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Chapter 2
“That’s it. I’m outta here,” Rosalie Jamison said as she stripped off her apron and tossed it into a bin with the other soiled towels, aprons, jackets, and rags that would be cleaned overnight, ready for the morning shift at the three-star diner. She slipped her work shoes onto a shelf and laced up her Nikes, new and reflective, for the walk home. “I’ll see you all later.”
Located a few blocks from the river, the restaurant had been dubbed the Columbia Diner about a million years ago by some hick with no imagination. It was located at one end of the truck stop about a half mile out of Stewart’s Crossing. Rosalie had spent the past six months here, waiting tables for the regulars and the customers just passing through. She hated the hours and the smell of grease and spices that clung to her until she spent at least twenty minutes under the shower, but it was a job, one of the few in this useless backwoods town.
For now it would do, until she had enough money saved so she could leave Stewart’s Crossing for good. She couldn’t wait.
“Wait!” Gloria, a woman who was in her fifties and perpetually smelled of cigarettes, caught up with Rosalie before she got out the door, and Gloria stuffed a few dollars and some change into Rosalie’s hand. “Never forget your share of the tips,” she said with a wink. She continued, “They keep me in all my diamonds and furs.”
“Yeah, right.” Rosalie had to smile. Gloria was cool, even if she continually talked about how long it would be before she collected Medicare and Social Security and all that boring stuff. A frustrated hairdresser, she changed her hair color, cut, or style every month or so and had taken Rosalie under her wing when a couple of boys, classmates from high school, had come in and started to hassle her with obscene comments and gestures. Gloria had refused to serve them and sent them out the door with their tails between their legs. The whole scene had only made things ugly at school, but Rosalie had solved that by cutting classes or ditching out completely.
“If you wait a half hour, I’ll give you a ride home,” Gloria said, sliding a fresh cigarette from her pack as she peered outside and into the darkness. “I just have to clean up a bit.”
Rosalie hesitated. It would take her at least twenty minutes to walk home on the service road that ran parallel to the interstate, but Gloria’s half hours usually stretched into an hour or two, and Rosalie just wanted to go home, sneak up the stairs, flop on her bed, and catch an episode of Big Brother or Keeping Up with the Kardashians or whatever else she could find on her crappy little TV. Besides, Gloria always lit up the second she was behind the wheel, and it was too cold to roll down the windows of her old Dodge. “I’d better get going. Thanks.”
Gloria frowned. “I don’t like you walking home alone in the dark.”
“It’s just for a little while longer,” Rosalie reminded her, holding up her tips before stuffing the cash into the pocket of her jacket, which she’d retrieved from a peg near the open back door. “I’m gonna buy my uncle’s Toyota. He’s saving it for me. I just need another three hundred.”
“It’s starting to rain.”
“I’m okay. Really.”
“You be careful, then.” Gloria’s brows drew together beneath straw-colored bangs. “I don’t like this, y’know.”
“It’s okay.” Rosalie zipped up her jacket and stepped into the night before Gloria could argue with her. As the diner’s door shut behind her, she heard Gloria saying to Barry, the cook, “I don’t know what her mother is thinking letting that girl walk alone this late at night.”
Sharon wasn’t thinking. That was the problem. Her mom wasn’t thinking of Rosalie at all because of crappy Mel, her current husband, a burly, gruff man Rosalie just thought of as Number Four. He was a loser like the others in her mother’s string of husbands. But Sharon, as usual, had deemed Mel “the one” and had referred to him as her soul mate, which was such a pile of crap. No one in her right mind would consider overweight, beer-slogging, TV-watching Mel Updike a soul mate unless they were completely brainless. He owned a kinda cool motorcycle that she could never ride, and that was the only okay thing about him. The fact that Mel leered at Rosalie with a knowing glint in his eye didn’t make it any better. He’d already fathered five kids with ex-wives and girlfriends that were scattered from LA to Seattle. Rosalie had experienced the dubious pleasure of meeting most of them and had hated every one on sight. They were all “Little Mels,” losers like their big, hairy-bellied father. Geez, didn’t the guy know about waxing? Or man-scaping or, for that matter, not belching at the table?
Soul mate? Bull-effin’-shit!
Sharon had to be out of her mind!
Rosalie shoved her hands deep into her pockets and felt the other cash that she’d squirreled away in the lining of her hooded jacket, a gift from her real dad. The jacket was never out of her sight, and she’d tucked nearly nine hundred dollars deep inside it. She had to be careful. Either Mel or one of his sticky-fingered kids might make off with the cash she was saving for a car. Until she could pay for the Toyota outright, as well as license and insure it for six months, she was forbidden to own one.
All around, it sucked.
Her whole damn life sucked.
As rain began to pelt, striking her cheeks, splashing in puddles, peppering the gravel crunching beneath her feet, she began to wish she’d waited for Gloria. Putting up with a little cigarette smoke was better than slogging through cold rain.
She couldn’t wait to get out of this hole-in-the-wall of a town where her mother, chasing the ever-slippery Mel, had dragged her. Kicking at the pebbles on the shoulder, she envied the people driving the cars that streaked by on the interstate, their headlights cutting through the dark night, their tires humming against the wet pavement, their lives going full throttle while she was stuck in idle.
But once she had her car, look out! She’d turn eighteen and leave Sharon and hairy Mel and head to Denver, where her dad and the boyfriend she’d met on the Internet were waiting.
Three hundred more dollars and five months.
That was all.
A gust of wind blasted her again, and she shuddered. Maybe she should turn back and take Gloria up on that ride. She glanced over her shoulder, but the neon lights of the diner were out of sight. She
was nearly halfway home.
She started to jog.
A lone car had turned onto the road and was catching up to her, its headlights glowing bright. She stepped farther off the shoulder, her Nikes slipping a little. The roar of a large engine was audible over the rain, and she realized it wasn’t a car, but a truck behind her. No big deal. There were hundreds of them around Stewart’s Crossing. She expected the pickup to fly by her with a spray of road wash, but as it passed her, it slowed.
Just go on, she thought. She slowed to a walk, but kept moving until she saw the brake lights glow bright.
