The Familiar Dark(35)

I spun around, startling him enough that this time he was the one to take a step backward. But still too close to me. “I didn’t lie.”

“Yes, you did. Because I’ve been right here, Eve, all this time. All these years.”

“No. Zachary Logan has been here all this time. With his button-down shirts and his boat dealership and his pretty wife and daughter.” I stabbed into his chest with my finger, snatched my hand away the second I made contact. “I don’t know that guy. I don’t recognize him. He’s nothing to me.” I reached behind me and grabbed the counter with both hands, steadying myself. “I didn’t lie,” I repeated.

“Okay,” Zach said, with a little smile. “Omitted, then.” He closed the distance between us, his body almost pressed up against mine. “You recognize me now?” he asked, voice soft.

I looked at him, really looked at him, in a way I hadn’t in years. Letting my eyes linger instead of skipping over him like a busted needle on a record player, getting only the vaguest impression before moving on. And tonight he was as close to my memory as he’d ever been, with his dark hair tousled and messy, his faded blue T-shirt, his smell of sweat and aftershave. He looked real to me for the first time in years.

“Do you?” he asked again.

“Yes,” I whispered.

When he kissed me, it was like tumbling off a cliff. Falling headfirst into the past. Time unspooling in reverse so that we both were impossibly young again, Junie a speck on some future horizon we hadn’t even imagined yet. And we tore at each other as if we could somehow start over, re-create what had already happened and make it turn out differently this time around, undo what had already been done.

But in the end, with my lips swollen from his mouth, his back marked by my nails, nothing had changed. It was too late. We were still strangers. And our daughter was still dead.





FOURTEEN


I might have lied to Land about never having seen Junie’s father again, but the rest of the story was true. It was a fuck-and-run. A one-night stand. No-strings-attached sex. It was all those things, but more than that, too. Even before the reality of Junie was born, that night was always more than its on-paper definition.

Sunday nights at the diner were slow. Dinner service stopped at five, and only drinks and desserts were available until the doors closed at eight. It was the only night Thomas ever got a break, and he always drove away at five o’clock on the dot, leaving a single waitress to man the diner. It was a shit shift, no tips because there were never more than a couple of customers, at most. Because I was the newest waitress, hired at the start of summer, I was the one working that sticky mid-July night when Zach Logan walked through the door.

I’d never seen him before, glanced through the plate glass window and realized I’d never seen his dark blue SUV, either. He wasn’t from around here, which made him instantly interesting. And his looks didn’t hurt, either. Slow half smile when he saw me, hair ruffled from the wind, slight farmer’s tan on his neck where his T-shirt pulled away from his skin. “You open?” he asked, swinging onto a counter stool before I answered.

“We close in five minutes,” I told him. I’d never been shy, but I moved through life with a certain watchfulness, wary of unexpected movements, faces. But something about him drew me closer. I was almost amused, observing myself from a distance. So this was attraction. I’d slept with a half dozen guys already, had endured untold numbers of sloppy make-out sessions behind the school or in the woods near my mama’s trailer. Always waiting for that buzzing in my belly, that heat in my cheeks that happened to other people. And here it was. Came sauntering right through the diner door when I’d least expected it.

I served him a piece of key lime pie and a cup of lukewarm coffee, locked the front doors and put out the Closed sign while he ate. Accepted his invitation to sit next to him, tried not to notice the way the tiny hairs on my arm stood up every time his hand brushed against my skin while we talked.

He told me he was about to start his senior year in college, that he was from Illinois, passing through Barren Springs. On his way to somewhere better, I’d assumed. Chicago, he confirmed, where he had a summer internship. I don’t remember what I said in return. Some sterilized version of my own truth. I know I lied about my age, thinking that seventeen seemed too young to his twenty-one, might make him skittish and not likely to act on the spark I saw in his eyes. Not dumb enough to believe I’d ever see him again, but still wanting this moment, this night. This boy who didn’t belong here, a piece of something that was foreign and different and just for me. A boy who didn’t know my mama or my history. A boy who hadn’t already written my entire story the second he laid eyes on me.

When I got up to turn off the lights, I let him follow me. Welcomed his hand sneaking under my skirt as the diner plunged into semidarkness. Closed my eyes and pretended I had a different life when he kissed me, the taste of whipped cream on his tongue. With him I was simply a girl who liked a boy. I wasn’t Cal Taggert’s less-attractive sister. I didn’t have a fading bruise on my cheek from my mama’s backhand. I wasn’t destined to spend the rest of my life working in this diner, always poor and always hungry for something more, even if I lacked the drive to reach for it. For those few hours, I let go of myself, and I was someone new.

When he drove away, sometime after midnight, I had no expectation of ever seeing him again. I didn’t pine for him, or daydream about what might have been. I’d never been that girl, and one night with Zach hadn’t changed that. The real world beyond Barren Springs had swallowed him up, taillights fading into the dark, and I’d stayed behind. And that’s the way it was always going to be. I didn’t waste time wishing for a different ending, even after I held the positive pregnancy test in my hand.