He winked at me.
“Okay Mr. Exciting, what are you having today?”
He stared at the menu with hard eyes. “Aw, hell, it’s Monday, let’s get a little wild. I’ll have the Denver omelet, double order of bacon, and hash browns on the side.”
“Slow down there, slugger. Are you sure that’s on the approved list of foods?”
He leaned forward with a steely look glinting in his brown eyes. “I said it’s Monday, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want Mark coming down here to chew my ass.”
Since the stroke, RJ’s kids had been all over him about eating healthier. He was muscled and lean, but the man ate like Garfield the Cat.
And I suspected that Mark had installed a bacon breathalyzer in his car. If I ever gave in and let RJ order what he wanted, Mark and his wife Sherry would haul down here to scold me for spoiling their dad. Then they would pull the, “You don’t want him to have another stroke, do you, Ruby? Or worse?” card and I would crumble.
I played a hard ass, but I was a softy when it came to this old man.
RJ’s teeth ground together, but he relented. “Fine do the omelet with the damn egg whites. Will that make you happy?”
“One order of hash browns,” I countered. “And no bacon.”
His jaw moved back and forth as he worked his teeth against each other. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I hated that sound. But I stayed quiet. “Can I at least have the Canadian variety?”
Nodding curtly, I filled out his order ticket and slid it through the kitchen window to Reggie, one of Rosie’s day-shift chefs.
“How’s that boy of yours, Ruby?” RJ asked as I moved down the counter to swipe the glass of the pie display. When I first started working here eleven years ago, everything was inexplicably sticky. The tables, the vinyl on the booths and stools, the countertops, the floors, the bathrooms. Everything. When I became a full-time waitress, I decided this establishment was better than being sticky. I’d spent the last seven years turning this place around, scrubbing it until it gleamed.
I might be stuck in this nowhere town at this nowhere job, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t take pride in my work.
“He’s good,” I answered quietly. I didn’t like to air my business in public anywhere in this town. I didn’t need anything misheard and then repeated all over the place. Hell, I didn’t need anything rightly heard and then spread all over town. I’d been the subject of town gossip my entire life. It wasn’t a spotlight I wanted to willingly walk underneath.
“He being good to you?”
I smiled at the lemon meringue, unable to help myself. “Always,” I agreed readily, despite my dislike of opening up about my personal life.
“Yeah, well if you have any problems, you send him my way. That boy needs a father.”
I spun around on my heel and pointed my dishrag at RJ. “Hey, now. That’s too far.”
RJ held up his hands in surrender, but his words were as sharp as ever. “You know it’s true, Ruby. He’s going to turn wild in that home of yours. Your mama ain’t no help.”
“If you’ll excuse me,” I told him briskly, “I’m going to see if Reg needs help.”
He made a sound of acknowledgment, but I could tell he wasn’t happy. It didn’t matter to me how I’d wounded his sensitive feelings. He was the one coming after me and my parenting. He should know better.
Not that I could even blame him. Nosiness was how this whole damn town worked. Everybody was in everybody else’s business. My thoughts flickered briefly to Dolly Farrow and how I’d aired her business earlier.
“Hey, Reg,” I greeted the gigantic black man that could cook just about anything you asked for. I had no idea why he stuck around this town when he could have gone anywhere with his culinary skills.
He always said something about loving the wide-open space out here. He claimed to get claustrophobic in big cities. But I hardly believed him. This town made me itchy.
Not that I would leave either. I made my choice seven years ago when I’d found out I was pregnant with Max. Freshly graduated from high school, with all my hopes and dreams in a giant dumpster fire, I settled at home with my mom and decided Clark City would have to do. For me and my little guy.
“Mick giving you problems?” he asked intuitively.
Letting out a steady breath I rubbed my temples soothingly. “RJ’s out there,” I explained.
He made a sound in the back of his throat. “Trouble on the best friend front? I hardly believe my ears.”
