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He was in danger of letting her become emblematic of a whole system he wanted to rail against. One he’d always been angry about, but was even angrier about it as time went on and he...
He’d had to be there for everyone else. No one had really been there for him.
Any fixing he’d done, he’d done on his own. And still, he got treated like he was less.
Wow. What a whiny-ass thing to think.
He didn’t often indulge in self-pity, but for some reason, all this stuff with Quinn had a way of pushing him that direction.
They walked into the diner, and Sarah, the normal hostess, was standing there with a pen behind her ear and an apron tied around her thick waist.
“Hi there, Levi,” she said. “Usual table?” She looked over at Quinn and frowned.
It was obvious to him that she had thoughts on his appearance with a Sullivan. But she wasn’t going to speak them out loud.
Probably only because she didn’t know Quinn well enough to do it.
She would normally have no compunction about scolding him.
He had not been insulated by a whole big ranch. He had been insulated by the town. When his parents died, there had been a whole lot of adults around these parts that had taken care with them. Took an interest in them. And nobody could carry the weight for Levi, but there had been support.
People had lent a hand. Women had come by with casseroles. Sarah among them.
“You having your usual?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Coke?”
He nodded at that, too.
She looked at Quinn expectantly. “I’m not... Can I see a menu?”
Sarah shook her head, but fished a menu out of the pocket of her apron. And while they walked over to the table, Quinn reviewed it quickly. “I’ll have the Caesar salad. And iced tea?”
“You don’t eat here very often?” he asked after they were seated.
“Is it that obvious?” she asked.
“Sarah, please get Quinn a Legend Burger. She doesn’t want the Caesar salad.”
“Excuse me?” Quinn asked, even as Sarah walked off without a word. “You don’t get to decide what I want. Maybe I’m a vegetarian.”
Well, that would be a hat trick. A little ranching expert who lived on the land producing the most beef in the area being a vegetarian.
“Are you?”
“No. But that’s beside the point. What if I have a gluten allergy?” she asked.
Another hat trick, considering she and her sisters provided most of the baked goods for the area and he couldn’t remember a preponderance of them being labeled as gluten free.
“Do you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But maybe I wanted a salad.”
“I’m not saying that you didn’t want a salad, but what I’m confident in is that you don’t want this salad. It’s a Caesar salad, but only in name. It is chunks of iceberg lettuce, thick pieces of purple cabbage, and it comes out of the bag that may or may not be as old as my kid sister. You don’t want it.”
She practically hissed like a mad cat. “It said Caesar salad.”
