How to Save a Life(49)

I slept fitfully, afraid he’d burn the house down from under me. At dawn, I crept downstairs. Lee was passed out on the living room couch with an empty bottle of Wild Turkey in his lap.

The kitchen was a f*cking disaster, the table littered with beer bottles, chicken bones, and industrial household chemicals. My growling stomach went silent. No point trying to scrounge up breakfast here. The diner was a better bet anyway. I’d let Lee stay unconscious a little longer and hope the booze would drown out the itch for another high.

I arrived at the diner thirty minutes early for my 7 a.m. shift. Patty was already there marrying ketchups, her back to me, though I imagined a few of her Medusa head snakes turning to hiss at me.

“You’re early,” she said when she saw me. “You take care of my boy? Get him breakfast?”

“He wasn’t hungry.” I headed for the back room.

Patty followed me. “Why not? He’s a man. Men need to eat.”

I turned around and stared down her death glare with my own exhausted eyes. “He got high last night after everyone left. Then he drank himself down, passed out on the couch and that’s where I left him.”

Patty straightened and sniffed, crossing her arms over her bony chest. She hated that she was losing her son to drugs. Her worry was both maternal and practical: legally, the diner belonged to Lee. Before meth took over his life, he ran the cash register and shot the shit with the locals. Now, Patty managed the place, single-handedly, working too many double-shifts for a lady pushing seventy. I took as many as I could, to help save up more money for my escape but Patty still got stuck when Lee didn’t show up. She was trapped, the same way I was. Her only coping strategy was to take the frustration out on me.

“You take care of my boy,” she snapped. “That’s your job. It’s only reason you got this job. You gotta keep him happy. Do you hear?”

I heard. And saw. The stone-wall gray of her eyes was crumbling with desperation. As Patty flounced out of the back room, I almost felt sorry for her.

The breakfast rush was on. Half a dozen tables were seated; Patty took one half of the small diner; I took the other.

I started at a table in my section where a lone guy had his face in the menu.

“Morning,” I said. “Ready to order?”

He set the menu down, looked up at me and smiled. “Hi, Jo.”

He smiled a beautiful smile, the one that made me feel as if I were a gift fallen in his lap.

“Hi, Jo,” he said, pulling me close.

“Hi, Evan,” I said. Then we were kissing…

My order pad fell from my hands. The pen bounced off the table, hit the ground and rolled away.

Evan.

Here. Right here. Right now. Looking at me.

I stared at this mirage, my mouth agape, my exhausted brain trying to work out if he were real or a figment of my desperate imagination.

His face was filled out, more chiseled, yet leaner too. His jawline squared and shadowed with beard growth. His blond hair was longer, pulled back in a short ponytail that curled in on itself at the collar of his denim jacket. Broader shoulders in that jacket. Thicker arms on the table in front of him.

His body had changed, but his eyes were the same shade of sky blue. Beautiful, kind eyes. Not laced with suspicion or contempt. Not glassy and empty from drugs. They looked tired. Full. Like he’d seen more than he’d wanted to in the past four years. I recognized that kind of heaviness. I saw it in my own reflection every morning. I saw it reflected now in Evan’s warm, weary gaze.

Evan.

The same beautiful boy I’d known, now transformed into a ruggedly handsome twenty-two year old man. The same kindness in his eyes and the inherent goodness he radiated. Time-tested and a bit frayed. But still there. A glut of emotion swamped me. Flashes of memory, shards of sensation. Feeling safe, feeling taken care of, feeling happy…

Evan Salinger stared at me and I stared down at him. Everything we’d had and everything we’d lost sitting right there in the short distance between us. All I had to do was reach through that cloud of time and memory, touch him and it would all come back…

My hand raised on its own, fingers reaching out to his shoulder.

“Evan,” I whispered.

“It’s me, Jo,” he whispered back.

His hand rose to touch mine. Our fingers reached. Then a gale of laughter erupted from a table in Patty’s section. The diner resolved around me. I snatched my hand away and glanced around, the blood racing through my veins.

“What are you doing here?” I said, fighting for breath and calm.

“You called me,” Evan said.

“You… I called you?”

“Can you sit? Have a cup of coffee with me?”

I started to slide into the opposite chair and damn if it didn’t feel like climbing into a lifeboat as the ship sank from underneath me. But before I touched the seat, I remembered where I was. I peeked over my shoulder. Patty was staring at me with that dagger glare. I was more worried about her wagging tongue.

I picked up my notepad and the pen from the floor, nearly whacking my head on the table as I straightened up. “I can’t.” I set my pen to paper. “What can I get you?”

Evan’s blue eyes had followed mine to Patty and back. He nodded and said, “Eggs up, bacon, coffee.”

“Got it.” I jotted the order down, my shaking hand turning my normally neat handwriting to chicken scratch.