Page 8 of The Drifter

The bell jingled over the door. I stepped into that room, and the room started clapping.

Not the way a stadium claps. Nothing like that. Just a couple dozen old men and a couple of wives, setting down their forks and putting their hands together, slow and dry, the way you'd clap for a boy who'd sung all the way through a hymn without losing his place. You did the right thing, son. That kind. Cowboy to cowboy. Texan to Texan.

I gave them a nod. Then, I sat back down in the corner booth, and I finished my eggs.

They'd gone cold. They were fine.

When I was done, I caught June's eye and asked for the check.

"It's on the house."

"No, ma'am."

"Mister—"

"June." I put my palm on the tabletop. "Come here a second."

She came. She was still white around the mouth and she was holding herself very straight, the way you do when you've decided you're going to fall apart later and not one minute sooner. I recognized it, because I've done it.

"My daddy always taught me to pay my way," I said.

She looked at me for a second, and something in her face gave. She nodded slow, because she knew what that meant. Everybody in that room would have known what it meant. In that country, it isn't a saying. It's the whole religion.

"All right," she said.

"One more thing." I nodded at the room behind her. At the four-top by the window and the counter and the old man in the ballcap. "I'd like to pay all of them. Every bill in the house. If that'd be all right with you."

She stopped.

And then she really looked at me. Not the way people look at a stranger who's done something. She looked at me the way a woman looks when she's deciding whether she's going to let you.

And standing in front of me in a small-town diner a hundred and some miles from home, that girl put her chin up—and, for about one second, she was my mother. Fierce and proud and not about to take a thing from anybody until she was good and satisfied it was being offered right.

I sat very still.

June nodded once. She went to the register. She stood there a while with her lip between her teeth, running the tickets, adding it up on a pad because the machine wouldn't do what she wanted. She came back and set the whole thing down in front of me in her round, careful handwriting.

I paid it in cash. I left a hefty tip.

And when I walked out, it was more than one woman who reached out and patted my arm on the way by.

Out in the lot, the heat had gotten serious. The Tahoe was gone. The two motorcycles were still nosed into the handicapped spot, and I expect they sat there a good long while.

Well.

Time to move on to the next place.

Get a shower, first. Then hit the road.

3

SASHA

Itook my hair down in the parking garage.

Every time. I'd get to my car and stand there with the door open and the heat rolling out of it, and I'd pull the pins out one at a time and drop them in the cupholder where they lived. I'd shake it loose and feel my scalp let go all at once, that ache you don't notice until it stops. Then, I'd sit down in the driver's seat and be a person again.

It was full dark by the time I crossed the Ravenel. The bridge came up out of the city and put the whole harbor under me, the water black and moving, the container cranes standing over in Mount Pleasant like something left behind by a bigger civilization. My hair moved around my face because I drove with the window down, which is a thing you can do when nobody in the car needs to look presentable.