Gun Shy(16)

They pull into the parking lot of the Grill in gleaming rental cars because they’ve flown in because they had to move that far away to forget how desolate this place is. What they’ve since tinged with nostalgia and rose-tinted memory — I grew up in the cutest little place! — is the empty present for the rest of us.

Visit the past briefly and go back to your shiny new life, but this is my life, and when the others who were planted here, the ones I grew up beside, the ones I was better than, look at me with an edge of discomfort in their eyes, it takes every bit of willpower I possess to not scratch their eyes out with my chipped fingernails.

Grow where you’re planted, the saying goes, but everything withers and dies here in winter. Even in summer, it’s winter for me. It’s been winter for eight years. I have long since shed my petals and burrowed beneath the layer of snow that smothers this place.

My mom was big into the law of attraction. She had all those The Secret books, the DVDs, the notebooks. She was a self-proclaimed self-help junkie before that shit was mainstream. She always told me that focusing on something makes it come true. But I’ve been focusing on getting out of Gun Creek for probably ten years now, and I’m still here. My manifesting game is strong, though, because it seems I’ve attracted the very thing I didn’t want to deal with today.

Motherfucker.

Shelly Rutherford and Chase Thomas. They’re in a booth in my section, in the back, away from the front windows. It’s quieter back here and the tables turn over less, so I earn less, but at least I don’t have to look at the highway every time I serve somebody.

Shelly was head cheerleader in our graduating class; Chase was the linebacker, second in skill only to Leo. Shelly’s still beautiful, tanned and slim without being painfully thin, the only sign of weight on her body a gigantic baby belly that looks like it’s about to pop right here in the diner. Chase chats to her and rubs her belly affectionately as their three daughters, all less than five years old, jump on the booth seats and throw sugar packets everywhere.

I have to see them every time they come back into town, but usually, I’m better at hiding. Usually, there is more staff on to take their table, every time they come home with a brand new baby and a great big rental car and the diamond rock on her hand so big, it’s obscene. I see his hand on her stomach and I can’t look anymore. Which is hard because it’s at that moment that Shelly sees me.

Her eyes go wide with shock before the pity settles into them. Fuck you, bitch. “Cassie,” she says, pushing Chase’s hand away and arranging her pretty face into a smile just for me. “It’s so good to see you. How are you?”

My best friend. She’s a stranger, now.

I smile, hoping the mint is doing its job and my vomit breath isn’t noticeable. “I’m good,” I lie, glancing at Chase, who offers his own plastic smile and a wave. “I’m really good.”

We make small talk before I take their orders; Shelly is a natural at being able to speak to anybody. She always was. She was my best friend from kindergarten all through school; apart from her annual visits back to her family, we haven’t spoken since the day she moved out of town six years ago to follow Chase to the college Leo and I had picked.

“How’s your mom?” Shelly asks.

“She’s doing much better,” I lie. “Her doctors say she could wake up any day now.”

Shelly glances at Chase; they might think I don’t notice the invisible words that flow between them, but I’m all about invisible words. They think I’m lying.

The ding from the kitchen saves me. “I’ll be right back,” I say, smoothing my apron as I walk back to the pass and grab a bunch of plates.

While I’m waiting for Eddy, the cook, to finish plating up a Dana’s Big Breakfast, Amanda, the owner’s daughter, joins me at the pass. Amanda is a registered nurse, a few years younger than my mom, and she only covers shifts at the diner when her parents, Dana and Bill, are traveling or unwell. She’s pretty, with red hair that falls in loose curls down her back, a smattering of freckles across her pale face, and big, pale-blue eyes that like to linger on my stepfather when he comes to pick me up from my shift. Or when she comes to our house. She does a couple shifts a week as Mom’s home-care nurse, bathing her, moving her to avoid bedsores, and making sure her meds are all adjusted correctly to keep her out of pain. I’ve seen how little Damon pays her — all he can afford, according to him — and I’m pretty sure she only does it because she and my mother used to be close. Plus, she likes my stepfather. She always manages to be getting off shift as he’s arriving to pick me up, or dropping things around at the house close to dinner time.

The police station is a few hundred yards away from the diner, which makes it convenient for Damon. He’s here a lot, more than he needs to be. With the meth problem in this town, he and Deputy McCallister have to be everywhere. I know where Nurse Amanda wants him. In her bed. She’s also a woman of morals, even at the ripe age of thirty-nine, and I know she doesn’t want to move onto my mother’s turf until she’s in the ground. She’s been patient. My mother’s been on the verge of dying for eight years now.

Nobody wants to be the whore that sleeps with a woman’s husband while she’s comatose and having a machine breathe for her, but also, nobody else would wait so long. She’s kind of lovely, and kind of pathetic.