them all.” She shook her head at the fond memory. Days so long past, they didn’t even seem real anymore.
“We paid for it using the money we had just gotten back for selling our textbooks. That was a good night. But let me tell you, even with a young metabolism, combining pancakes with chicken tenders with a cheeseburger and cinnamon French toast and God knows what else—that’ll give anyone a horrible stomachache.”
“I bet,” replied Tamara. She recognized that she sounded uninterested in the story, when actually she was just thinking how good all those things sounded.
And how she wished she had a friend she could pig out like that with. What a lame and pitiful thought: I wish I had a best friend.
Tamara didn’t really have anything resembling a best friend. She used to, back home at her mom’s, but they had lost touch. At home, all she had were “the girlfriends.” The other groupie girls who watched the boys play video games and went off to make out or do more whenever the guys said to.
She shivered, thinking of Vince and the fact that he had recorded that video. God. How could she have been so careless, letting him do that? Not that she “let” him; she was just too lazy to stop him. No, not lazy. Tired. Painfully, sickly polite. Something. At any rate, she knew she didn’t trust him, despite his promises it would go no further. Knowing him, it could very well be on Reddit or 4chan or something else by now. Her private moment with him, being upvoted and downvoted by creepy unattached losers sitting at home, feeling high and mighty with their job as judge, no idea that it was a big deal to her.
Hopefully she was wrong. Maybe this time he was telling the truth when he said he wouldn’t tell anyone. She just feared that by “anyone” he had meant “anyone who would tell Tamara they saw it.”
She bit on the inside of her cheek, and decided that cinnamon French toast was a lot easier to think about than Vince exposing her.
“I’m getting that French toast,” she announced.
“You are? Hm. I was thinking about it too. But we can’t both get the same thing, then we’ll miss out on swapping bites.” Colleen smiled. “What else sounded good to you?”
Swapping bites. Not something Tamara was used to. Neither was getting to help pick out more than one thing. Both sounded okay at this moment.
Her answer was quick, as every time she went to a restaurant that served breakfast food—not very often—she had trouble picking between something sugary that would make her fall asleep in half an hour and something with protein to keep her going. “Uh … the mini meat loaves with mashed potatoes. Is it weird to get something so dinnery and so breakfasty, though?”
Colleen thought for a second. “No. I think it’s quite civilized, actually.” She flagged down their waitress. “I’m going to get the mini meat loaves.” She gestured at Tamara to order.
“Oh. Um. Cinnamon French toast.” Tamara noticed Colleen let her order her first choice and took the second one herself. It was a small gesture that didn’t really mean anything, probably, but still Tam thought it was cool.
The waitress made a scribble that couldn’t have been letters on her pad. The movement was too big, too scroll-y. Was she drawing pictures? A picture of a hot dog instead of the words “hot dog”?… Tamara almost laughed at the idea of a pile of Pictionary-style doodles of the food wadded up in the trash can at the end of the night. “Got it,” said the waitress, whose name on her tag was so faded, it looked blank. (Why put it there?) “Should be out in about ten minutes.” She took the menus, tucked them under her arm, and left. Then she was gone, and it was back to just being the two of them
.
Silence.
Blech. These awkward silences kept happening. When Tamara was a kid, she had filled every silence. Been talkative and enthusiastic about everything. She remembered her mother being responsive when she was young, and she remembered her dullness and single-word answers—sometimes not pertaining to anything at all—before she died, but Tamara didn’t remember when she had changed from one personality to the other. It was like she was remembering two different people.
When Tamara moved in with her dad, her talking had stopped altogether. Not only was he quiet, and not the type to sit around chatting, but he was always telling her to be quiet or calm down too. One time, when she had been delighted to be taken to lunch on her birthday—her only plans for the day—he stared at the screen the whole time, watching football. She had chatted on about things going on in her own life, not needing a response and knowing she wasn’t really going to get one. When he broke his silence, he snapped at her, saying, “Are you ever going to stop talking? You haven’t taken a breath since we walked in here.” When he didn’t do something like that, he would tell her to leave him alone for a few minutes. The “few minutes” never ended, and she could never wait long enough for him. Real soon she’d learned not to come back at all.
All this left Tamara with an irritatingly restless feeling whenever there were silences, but with a reluctance to fill them as well.
Maybe even a determination not to.
She got that her father had never planned on actually having to live with her. She understood that her existence had not been welcome news … just eighteen years of payment for his freedom. That’s if things worked out “ideally”—but her mother had died and he ended up taking care of a daughter he’d never wanted, and no matter how many strained or guilty smiles he gave after saying something short-tempered to her, it was always 100 percent clear that Chris Bradley was not a “single father” so much as a “single man with a finite obligation.”
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