Page 44 of And Now, Back to You

CHAPTER 10

JACKSON

“I’ll have the turkey sandwich on whole wheat, not white. And fries instead of mashed potatoes, but not if they’re breaded. If they’re breaded, I’ll do the mashed potatoes. Oh, and the salad with the Caesar dressing. But not if it’s dressing from the bottle. Homemade only, please.”

I hand over the menu to the unimpressed waitress. She smacks her gum and stares at me. “Of course the dressing is homemade. This is a diner, sweetheart, not a McDonald’s.”

I fold my hands together, not exactly inspired by how her pen hasn’t taken a single note. This place is exactly as expected. Chipped vinyl flooring. An octogenarian with bright blue hair and ten thousand pounds of mascara manning the cash register. Leather booth seats that squeak when you move and miniature jukeboxes at the end of every table.

“We make everything in-house,” our waitress continues. “Including the Caesar.”

“Excellent, thank you.”

“Mashed potatoes got skins,” she adds, like she expects me to change my mind and list out another five to ten contingencies. But I’ve exhausted the lot of them, and I don’t like French fries that much anyway.

“That’s fine,” I say.

Our waitress turns wordlessly to Delilah, arching one penciled-on eyebrow. “Well,” she says. Another snap of her gum. “What about you?”

Delilah hands over her menu without looking away from me. She’s been doing that for most of this trip. Studying me like she wants to peel back my layers and poke around underneath.

“I’ll have the turkey sandwich with fries. No additions or modifications, thank you.” The waitress disappears back into the kitchen and Delilah scrunches her nose. She’s still wearing my jacket, draped over her shoulders like a cape. I know she’s been teasing me about my timetable, but if she reached into the left pocket, she’d find exactly that, folded into neat squares and highlighted to within an inch of its life.

“Really stepped outside your comfort zone with that order, huh.”

I reach for the sugar packets, slowly arranging them by height and color. “I know what I like.”

“You order food like a serial killer.”

I swap a Sweet’N Low with a Sugar in the Raw, then change my mind and switch them back.

“I’m particular,” I explain. “I like things done a certain way. And the sign said the turkey sandwich was famous.”

I’m particularly particular when it feels like I’m losing control of everything else. I am currently hurtling toward a massive winter storm in the mountains with my polar opposite as company. I’m supposed to go on live television and explain—in clear and concise terms—what’s happening. I left my sisters behind for the first time since I assumed custody, and my mother won’t stop sending me text messages from random, unknown numbers, asking the most asinine questions.

My head is in shambles, and so I ordered the mashed potatoes.

With skins.

Delilah drops her chin into her hand. “I’ll accept that answer.” She takes a noisy slurp of her chocolate milkshake. The one she politely inquired about as soon as we walked through the front door (“You don’t happen to have chocolate milkshakes, do you?”) and was somehow waiting for her at our table, like a foreign dignitary sitting down to a state dinner. I’ll never understand how she draws people in and makes them love her, all with a sunny smile and a flick of her long hair.

She smacks her lips. “For now,” she adds, a thin undercurrent of warning in her voice.

“Noted,” I answer.

So far, this trip is both exactly what I expected and nothing like I planned. I thought Delilah would babble incessantly for the duration of our time in the car, some vapid, sugary-sweet commentary on the passing pine trees or gas station snacks. And while she did deliver a fifteen-minute monologue about the underrated power of a good peach ring, she’s otherwise largely kept to herself.

“Tell me about your sisters,” she demands from the other side of the table, reaching up to toy with the button at the base of her throat.

“Um,” I say, distracted. She’s wearing a soft-looking V-neck sweater that clings to all her curves, so different from her structured broadcast dresses. My eyes dipped once when she was climbing into the van and I pinched myself so hard, I still have the mark on my wrist. The last thing I need is to start looking at Delilah Stewart.

But holding that line is borderline impossible with the way she keeps dancing her fingers along the top of her chest. She closes the snap then undoes it again. Open. Closed.

My jaw clenches tight.

“How old are they?” she asks.

I have to forcibly drag my brain back into the conversation. “What?”