Bet on It (5)

Aja didn’t get a number from one of her sheets called until the eighth ball was pulled.

“B90—the end of the line.”

Aja loved the quirky, sometimes totally bizarre sayings that accompanied the numbers in bingo. When the number 90 was called, it was accompanied by the phrase “top of the shop” or the “end of the line.” Not because the game was over, but because 90 was the last number used in a bingo roll call. There was “legs 11” for the number 11 simply because two ones next to each other looked like a pair of legs. There was also “buckle my shoe,” which came after the number 32, because it rhymed.

There was technically a phrase for every number in the roll, but the callers themselves decided which ones to use and when. Aja had heard them hundreds of times by now and she still got a kick out of them. She didn’t think they’d ever get old.

She took a peek at Walker’s stack and immediately spotted the same number, right there on top. He was running his eyes over the cards frantically, completely missing it. Moving her pinkie finger across the table, she slid it towards the little square on the upper far left of the top card. The second she touched the square she heard his intake of breath.

“Thank you,” he mouthed, and the gratitude in his eyes was so palpable it made her throat tighten.

She had no idea what came over her. The pluckiness that welled up inside was something she hadn’t felt in … forever. It didn’t sit with her for long though, spending only enough time in her chest for her to shoot Walker a wink of her own. Then, it was gone. Leaving her with a racing heart and a look from the man next to her that made her light-headed.





Chapter 3


Outside of his grandmother, there were exactly three things that Walker had missed about Greenbelt, South Carolina. The first was the lack of traffic. In Charleston, he had to leave home nearly twenty minutes early to get to work on time even though he lived a five-minute drive from the office. In Greenbelt, it wasn’t uncommon to get clear across town without catching a single red light.

The second was the quiet. He’d known what he was getting himself into when he’d decided to move to the largest city in the state, but he’d underestimated the noise. He lived downtown, in an older building near the city’s center, and something was always happening. Always. Here, things were quiet more often than not. He never had to worry about being woken up by a music festival two miles away or a news helicopter flying overhead. There was only sweet country silence in the woods next to Gram’s place.

And last, there was the peach cobbler at Minnie’s Diner.

Normally he hated cooked fruit. It was too soft and too mushy and no matter what it was put in, way too damn sweet. But Minnie’s cobbler had a special place in his heart.

He’d been six the first time he’d had it. The night before, he and his father, Benny, had been pulled over by the cops while driving home. The entire memory was blurry for Walker—whether because of his age or the trauma, he didn’t know. One second, he was buckled into the front seat of whatever hooptie his dad had gotten his hands on, and the next, he was standing on the curb watching Benny get ushered into a police car for possession of a controlled substance. They hadn’t taken Walker down to the station, and since his mother had split town years before, there was only one person to call.

Gram had picked him up right at the scene. The next day, she’d forced him out of bed early, cleaned him up, and taken him to Minnie’s, where she’d let him pick whatever he wanted for breakfast, nutrition and propriety be damned. He’d chosen cobbler. It wasn’t the first time Walker had eaten dessert for breakfast, but it was the first time it hadn’t made him feel all wrong inside.

Crisp, buttery crust; warm peaches covered in syrupy goodness; and ice cream to top it all off. It may have sounded ridiculous, but that cobbler had healed him. Not of his shaky childhood or the trauma it left him with, but the place in him that had never known true satisfaction before.

That feeling had never really gone away, even if he had. He’d been chasing it in peach cobblers around the state for over a decade and hadn’t been able to recreate it in a single one. Which was why he found himself standing in front of the Minnie’s dessert counter on an early Friday afternoon a week after arriving in town.

He’d shown up at the perfect time; heat was rising off the freshly made cobbler and steaming up the glass display case. He was sure the other treats were incredible too, but Walker’s eyes were on the only prize that mattered.

“Got your eye on somethin’ special, Sugar?”

He recognized the voice immediately. There was a singularly unique cadence, high and nasally, with an accent that was clearly exaggerated. At one point he’d been used to hearing it. Now it sent a shock through his system that made him jerk his head up.

Louise Smith hadn’t changed much in the twelve years he’d been gone. She’d kept the same dark, wispy bangs across her forehead, still used foundation a couple shades too dark for her pale skin and hadn’t bothered to switch up the dark purple lipstick she’d always worn. She would have been in her mid-fifties by now, and he could see lines and wear in her face that hadn’t been there before. Otherwise she was exactly the same. Almost as if she’d been preserved in time the moment his Greyhound bus had left the city limits. She looked him over but didn’t seem to recognize him.