Sarah grinned and lifted a sandwich to her lips, taking a big bite. I still had no appetite, but picked up a fry and ate it slowly. Sarah had said to leave my confession at the park. This stays here. I watched her eat her sandwich as if nothing had happened, as if it were a regular day. She was able to do that, somehow. I had to do it too.
“I want you to remember Mr. Gardner when that detective comes back tonight, okay?” Sarah wiped her mouth with a napkin. “Remember that you’re going to give them what they want, whatever that is. Even if they don’t know that they want it. Answers. The truth, even.” Sarah glanced over at the manager and gave him a little wave. “Just enough truth. Give them what they want, and it’s going to be okay.”
SARAH
IT WASN’T LONG AFTER Candy came to stay that I decided my time with Ma was up. “We’ll miss you, won’t we, Candy girl?” Ma said, but she didn’t beg me to stay or anything. I was over eighteen. I needed to be on my own anyhow.
I moved in with another waitress, Sheila, who knew that I cribbed credit card numbers at the restaurant but wasn’t in that racket. She knew me as Melissa “Missy” Carter, and I never did tell her my real name. Melissa was some blond chick who had drunkenly dropped her ID at the last restaurant where I worked. I didn’t take anything else from her—not her credit cards or cash—so she never reported her ID stolen. She probably just got it replaced, which meant I could be her at the same time, which worked for me. I had a record in Gainesville. Not easy to get a job, even waiting tables, when they can look up your real name and get a list of your arrests in about five seconds. But Melissa Carter had a clean record. She also had light blond hair. That’s why I’d dyed my hair platinum—not my best decision, but Melissa Carter from Tampa was a bottle blonde, so I was too.
Things were going okay for a few weeks, even a month. Tips were good, and Sheila was pretty cool, but her stepfather wasn’t. One too many times, he “accidentally” walked in on me in the shower and that was enough to send me packing. I grabbed my sleeping bag and my backpack and got on the bus that night, leaving Sheila a note and a few twenties for her troubles.
I rode all the way to the beach, just wanting to feel the sand beneath my feet again. But when we rolled into West Palm, it was raining buckets. I hid under an awning at the bus station for hours, eating bags of chips and soda from the machine until it let up around dusk. It wasn’t the best time to walk the tourist traps, looking for a waitressing gig, so I decided to hit the beach and wait until the next morning. A dry bench and my sleeping bag would do just fine—with my hood pulled up, you could barely tell I was female. Or so I thought.
That first night, there was a group of guys, maybe from a frat at the local university, who decided it would be fun to harass some homeless folks on their way out of the bar. They mistook me for an old lady or something. It didn’t go well, especially when they realized that, while I was a lady, I wasn’t exactly old. “Hey, blondie!” one of them yelled after me as I made a dash. “Come on, we aren’t going to hurt you.” They were so drunk and stupid, I lost them quick, but I left my sleeping bag and backpack behind, hiding in an alley where the smell of wet garbage, rotting in the humidity, made me gag up the Doritos I’d eaten for dinner. When I returned to the bench at dawn, my stuff was completely gone—of course.
I tried to clean up in the public beach bathroom, but my hair hung dirty in knots. I finally managed to rake my fingers through it and twist it into a ponytail. Still, I looked shabby, and had no clothes to change into for my job hunt. I went into a few of the tourist joints, looking for waitressing gigs. No one was hiring—either they didn’t like my looks or they really didn’t have any openings.
Finally, one place gave me a paper application and I sat down to fill it out with a borrowed pen. I still had Melissa Carter’s license, so I used all of her info, except for the social security number, which I just made up. When they got around to figuring out that it was wrong, I’d have a new one for them.