Random (Going the Distance) (2 page)

The guy next to me says, “Can you tell if this is everybody?”

I frown and look around, counting. The couple eating pie, check. The family group we hauled out. A lone man drinking coffee, check. In my imagination, I scan the restaurant in the seconds before the crash and can’t think of anyone else. “I think so. We got lucky that it wasn’t earlier. An hour ago, the place was packed.”

The guy nods. He’s frowning, as if he’s trying to piece the scene together, too. “I can’t think of anybody else, either.”

The fire trucks arrive, and I rush over to direct them to Virginia. It takes the firefighters and EMTs ten minutes to get her out, and she’s not looking great when they do. They’re yelling and shoving bystanders out of the way. I’m standing beside her as they load her onto the ambulance. “Who should I call?” I ask.

She just gives me a glazed look.

“I’ll come see you later.” They pull her away and tuck her into the ambulance, and I stand there with a hollow chest, wondering what her kids will do while she’s in the hospital. Maybe I can find her purse. Maybe—

“Hey,” says a warm voice beside me, and I look up to see the guy again, staring at me in concern. “You’re looking a little pale. Why don’t you come sit down?”

I realize I’m really close to passing out, dizzy and so shaky I can hardly stand up. I let him lead me to a lone chair standing in the wreckage and sink onto it.

“Put your head between your knees.”

“Does that work?” I ask on my way down.

A slight chuckle slips out. “I have no idea. It’s what I’ve always heard.”

My body buzzes from the back of my neck down my spine, through my limbs. The edges of my vision go black.

His open palm falls hot between my shoulder blades, steadying me. “Take a deep breath and let it out slowly.”

Behind the prickling vision comes a wave of nausea. I take a breath in through my nose and blow it through my mouth, buzzing all over, fighting the need to throw up. It helps. I take another. And another.

“That’s it.”

After a minute I’m steady enough to try sitting up. “Thanks.”

“Better?”

He’s close. I notice about forty things all at once. His eyes, which really are an amazing color. His gorgeous cheekbones, which are high and tan, as if he spends a lot of time outside. His full lips, slightly tilted into a smile. He smells like sunshine and grass and something faintly spicy.

My body responds all over, all at once, every cell waking up and leaning toward him. I look at his mouth, and I notice he’s looking at me the same way. I look back up to his eyes.

“I’m Tyler,” he says.

“Jess.”

Then it hits me. I turn around and look at the mess. “I just lost my job, didn’t I?”

“Uh, yeah. For a while, anyway.”

I reach into my apron pocket, pull out the neatly folded bills and count them. $42, which is what will have to carry me through until I get my check Monday. Today is Wednesday—and anyway, that check has to go to rent, though I really need gas in my car, especially if I have to look for work. “Crap, crap, crap.”

“You’re probably allowed to really swear under the circumstances.”

I look up. “It won’t help.” I rub my face, a hollow terror rolling around my belly. What will I do? Then I shake it off, stand up and stick the money in my pocket. “I have to get another job.”

“I work at the Musical Spoon. You won’t make as much money, but I could put in a good word for you if you want to come over there later this afternoon.”

The Spoon is a hipster cafe/pub near downtown. They serve organic soups and vegan burgers, and a hundred kinds of tea in heavy pots and microbrews from all over the state. Folk singers play on the weekends, and they have poets read on Tuesday nights.

But my favorite thing is the walls lined with old books. Odd books. You can go there and read them as long as you want, and nobody cares if you sit in an armchair for three hours with one pot of tea. It’s that kind of place.

Which is why the tips suck.

“I love that place,” I say. “You work there?” He doesn’t look like a cook or a restaurant person at all. There’s something high end about him, though I can’t really say what it is. I would have thought maybe a grad student or something, which sort of makes sense. “Are you at Colorado College?”

His face goes hard, like it’s turned into a porcelain mask. “I was.”

“What were you studying?”

“Environmental science.”

I give him a half-smile, shooting him a sideways glance from under my eyelashes. Teasing. “Brains
and
beauty.”

The half-smile he gives back is small but real, his eyes connecting with mine. An electric rippling passes between us. His teeth are perfectly white and straight, the product of a childhood full of dental visits. I slide my tongue over a crooked eyetooth and then force myself to stop.

