“I’m pregnant,” she said quickly. And all of a sudden the air vanished from the room.
I straightened. “To who?”
I didn’t know she was having sex.
Missy’s face came alive. “Johnny,” she said.
My mind worked quickly to put all the pieces together.
“You mean, Johnny Miller—your boss at the bar?”
She nodded and crossed the room to sit on my bed, tucking one leg under her.
“Oh, Cassidy, he’s treatin’ me real nice,” she gushed. “Always kissing me and stuff. Callin’ me beautiful, telling me he can’t stop thinking about me. He calls me his doll face. And he has this real nice way about him.”
“But he’s married!”
She raised her chin slightly. “He loves me.”
All I could do was gape at her.
“But… he’s married!” I reminded her again.
A storm cloud passed over her lovely face. “He’s going to leave his wife for me.”
“Did he say that?”
“Yes. Last night. When we were making love.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
Missy took my hand. “Please be excited for me, Cassidy. I’m so happy. Please say you’ll stay and help me with the baby. I know you don’t like it here. I know Craig makes you feel uncomfortable. But Johnny and I will get a house and you can come live with us. You can help me with the baby.” She shook my hands because I was non-responsive. “Please say you’ll stay and help me.”
Slowly, I turned my head to look at her. I felt like the wind had been kicked out of me. I hadn’t seen this coming.
I owed Missy a lot. She taught me how to survive on nothing as we traveled from one adventure to another. She also saved my life. Last year when we were traveling from Scottsdale to Phoenix, the car we were riding in crashed and flipped on an almost empty desert highway. I was trapped in the front seat, hanging upside down and unconscious. A fire started in the engine and smoke began to fill the car. Missy was able to crawl out her window. When I came to, she was undoing my seatbelt and pulling me from the wreckage while the driver was on the phone to the police. A minute later the car erupted into a ball of fire.
I owed her my life. I couldn’t leave her now when she needed me.
“Of course I’ll stay and help,” I said, forcing a smile.
Suddenly, getting out of Destiny was an impossibility, and I had to fight back the nausea when the realization hit me.
I was stuck here.
CASSIDY
Two days later, I started work at a diner in town.
It was only three hours a day, four days a week. The money was bad, but despite being on the wrong side of the river where the homes were trailers and there were more bars than stores, most of the customers were good tippers.
Plus, Molly Jenkins, the owner, was kind of cool. Somewhere in her sixties, she flustered easily and was angry, prone to eye-rolling and head-shaking, but she hadn’t lost her sense of humor, even after life had given her two dud husbands and three no-hope kids. She was kind. Funny. She also knew a desperate case when she saw one. Because even though I had absolutely no waitressing experience whatsoever, she threw me a lifeline and gave me a job.
She also threw in breakfast. Because according to her, I was too skinny and looked like I would disappear if I turned sideways. So before my shift started, she all but force-fed a bowl of grits and gravy into me. Which was good because when I’d gone to make toast before work, I discovered Craig and Missy had eaten all the bread.
There was one other waitress besides me, Molly’s grand-niece Daisy, a chatty drama queen who liked her uniform as tight as it was short and her heels as high as they were shiny. She wore a lot of makeup and chewed gum like it was exercise. She was fun, confident, and flirty. Straight away, she had my back. When I spilled milk on the lap of a rather pissed-off trucker, she swooped in to take care of matters, and after a lot of flirting and eyelash batting, she had him convinced it was completely his fault and not mine. She was good at her job. Great at PR. And had the opposite sex eating out of her hand.
She made my first day fun.
Not to mention saved my ass more than a couple of times.
Because, hell, waitressing was a lot harder than it looked.
After the lunch crowd cleared and the afternoon diners came and went, Daisy and I heard the approaching rumble of Harleys. We stood at the window, and Daisy pulled down the curtain for us to watch five bikers rumble past, all of them looking like formidable gods with their dark glasses and cuts as they controlled big metallic beasts between their legs. We watched as they disappeared down the street to where they pulled up to a cigar bar, reversing their bikes to park in front of the curb.