I glared at him and his faux sense of surprise. I loved RJ like the father I never had, but he also irritated the bejesus out of me. “He’s not my best friend.”
Reggie gave me a look. “Uh, huh.”
“Coco’s my best friend. You know that.”
“Yeah, and she’s also a bad influence. You should stick with the old man.”
I snorted. He was right. My real best friend since kindergarten was a bad influence. But in the best way. If it wasn’t for her, I’d have locked myself away in my mother’s double wide a long time ago and probably starved to death.
No, that’s not true. Meals on Wheels would have found me. But I would at least be a cob-webbed version of myself. And Max didn’t deserve that.
“What’d he say?” Reggie asked with genuine curiosity.
“He’s just trying to give me parenting advice per usual.”
“This whole town tries to give you parenting advice, have you noticed that?” I blinked at him. Was he serious? Had I noticed? He laughed again. “Not too many single moms around here I guess.”
I shrugged. I was raised by a single mom, so it wasn’t strange to me to raise Max by myself. And in the part of town I was from, there were plenty of single-parent homes. They weren’t always moms. Dad’s shared the statistic too. And grandparents doing the worthy work of raising their grandkids when the parents stepped out. There were plenty of statistics available for the trailer park on the wrong side of the tracks.
I wasn’t even the only single mom in my graduating class of twenty-three students. Another girl, Lauren Debrovsky had gotten knocked up at college and moved home her junior year.
The town’s excitement surrounding my surprise pregnancy was more than normal due to the mystery of the father. A secret I would never tell. But a secret every person speculated about no matter how stalwart my silence on the matter.
It made Max and I quite the topic of conversation around here. Again, I was used to the talk. My mom, Maxine Lorraine Dawson was a tank of a woman. She’d managed the local strip club for my entire life after the owner had kicked her off the pole for getting knocked up with me.
Refusing to give me up, she’d happily moved to the office where she’d found her true calling in life—corralling strippers to get “their tight, no-good asses on the fucking stage already.” A phrase I’d heard repeatedly during the hours I spent there with her before I was old enough to stay home by myself.
“I guess not,” I agreed with Reggie, deflecting away from the quiet conjecture he asked about.
The problem was that I’d gotten pregnant so close to graduation night. There was a house full of suspects, but nobody had come forward to claim little Max as their own. And thankfully, he took after me more than his father. After infancy, I was positive I’d be found out.
But Max shared my dark, riotous hair and pale complexion. He had my slender nose and round jawline. And right now, with three missing front teeth, his dark-rimmed glasses and the cutest sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose and cheeks, he looked more like my grandpa in his old age than anyone in our town. Granted, he was tall for his age and way too fast. He was an exceptional athlete—something nobody would ever say about me. But so far, that hadn’t been enough to give away his paternal genes.
It was only the eyes that were different, that were so obviously his father’s, I was stunned not one person had guessed the right answer.
Or maybe they had, and th
ey were too afraid to say it out loud.
“Order up,” Reg said quietly, sliding RJ’s plate across the stainless steel counter.
“Thanks,” I mumbled gratefully.
Grabbing RJ’s healthy choice, I headed back to the dining room and found him turned around on his stool engaging Mick in reluctant conversation. RJ didn’t have much patience for Mick and his antics, another reason I respected RJ so much.
Usually, anyway.
“I haven’t heard anything about that,” RJ was saying.
“Heard it myself,” Mick insisted, nodding so quickly his double chin trembled with the effort. “Saw Darcy this morning. Said he was coming home by the end of the week.”
I accidentally dropped RJ’s plate, saving it only to have it clatter on the counter. He gave me a raised bushy eyebrow at my uncharacteristic clumsiness but nodded gratefully.
“I thought Levi Cole washed his hands of this town.”
“Rich wants him to take over the farm,” Mick added, a gleam of triumph in his eye for knowing something RJ didn’t. “With Logan gone, the responsibility of the farm goes to Levi.”
