Zoe glances back to where he was sitting. The tip is already there. Nothing to lose.
“Well, you’re a good talker, anyway.”
She hands him his change and he fans the bills once again, inserting his change in between. He shoves the wallet in his hip pocket and smiles, his ham-hock hands dangling at his sides. “You have a good evening now, you hear?” he says and leaves.
Zoe heads straight to his seat to retrieve her tip. Five dollars? It is three times what he should have left. Grandma’s accusation fills her head. Ungrateful. Is she? Was he just trying to be friendly? Did the poor perv just want to be noticed? Was that too much to ask? Just to be noticed? The way she wants the guy at the end of the counter to notice her? Isn’t that all anyone really wants—someone’s eyes to look into you instead of through you?
She watches Charisse fill the book guy’s water glass. He lifts his gaze from his book, smiles, and thanks her. Charisse is married with three kids. She can never appreciate that smile like I can, Zoe thinks. But life is never fair, never even, never sensible. Look at Mama and Daddy. They fought like cats and dogs, but Grandma says Daddy was the love of Mama’s life. If love is a lot of fighting and pain, then maybe life does make sense after all.
She runs her hands through the tips in her pocket. She knows to the penny how much money is there. Exactly $13.75. Her groveling, jumping, and smiles didn’t get her far, and now her shift is over. Never even, never fair. After she tips the cook and pays the garage, she will have $5.25 to last her until Sunday when she works again.
Mama probably drinks away that much in a day, she thinks.
She wraps two biscuits in a napkin and fills a paper cup with orange juice before she leaves. She will put those in her refrigerator. Her refrigerator. I am grateful. I am.
She takes a last look at the guy at the end of the counter. He is studying his book again, his fingers running down the page. She wishes she was half as interesting as his book. She clocks out and leaves, walking through Murray’s parking lot past the grimy oil pump she usually parks next to. Like the others that sprinkle the Ruby community in odd, unexpected places, it has a matching grimy chain-link fence around it. It groans its usual greeting. A groan that always seems to be pleading, always sad. She offers her usual greeting in return.
“Someday,” she whispers. “Someday.”
Sixteen
She takes a detour.
It’s for the coffee can, she thinks. For the thousand pennies that must be in the coffee can. It’s hers after all. Just a quick detour to get what is hers.
The gate still swings open. Light glows through yellowed shades.
She pushes the door open. “Mama?” she whispers, so softly it hardly creases the air.
There is no answer. She didn’t expect there would be. She goes to her closet and quietly slides the door open. The old coffee can, heavy with pennies, grates and chinks as she slides it from her shelf. She tucks it into the nook of one arm and slides the closet shut with the other. Mama will never know she was here. Her breath barely rises in her
chest as she walks down the hallway, but then she stops.
Why, Zoe? Why don’t you just leave? Run?
But something pulls inside of her. It feels like Daddy, whispering in her ear, Just keep an eye on Kyle for a few minutes, a few minutes, I’ll be back, keep him safe for me, that’s a good girl, my good little Zoe.
She closes her eyes, but it doesn’t make the pulling go away. She wants to throw the coffee can against the wall and hear a thousand clattering pennies shatter the silence, a thousand tinny voices falling to the floor, spinning, rolling out of control, anything but Daddy’s whispers.
She hugs the can closer and reaches for Mama’s doorknob. A quick look. That’s all. Just to be sure. She opens the door a sliver and then a little farther. Rumpled sheets and nothing more.
But the lights are on.
“Mama?” she whispers. She goes to the closet, but it is empty, too.
“It’s so late,” she says. And then she knows she must check one more place. A place that haunts her, even in her dreams, and the coffee can becomes a heavy weight but not heavy enough to keep her feet from moving to the bathroom. She is tired. She doesn’t want to go. She has looked too many times, and she doesn’t want to look anymore. It makes her crazy, and she probably is, she is, to let it hold on to her, to clamp down on her like a trap that is sprung over and over again, but, keep an eye on her, Zoe, watch out for her, where is she, where is she, where the fucking hell is she?
And she tears back the shower curtain to see an empty white bathtub.
Nothing more.
She clutches the coffee can, her fingers running up and down the ridges like she is calming Kyle by rubbing his head, like she is rubbing the fear right out of him.
Except for the muffled strum of her fingers against metal, the house is still, quiet, but then she hears another sound, this one coming from deep within. A rumbling furrow slides through her soul, sliding into her brain, a furrow that separates one part of her heart from the other.
And then it is quiet again.
Seventeen