She nodded. Gave me one more careful look. “Okay. Well. Thank you. For the car, and the…” a small gesture at the drive, the garage, the whole of the last ten minutes, “…for all of it. Genuinely.”
She turned and went back across the road on the same line she’d come over on and let herself in her own gate and shut it behind her, and the road was empty again, the way it had been every morning until this one.
I stood in the bay with her card still in my hand. She’d handed me a reason to cross the road. I didn’t think she knew she’d done it.
Thank you wasn’t going to be enough. I’d known it before she reached her own gate. The woman had crossed the road to settle a debt, and I’d let her. But what I wanted from her was never going to fit in two words on a small card.
I wanted more than thank you.
I sawher leave for the night a little after six.
I was in the garage with the door up, a rag in my hand and nothing in particular on the bench in front of me.
I watched her back out of her drive in the last of the light. She paused at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, then turned toward the county road and disappeared.
I stood there watching the empty driveway.
By now, I knew her shifts were twelve hours and she’d be home a little after dawn with the kettle going as soon as she walked in the door.
Or, I thought, looking down at the rag in my hand,there could a flat white, extra hot, with a caramel shot waiting for her instead.
I went inside and set an alarm for five-forty.
Dottie's opened at six. I was at her counter at six-oh-one.
She was working the griddle when I came through the side door.
"Mad Dog," she said. "What can I do you for, honey?"
"Flat white. Extra hot. Caramel shot."
The spatula stopped.
Slowly, she looked over her shoulder.
"That coffee's not for you."
"No, ma'am."
A smile twitched at one corner of her mouth.
"That coffee's for the woman across the road."
"Just being neighborly."
"Aha."
Suspicious as hell.
She turned back to the machine and started making the coffee.
"You know who she is?"
"I'm learning."
"Sophia Walker. Owen and Louisa Blackwood raised her and her brother after they lost their parents. There's a Texas Ranger in that family and enough Blackwoods behind them to start a small war."
She slid the cup across the counter.