RJ tsked at the mention of the late, great Logan Cole, Clark City’s once golden boy.
I sucked in a sharp breath at the pain of listening to both of the brother’s names. Seven years after high school, I hadn’t had to hear about either of them in a good while. Sure, occasionally someone would speak of Logan with the kind of hushed reverence he deserved. And even more often someone would mention Levi. If it was the older generation they were more than likely recounting awful behavior of yesteryear. And if it was someone my age, it was usually with the awed jealousy of never being as cool or as cruel or as rich.
The Cole brothers had once ruled this town. High school superstars and heirs to the largest agricultural conglomerate in all of Nebraska, Cole Family Farms, they were legends in this little town.
Logan, the eldest brother, had once held my heart in his hands. Albeit he didn’t know he did. But he had. I’d loved him once upon a time. Or I had convinced myself I loved him anyway.
And then he’d gone and gotten himself killed in unfriendly fire somewhere in the desert. His death had rocked our town and devastated his family. I had been utterly crushed by the news. Not necessarily because I thought I loved him, although there was some of that. Most of my grief centered around fear though. Fear, and sharp but temporary pain.
The news was hard to swallow. He was a friend of mine once upon a time. He was a great guy. And his death had destroyed his family. I couldn’t help but mourn on their behalf. Yes, I missed him. And yes, his death had a giant impact on my life. But my heart truly broke for the mother that lost her son, for the father that lost his eldest boy… for the younger brother that lost his hero. I mourned most of all for Levi.
Levi was Logan’s younger brother, and at one time, my arch nemesis. While Logan was two years older than me, Levi was almost exactly my age. Our birthdays were only three days apart. A fact I’d had to face every year at school when he was celebrated as the celebrity he was, and I was forgotten about completely only days later.
That wasn’t why I hated him. During high school and after and even now, I preferred my invisibility. But it wasn’t just our birthdays that competed back then. Levi and I found ways to rival each other in absolutely every way. If he said the sky was blue, I argued that it was more light purple. If I said that it was raining outside, he declared that it was only sprinkling and I was being dramatic. When we were in high school, it didn’t matter what it was, we fought over everything.
We were even headed to rivaling colleges once upon a time. I was sure our scholastic contention would have only continued—at least in my own imagination. But the summer after graduation had changed everything.
After finding out I was pregnant, college was no longer an option for me. And Logan had died. Levi’s best friend and only brother had been unfairly taken from him. That fall, Levi left for college and he never returned. And I had never left. I’d stayed exactly where I’d always been.
I didn’t know where he’d gone or why he’d never come back, not even for a family holiday. Rumors floated around town of course. People were always whispering about his absence, the lost son of the town’s foremost family. But I couldn’t stomach listening to them. They were too painful. Too… reminiscent of everything I’d lost. I tuned out or ignored everything about him. I avoided him on all social media. And I banished him from my thoughts. It was as if he’d died with Logan. And for the most part, I’d been okay with his absence—even if the circumstances surrounding him staying away were tragic.
Maybe especially because of the horror that had happened.
It seemed unfair to rival someone who had lost so much.
And in a way, I’d lost enough as well. Maybe not a loved one. But I’d given up my plans, my future… my hopes and dreams and goals. I wasn’t a worthy opponent anymore. I was a shell of the girl I used to be. Just a ghost. Levi and I wouldn’t have anything to fight over anymore even if we happened to be in the same world again.
Not that it mattered now. If Levi Cole was really returning to Clark City, Nebraska, then I was going to go out of my way to make sure we never ever ran into each other.
Our high school competition was in the distant past. There would be no reason to see each other now. Or speak to each other. Or even look at each other.
So that was that.
2
Playdate Problems
My shift ended at two-thirty, so I had just enough time to hang my apron on the office wall, grab my purse, and head over to pick up Max from school.
