Page 8 of Run Rabbit Run

Gramps' rifle.

A Winchester older than our mothers, the one he taught all three of us to shoot with, the one thing of his I'd have walked into a fire for.

Luke took it to a pawn shop in Kettner for two hundred dollars and a night at a card table, and I bought it back for four, and I never told him how close I came that day to being done with him for good.

I never told him because being done with Luke isn't something I know how to do.

He's the last of us. Him and me and Rue and a ridge full of a dead man's ghosts. You don't get to be done with the last of your people.

"It's probably nothing," I say, and it comes out of me worn smooth, the same words I handed Rue an hour ago on the riverbank about the account that watches all of my videos over and over again.

It's probably nothing.

I'm starting to notice how often I reach for those words, and how rarely lately they've turned out to be true.

Rue doesn't call me on it.

She reaches over and squeezes my wrist once, hard, the way Gramps used to.

Then she's out of the truck and heading for the diner door and calling back over her shoulder that if I make her wait for biscuits while I catastrophize, she'll never forgive me.

Inside, the diner is the same as it's been my whole life.

Vinyl booths gone soft and cracked at the seams, the smell of bacon grease worked so deep into the walls it's structural, Marlene behind the counter who poured me my first cup of coffee at fifteen and pretended not to know I wasn't old enough for it.

She calls me baby girl and asks after my mother, and I tell her Mama's the same, which is the sad truth and is also the kindest way to say it.

The same. Mama's always the same.

Sober enough to answer the phone some months, gone enough to forget she called me the next.

She lives forty minutes north in a place I pay for and don't visit as often as a good daughter would. The guilt of that is an old coat I've stopped noticing I'm wearing.

Gramps was her father. He spent the back half of his life raising her kids because she couldn't, and he never said a hard word about her that I heard.

Loved her the whole way down.

I've never worked out how he managed it. Half his patience lives in me and none of his mercy, and most days I think the mercy was the part that mattered.

We slide into the corner booth, the one that looks out on the entire room and the door both.

I take the seat with my back to the wall without thinking about it, the way I always do, the way Gramps drilled into me before I understood there was another way to sit.

See the room and the door both. Always know your way out.

Rue orders for both of us because she's known my order since we were twelve.

And for a little while it's just us, the coffee, and the ordinary Tuesday noise of a town that raised us, and I let myself have it. This last hour before ten o'clock, the way you take a breath at the top of the climb before the trail tips down into country you can't see the bottom of.

Rue tells me about the collab creator, some guy with a fishing channel and a jawline and four hundred thousand followers who's been sliding into the brand inbox.

She tells me the new diner owner did, in fact, ruin the biscuits, a betrayal she takes personally, and I laugh.

It's real, and it loosens something that's been wound tight in me since the riverbank.

Then she sets her fork down.

"Hey." She waits until I look up. "Whatever it is he's bringing through that door at ten, you don't have to catch it. You know that, right? You're allowed to let one thing hit the floor."