“Thanks, Tommy,” Sam tells him before he starts ringing me up. “Tommy owns the local wrecking yard.”
“That’s good to know,” I say, wondering why he’s telling me that.
“If you have any trouble with that new headlight, you let Tommy know.”
“What new headlight?”
“The one he just installed,” Sam says.
“What?” I look out the window to see the headlight that had been cracked is now not. “How?”
“Small town,” he says with a shrug. “Besides, you were back there damn near all day.”
“It was an hour,” I argue, rolling my eyes playfully.
“Same thing.” He gives me the total, and I pay him with cash. “Let me get you loaded up.”
“I can manage.”
“I have eyes, you know? They may not work as good as they used to, but I can still see,” he says, wiggling his fingers at my busted up hand. “Besides, I don’t need Grady stomping in here because you injured yourself more.”
“Yeah, okay,” I relent and lead him out to the car, where he drops the paint in the trunk. “If a girl wanted to get some lunch before she starts the horrible task of paint preparation, where would be the best spot?”
“Miss B’s, no question,” he says. “Head down Orchard to Sixth and take a right, you’ll see it.”
“Thanks, Sam. I appreciate it.”
“No problem, at all,” he says.
“You wouldn’t happen to know if Tommy likes oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, would you?”
“Tommy likes everything.”
“Good to know.”
“You take care of yourself.”
“I will,” I say before I drive off in search of Miss B’s. It’s a small café at the end of a small strip building that also houses an even smaller hair salon and a dry cleaner. Miss B’s is painted in an almost garish shade of neon green, except all the pots of flowers around the exterior offset its brightness in the most complementary way.
Inside is equally colorful, and I’m greeted with a happy smile drawn on the face of a woman around my age, her belly swollen with pregnancy.
“Hey, hon. You can sit anywhere you want; I’ll bring you some water and a menu.”
I thank her and take a table in the brightest light of the front windows. It’s early still, barely eleven. If there’s typically a lunch rush on a Wednesday, it isn’t here, yet. The only other table with anyone at it is on the other side of the café where two women chat animatedly.
The server comes by, as promised, dropping a glass of ice water that’s already sweating, and a single page paper menu. It lists today’s lunch specials as a tuna melt, a French dip, or a club sandwich, all with the option of fries or pasta salad.
There’s not a green salad in sight. The familiar panic tries to seep into my chest. I have to work at keeping it at bay.
You can eat what you want now, Louisa.
I weighed myself this morning and was appalled at how much weight I’ve lost. There was a time that I was obsessed with it. Pierre told me I had gained too much. While I don’t know if my relationship with food is at the level of an eating disorder, it certainly isn’t healthy.
“You’re disgusting, Louisa. Who would hire you in this state? You’d make them vomit.” All his ugly words were delivered in a beautiful French accent; it almost made them sound like compliments instead of insults.
It wasn’t true, then. I wasn’t too thin. But it may be, now. I am skin and bones. A skeleton. A soul inside a husk, absent of all substance.
“I’ll have the club, please. Could I get it with fries and also a small side of the pasta salad?”