When I’d first decided to forsake college and raise my baby, Rosie had let me work two four hour shifts a day, so I could be with Max as much as possible. I would come in early in the morning and cover the breakfast rush while my mom was home with Max. And then my mom’s neighbor, Mrs. Gomez, would watch him in the evening over the dinner rush. It hadn’t always been perfect, and I stressed Rosie out more than I helped her in those early years, but she was a kind enough woman to let me keep my job waitressing despite the baggage that came with me.
Lord knows why I did it. For as gracious as my boss was, my Rosie’s Diner and Donuts To Go paycheck wasn’t anything to get excited about. And farmers happened to be the cheapest people on the planet, so the tips were practically laughable unless the men were ogling. Then they tipped to help with their guilt.
The problem with living in a small town like Clark City was there weren’t a whole lot of job opportunities. Unless I wanted to be a farmhand or become a stripper, my options were limited to waitressing, bartending, or the Piggly Wiggly.
I pulled my little beater of a Toyota Corolla up to the curb outside the school to wait for Max. A few other moms dotted the sidewalk in clusters while they waited for their kids to come out. Heads turned at my arrival, the sputtering engine of my beater drawing their attention. Noses instantly raised in disgust, as if they smelled something bad.
Granted after working eight hours at Rosie’s, I didn’t smell great. But I wasn’t exactly steaming with shit either.
Letting out a long sigh, I reached for the radio and turned it up. Sir Sly did his musical thing and I relaxed into my seat, dropping my head back and closing my eyes.
This was the kind of reaction I was used to—had been used to since grade school. Ruby Dawson, the poor kid. Ruby Dawson, trailer trash.
Ruby Dawson, slut.
The slut moniker wasn’t new. A throwback from when I got pregnant with Max. In high school I was considered a prude, a desperate girl trying to run from the life she was born into. It was amazing what one night could do for a girl’s reputation. “It was only a matter of time…” became synonymous with me.
“You know who her mother is, don’t you?” and “What did you expect from a girl like that?” were also fan favorites.
Not that the town knew my sexual escapades—at least the escapades that had produced Max—were limited to one reckl
ess night.
A knock at my window made me jump, scattering memories that were better left in the past. I opened my eyes to find Jamie Mannor-Shultz standing there, bent over primly at the waist, like she was about to begin a cheer routine.
I reluctantly pushed the power window button and the glass made a loud sound of protest as it slowly moved down. Jamie watched it in alarm.
“I think your window’s broken,” she said in that perky way I remembered from high school. She had been a senior when I was a freshman and captain of the cheerleading squad. She’d married her high school sweetheart, the one-time great Jason Shultz, and was now cheer captain of the room mom squad.
Only the Lord knew why she’d hyphenated her name. Apparently, she’d wanted to hold onto her roots. Her dad was the mayor of Clark City. Also, he owned a car dealership forty-five minutes away in Grand Island, so they had lots of money. The Mannor name had some weight in this town. But so did the Shultz ranch.
Jamie and Jason had been a power couple once upon a time. Now they were power-napping parents. And since Jamie had lost the opportunity to control a squad of perky cheerleaders, she turned her Type A personality on manic moms.
Unfortunately, her daughter Harper and my son Max were in the same class. So, I had to deal with her on a semi-regular basis.
“Not yet,” I returned. “But it’s on its way there.”
Her pert smile turned into a concerned frown. “I know a guy if you want a mechanic recommendation. My dad has taken our cars to Don for years. He’s old, but he knows cars.”
I looked down at my chipped nails and tried to decide if her recommendation was sarcastic or serious. “Thanks, but, I uh, got a guy.” And by that I meant three trailers down, my mom’s friend Duane could help fix the window if I paid him in weed and didn’t mind parts from the junkyard.
He would also be willing to steal a car for me if I slept with him. He had been offering ever since I turned eighteen. My car situation was to the point where I was now considering the option.
Trailer Park Heart Page 3