Tara still hadn’t responded to any part of the thread when Rainy tucked her phone in her back pocket, and neither had Braithe.
She went to the Canary for breakfast, where the same kid was there, setting out sugar caddies on the tables. Derek. Marvin had said he was Taured’s kid. Taured probably had a dozen kids by now; when she lived at the compound, there had been rumors that he’d fathered some of the pregnant women’s babies—she remembered the bratty, crying kid from her very first day, Enoch Aaron—but at fifteen, looking into that hadn’t been a priority.
She decided to sit at a table this time, and Derek came over with a menu as soon as she’d seated herself. He didn’t make eye contact when she asked for a coffee. The one from Red’s hadn’t been enough. Instead, he nodded at his shoes and scurried off. Rainy took out her phone. The group chat had ten new messages. She’d look at them later; right now, she wanted to see if she could find an Uber. It was twenty minutes away. She was the only customer, and while she sat, nursing her coffee, she realized that Taured could walk in the door at any second. What would she do? She didn’t know, but the mere idea of seeing him made every hair on her body stand at attention. Even more disturbing was the possibility that she wanted him to see her. But what was she going to do about it? She sipped her coffee and stared at the door. When Derek came by again, she asked him where he went to school.
“I was homeschooled,” he said, looking embarrassed about it.
“You an only child?”
He looked startled by her question.
“No... I have brothers and sisters. I’m...the oldest.” He said it like it was a bad thing.
“You’re setting a great example for them by being responsible and working.” Rainy smiled, and for the first time he looked her in the eye. While she had him, she ordered eggs and toast and asked for her coffee to be topped off. When he brought the pot back, she asked how long he’d been working there.
He was skittish, trying too hard to be careful and seemingly in perpetual terror of messing up. “Just the last two months, since I graduated. My dad owns this place, so—” His voice dropped off hopelessly.
“He wanted you to learn the business,” she interrupted him, rolling her eyes.
He blushed. “Something like that.” Now that she was looking at him—really looking—she could see a resemblance, and not just to Taured. The wide shoulders, the height, the neck pushed forward. Is it in your head? she asked herself.
“Sometimes dads suck,” she said truthfully. He looked like he wanted to say something, but a voice barked his name from the kitchen and Derek’s head snapped toward it. A trucker walked in and sat at the breakfast bar, putting his hat on the counter beside him.
“Gotta go,” he said. “Be back with your eggs in a few.”
She left her phone next to her coffee mug when she went to the bathroom; there was a Jansport backpack resting in the little alcove where the cash register was, propped against the wall. Before she could think, she grabbed it, carrying it to the bathroom and locking the door. She set it in the sink, unzipping it and peering inside. Notebooks. She took one out and flipped through, finding a series of sketches. The kid was not half bad. His drawings were on the religious side, but she couldn’t hold that against him. His wallet was in the front pocket: Gideon Derek Browley, eighteen years old, his address the compound. Remorse washed through her with such violence she began to tremble.
Sitting abruptly on the closed seat of the toilet, she stared at his driver’s license. Half the shock was in knowing she’d been right. If her math was correct, he’d have been born when Sara was seventeen, two years after Rainy had left. And how many underage mothers had there been in the twenty years since she’d fled from that place? And, of course, none of the children took Taured’s last name, because if he was caught, he’d go to prison for statutory rape. Stuffing the license back into the brown leather wallet, she dug further, uncovering nothing particularly interesting until her fingers closed around an envelope. It was from the art school at Hunter College, City University of New York. He’d been accepted into the graphics program. Poor kid. Taured would never let him leave...unless. Maybe he was planning to take things into his own hands. She put everything back except the notebook and, borrowing one of his charcoal pencils, she wrote him a note while sitting on the toilet lid. When she was done, she slipped the bag back into the alcove and went to eat her eggs.
By the time Rainy was finished with her food, the breakfast bar had filled with a variety of singles and one family of four. Sara’s son. She could see Sara in the way he slouched his shoulders. He darted around the dining room, a coffeepot forever in his hand. Around eight, another server came in and Derek came over with her check, looking almost embarrassed to hand it to her. She handed him cash and he started digging around in his apron to make change, but Rainy said, “Keep it.”
“Really?” he said. Rainy had left him an eighty-dollar tip.
“Yeah,” she said, standing up. “I wanted to leave my town, too.” She bent down to grab her phone from the table and saw that she had texts from Grant in addition to the Tiger Mountain group.
Instead of looking surprised, he looked relieved she’d said it. “Did you leave it?” His liquid brown eyes reminded her so much of Sara’s, the way they dipped down at their outer corners. His skin was pale like hers, too, and he had three dark moles on his cheek. Sara hated her moles, said she was going to get them burned off when she was an adult.
“Hell, yes,” Rainy said, and he smiled. His teeth were crooked, but clean and white. The kid seemed more upbeat as he stuffed the money into his apron and nodded at the floor. She watched him in amusement, remembering her first restaurant job in New York as a hostess and then, later, a server. He could leave here and work at any restaurant; it was good money if you found the right place and got decent shifts. He could make it. When she’d first seen him, knowing he was Taured’s kid, she’d wanted him to leave, get the hell out of Dodge, and now that she saw Sara’s face when she looked at the boy, her heart ached.
“Your mom,” Rainy said, staring into his eyes and thinking of her own. “Always let her know you’re okay.” She supposed it wasn’t such a strange thing for a woman to say to a kid; she could have been a mom herself for all he knew, making sure some other mom’s kid didn’t run off without her knowing.
Derek seemed frozen in place. He blinked at her and then finally said, “My mom’s dead.”
Rainy hadn’t bitten her nails since she was nineteen and her college psych professor called her out for it in front of the class. It had been a humbling experience in not showing her tells. But as her Uber sped through the desert, she bit them till they bled. In her lap: the rescued Ziploc bag she’d dug up after burying it twenty years prior. She was purposefully not looking at it, afraid of what it might make her feel. Her jeans were brown with the dirt they were carrying; she imagined her face didn’t look any better. How had it stayed undisturbed for so long? But Rainy knew how; she’d chosen the spot for that very purpose. The locals called it Charlie Cactus: a thirty-foot saguaro cactus that Rainy agreed was impressive. She’d come here with Sara on their few trips into town for nonperishable food. It grew behind Red’s, away from the freeway and a five-minute walk up a hill. None of the adults had cared enough that they’d wanted to go see it each time they were in town, but it became a thing for the girls to walk over to visit Charlie.