He says, “Give me your phone. I’ll put in my number. You can call me when you’re on the way to the Spoon.”

I pull out my phone, flip it open. Hand it over and dare him to say anything. He looks at it for a second. “Can you even text on this thing?”

“Of course.” I shrug. “I have to do the triple tap thing, but it works.”

“Triple tap?”

“Yeah, you know, tap the 1 three times for a ‘c.’”

He holds the phone in his hands and gives me a slow, unbelievably sexy smile. It’s mostly on one side. Sunlines crinkle on the left side. “I had a phone like this in high school.”

“Yeah?” I raise my eyebrows. “That makes you old!”

Tapping in his name and number, he nods. Sunlight dances in his thick brown hair, too long and streaked with gold. I notice the tanned skin of his throat at the opening of his shirt, catch a glimpse of his collarbone. He hands me back the phone and pulls his out. An iPhone, of course, sleek and black and not wrapped up in some fancy case, just cloaked in black glass. He brings up the screen, taps an icon and gives it to me. “Put yours in.”

I do it, flushing like he’s going to call me for a date.

Don’t flatter yourself
, I think. He’s from a whole different world, and must be at least twenty-four or twenty-five.

Not to mention the little fact that I already have a boyfriend.

I give him back the phone, and over his shoulder I see a news van and think of Henry, seeing this on TV and freaking out. “I’ve gotta call my step-dad.”

He gives me a nod. “Call me. I mean it, okay?”

“I’ll come in this afternoon.”

Chapter THREE

H
enry arrives ten minutes after my call. He drives an old, cartoonishly round blue pickup truck, the engine in perfect condition because that’s one of his hobbies. The exterior is a little less polished. Like Henry, who fell off a telephone pole seven years ago when a goose bit his hand. Pretty random.

He broke his back in seven places and hasn’t been able to really work since. He says he’s lucky to be walking.

Which is one way of looking at it.

I spy the truck and wave. He waves back, waiting for me because it’ll be too hard for him to get out, then get back in, and I can see that he has Ginger with him, one of his little dogs. She peeks over the steering wheel with her peach-colored head and black button eyes.

A cop has been asking me questions about what happened. I don’t really know what’s supposed to come next. “Is it okay if I just leave? My step-dad is here. I’d like to go home.”

“I’m sure that’s fine. Nothing you can do here.”

I take in the scene one more time, the gaping hole, the missing windows. My stomach hurts with the suddenness of the loss. Almost everyone is gone now—the injured whisked off to the hospital or patched up and sent home. Only the police and the reporters and the Wicked Witch are left. I feel like I should say something to her, even if she’s plainly hated my guts since I started here. But I kind of feel sorry for her, standing there in her wrecked business. A cigarette burns unnoticed in her hand as I come up. Her black eyes are blank.

“Hey, Tina. I’m really sorry this all happened. I just wanted to tell you that I’m leaving now.”

She just looks at me.

“I just thought you should know. I don’t know if we can get our checks next week or—”

“I don’t care about your fucking check, you stupid little bitch.”

I blink at the name-calling. She has other things on her mind, I get that, but this is a pretty important issue to me, too. “I have to pay my rent next Tuesday. I was counting on that check.”

She just turns her face away like she can’t hear me. For a long second I try to come up with something to say that will sum up how much I’ve hated her and hate her even more now, but nothing comes. Her shoulders are hunched and skinny and—

I turn away, taking off my apron one last time. I drop it on a broken table as I walk out. One small part of me is already panicking about the rent, but another is saying everything will look better after I get a good lunch in me. Since I moved out, Henry loves to buy me meals at restaurants. Though it’s not like we ate together a lot before that, since you can barely find the kitchen in his house. I wouldn’t eat in that room if you gave me a million dollars.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Henry says as I climb into his truck. A multicolored woven blanket from New Mexico covers the ratty old seat. Ginger dances over on her tiny legs to give me kisses. She’s mostly Pomeranian, probably mixed with poodle to give her that pale peach fur. Henry rescues little mixed breeds and currently has six. Or seven. I’m not sure. He started rescuing after my mom died.

“Can we go to Cracker Barrel?” I ask.

