“You can’t catch a disease from a stuffed armadillo. Just live ones.” She scratched it behind the ears, then spoke in a baby voice, “You wouldn’t give me leprosy, would you?”
“It looks a little…off.” The armadillo gawked back at Zadie, one eye noticeably higher than the other.
“I think he’s cute,” Finn countered. “Just look at how happy he is.” Whoever had immortalized this particular armadillo had formed its mouth into a grotesque smile. Zadie shook her head in disgust.
A hostess wearing a red-and-white-checked gingham shirt greeted them at the podium. “I see you’ve met Luanne!” she said, nodding at the armadillo.
“Oh, yes. We’re best buds,” Finn answered.
She chuckled. “Just the two of you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Follow me.” The hostess pulled out two menus from a basket hanging under Luanne’s tail and gestured for the girls to follow her through a pair of swinging saloon doors into the main dining area. She walked them over to a booth pushed up against a wood-paneled wall decorated with framed portraits of Hollywood cowboys. “Your server will be right with you.”
Zadie gazed up at a signed picture of Burt Lancaster. “They committed to their theme. I’ll give them—”
A very loud ringing sound interrupted her. “Order up!” cried a voice. Zadie clapped her hands over her ears. “Shit! What was that?”
“The dinner bell.” Finn laughed and pointed to a cast-iron triangle swinging from the kitchen pass-through window.
Zadie’s face sank. “Do you think they’re going to do that every time an order comes out?”
Finn shrugged. “Oh, come on. It’s fun!”
“Ugh. Well, if the coffee doesn’t wake me up, that will.”
The crumpled ten-dollar bill in Zadie’s pocket bought each of the girls a short stack and a side of bacon, a glass of orange juice for Finn, and another cup of coffee for Zadie. Their ears were still ringing from the dinner bell when the waitress placed their steaming plates on the table. Finn promptly drowned hers in syrup like she was trying to put out a fire.
“So what has Dustin been up to?” she asked, passing Zadie the syrup dispenser. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”
Zadie realized that she hadn’t thought about Dustin once since they’d started driving. The thought was both simultaneously liberating and depressing. “Oh, uhhh… we broke up.”
Finn looked up, startled. “What? Seriously?”
She nodded. “A few days ago.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I was the one who called it off.” Zadie wondered if she appeared sad. She didn’tfeelparticularly sad—not over Dustin, anyway.
“Damn…” Finn looked reflective for a moment. “But he was so good at caricatures.”
Zadie raised an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting I shouldn’t have broken up with him because he’s a good cartoonist?”
“I’m just saying. He never drew one of me, and I kinda wanted one,” Finn continued, mouth full. “Why’d you break up with him?”
It was a simple question with a Rubik’s Cube of an answer. “Because…” Zadie turned it over in her head, trying out different combinations of words that essentially meantI didn’t think he’d be a good fatherwithout letting it spill that she was pregnant. The phrase she decided to go with was: “He didn’t have his shit together.”
“I get that,” Finn said. “He never struck me as the responsible type.”
“Me neither. It didn’t used to bother me as much before—” Zadie paused as she debated whether the mustard-colored booth under the watchful eye of Luanne the Armadillo was the right venue to tell her sister the big news. Thankfully, the waitress swooped in atjust that moment to refill Zadie’s coffee. “Can I interest you girls in anything else?”
“Just the check, please,” Zadie answered, then wiggled her finger in her right ear as if that would somehow cure her of her dinner-bell tinnitus.
“So what’ve we got planned for today?”
“You tell me,” Zadie said, emptying her coffee cup. “You’re the reason we’re out here.”