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“Shi— I mean, dang,” Carter muttered, remembering Henry on his back as our feet kicked up dust. “We’ve only got room for three. Normally I’d say someone could get in the flat of the truck, but it ain’t safe at nighttime, not with some of these crazy drivers.”
I thought first of our afternoon spent in that truck bed, and yearned for a moment to revisit it. Oh, that had been so delicious. Why couldn’t I just spend all day back there, fucking and napping? Maybe there were some opaque cowboy rules for what constitutes safe and unsafe cars, rules that would never be apparent to a city slicker like me.
“Phoebe, Jo-Beth,” he asked. “Can you drive? I don’t mind walking, if ya’ll can take Henry with you.”
I looked to Jo-Beth, who said, “I can’t drive stick.”
“Me neither,” I admitted.
Carter’s brow worried, a thin line forming on his forehead. “Um, okay, well… let’s see. We could—”
“We’ll just walk, Carter,” I volunteered. “Don’t worry about it. Get Henry home, cuz I’m sure it’s his bedtime. Jo-Beth and I will be fine.”
“I can’t let you do that.” His voice was protective, his words firm.
“Sure you can.”
“You don’t even know how to get back.”
“I do,” Jo-Beth piped up. “I’ll get her back in one piece.”
I didn’t need the lights of the diner to see the blush working its way across Carter’s face.
“Well… all right then,” he allowed, caving. “Only because I gotta get Henry to bed. But you hurry on home, ya hear?”
“Will do.” Jo-Beth was already striding away from the truck, so I jogged to keep up with her.
“I’ll see you back there,” Carter called out as we walked onto the dirt road.
I turned to wave at him, and he waved back. The separation felt so much harder, after spending the whole day together. It was as though he kept a piece of my heart tucked into his back pocket, and I was experiencing all the tearing sensations at once.
Night in Rough and Ready is thick and earnest — there were no street lamps where we were heading. On the bright side, this meant that you could see each star in the sky. On the down side, it was spooky as fuck.
“You don’t mind walking home by ourselves?” I asked Jo-Beth as I fell into her stride, my voice low as if in fear that the coyotes would hear us and come chomping.
“Oh please. It’s like a couple of blocks. And you know I took a ton of those self-defense classes. Not like it matters, because everybody has clearly gone to bed.”
She gestured to the small smattering of houses we passed by. All were either abandoned or the lights were off. By the state of the yards, I was leaning to the former, though then again, maybe yard maintenance just wasn’t of the utmost import in Rough and Ready.
Where I was from, the true suburbs of Jersey, yards told a whole life story. Your house was the same as everyone else’s, so you distinguished yourself through excellent water practices, constant mowing, and regular updates to seasonal decorations. Said decorations included appropriately colored holiday lights and gate wreaths, which were for whatever reason were vital and replaced about once a month.
“So,” I asked, trying to make conversation to assuage my fears of the dark. “Did you really see someone?”
“Who?” Jo-Beth was playing with the edge of her shirt, not really paying attention.
“The one in the window. In the diner. Or were you just trying to get me to stop focusing on Carter?”
Jo-Beth laughed, delighted. “No, that was an added bonus. She was there, all right, but just for like a second.”
“Really?” There’d be no reason for Jo-Beth to lie, now that Carter was out of sight. We always told each other the truth.
Then again, she did have a fanciful imagination. She watched tons of horror movies, devouring them faster than the studios could produce them. It was possible her overactive brain had invented a woman in a window, late at night in a tiny town, purely for the dramatic effect.
Or maybe she was real.
An unexpected cold breeze blew past, reminding me that, though the desert is hot as shit during the day, the temp drops like twenty degrees at night. The wind creeped up under my thin dress, sending a shiver through me. Shit, I thought with remorse. Should’ve brought a jacket. In my mind, the ultimate sign of maturity was packing weather-appropriate clothing options.
Maybe the fact that I was in a sundress is why Carter kept mentioning my age — because I didn’t seem prepared for the regular adult world with all its temperature fluctuations. He’s not trying to be mean, I reminded myself. I knew the discreet comments about my age weren’t personal, but it was hard to take that on the chin, since there wasn’t a way to make the years move by any faster.