“You bet.” He takes a minute to peer at me. “How are you doing?”

A fast crush of freakout pours over me all at once, and tears well up in my throat. I stare through the windshield until the emotion goes away. “It was crazy,” I say, “but I’m all right, aside from being out of a job.”

“Oh, man, I didn’t even think about that.” He puts the truck into reverse and navigates around a TV van. “You got enough money?”

“I should be okay,” I lie. He lives on disability and whatever he can get fixing things, which is to say not that much.

“You can always come back home. Give me a day or two of warning and I’ll get things cleaned up for you.”

More like a century or two, but I smile. “Thanks, Henry. You know I love you.”

“I’m lucky that way.” He turns up the stereo and pulls into traffic, singing along to U2, his favorite band of all time.

For the first time since the crash I feel my body letting go. With Henry, I’m safe. He’s the one true person left in my life and, while I won’t ever live in his house, I’m glad that he’s around.

My mom met Henry only a few months after she got back to the States with me. She left my real dad in New Zealand, said she just couldn’t stand being so far from the world anymore and my dad wasn’t going to move. I was six. By the time I was eight, Henry and my mom were married and happy.

Henry parks in the shade and leaves the windows a quarter of the way down for Ginger. He uses a cane to lever himself out of the truck, and we walk slowly through the doors and sit down. He looks pretty good today—his curly black hair clean, his whiskers shaved, a clean t-shirt and jeans. The wrinkles around his eyes that say he’s in pain aren’t there, and I think he must be having a good day. He always
says
he is, but today I think it’s true.

That was the thing that made it hard to move out—I knew he needed me. Or somebody. I feel guilty about it sometimes, but it was just not possible to stay in that house. I used to have nightmares about drowning in junk and wake up gasping. In the middle of my senior year, I just couldn’t take it anymore and Henry didn’t protest my moving out. In fact, he helped me.

Now we see each other a lot, mostly for meals like this, or when he brings stuff over for my house. I go down to his house to check that he’s not gone over the line too far, and to use the computer once in awhile.

Once we’re settled at Cracker Barrel I excuse myself to wash my face and hands, because people are looking at me, then looking away. In the bathroom mirror I see that there’s dust over my forehead and a smear of what might be blood on my neck, and little bits of debris in my braid. I bend over and splash water on my face.

As if it’s happening all over again, I see the car coming in slow motion through the door, knocking things down…

I snap off the water, dry my face with paper towels and look myself in the eye. Dark blue irises, the eyelashes disappearing now that the mascara is gone. I think of Tyler looking at me so intently. What was he seeing? I straighten up, narrow my eyes a little. Oval face, maybe too long. Big mouth, way too big. I fake-smile and see the crooked eyetooth.

   The car crashes through the reflection in slow motion, coming through the door.

“Okay, no,” I say to myself, pulling the elastic band out of my long braid. “We aren’t doing this. Pull yourself together.”

As I work my fingers through my hair, little pieces of stuff fall out of it. Taking a comb out of my back pocket, I start at the bottom, around my rear end, and comb it upward, a little at a time. I washed it this morning, and it’s still a little damp, but the waves are pretty, making ribbons of the streaks of blonde and brown. It’s really long, like my mom’s, to the middle of my rear, and I leave it down, a magic cape of protection.

My mascara has smeared, and I wipe it away. There’s a little bruise on my right cheekbone that surprises me—I don’t remember anything smacking me.  

A woman comes in, herding what must be her granddaughter. The little girl looks at me. “Are you a princess?”

I smile at her. “Yes, actually. I’m Princess Jessica. Are you?”

She dimples. “No.”

Her grandma winks at me, and I go out to join Henry, and pig out on biscuits and gravy. This meal might have to last me a while.

* * *

Henry drops me off at Billy’s so I can pick up my car. The building has been cordoned off with police tape. In the bright light of the summer afternoon it looks sad, glass shattered and bits of wood hanging down, the parking lot empty. My car sits by itself in the back of the lot. I climb in and roll down the windows—by hand, since they’re not electric. I’m glad for the fact that at least the struts had to be replaced last week rather than this week, even if it did wipe out my bank account. Otherwise, I’d be out of a job with a broken car.