Physical labor, right where I was living. I wouldn’t have to go into town. Meet other people.
My gut, which had been silent for my entire life—seriously, not a peep out of the thing for twenty-four years—had been yelling at me nonstop since I woke up on my kitchen floor two weeks ago. And my gut seemed to think this arrangement, this job, was not to be passed up.
“Did I tell you what you’ll be doing?” he asked, walking in front of me down the dirt track between my trailer and the next one.
“No. You just mentioned some lawn work.”
Kevin laughed, but I didn’t find any comfort in it. I had the distinct impression he was laughing at me. “Well, that was clever of me,” he said ominously.
The trailer next door was nearly identical to mine, though it seemed to be a newer model. White, where mine was totally ’70s beige, with a darker brown racing stripe down the side. American Dreamer written in sort of an old-timey Western print.
Yep, she was a beaut.
But the white RV next door had a wooden deck on the outside with a chair, a table, and an ashtray.
Deluxe.
I had trailer envy.
“Does anyone live there?” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the neighbor’s trailer.
“Joan,” Kevin said. “Keeps to herself. Not too friendly. If you’re smart you’ll stay away. She’s kind of a bitch.”
The skin on the back of my neck prickled as I walked by, as if someone was watching me from between two slats on the blinds. But when I glanced back there was nothing.
I’d been paranoid most of my life—it’s not like I could just make it stop.
“Ben, on the other hand,” he said, pointing past Joan’s trailer to the trailer the man…Dylan…had asked me to look in on.
Just the thought of his name electrified part of me, like a filament in a lightbulb starting to glow.
Don’t. Don’t think about him.
“Nice guy. Quiet, but not rude about it. Grows a hell of a garden.” He pointed over at the far end of the property, where I could see fencing and some plants.
Hardly sounds like a guy worth watching, I thought, wondering if Dylan wasn’t looking after the wrong person.
“Other side of the park,” Kevin said, jutting his chin out at the trailers just visible over a giant rhododendron bush, “that’s where the families are. Some are great. Some are screamers and drinkers and scene makers, so I try to keep the people without kids on this side.”
“Are you quarantining them? Or us?” I asked.
He gave me an arch look. “Hell if you won’t appreciate it by next Friday.”
Probably true.
We walked single file across a wooden bridge over a rain ditch that because of a recent storm was gurgling along happily under my feet.
Black-eyed Susans and forget-me-nots and tons and tons of Queen Anne’s lace covered the banks of the small stream. Crickets were loud and jumping into my legs. The highway was a bunch of miles in the distance, but I could feel the hum of trucks on asphalt rumbling in the boggy ground beneath my feet.
“It’s nice,” I said.
“What is?”
“This place.” I flung out a hand toward the flowers, the stream. A cricket smacked into the back of my leg and then buzzed away.
Kevin’s look made it clear he doubted my sanity. “You must see some real shit holes if this is nice.”
Oh Kevin, you don’t want to know.
Because the truth was, I hadn’t seen anywhere. Shit hole or otherwise.
Mom had been on a campaign practically since the moment of my birth to convince me that the world outside of the farm was a godless, terrible place. Full of selfish people doing selfish things. Men who’d want nothing but to hurt me, and women who’d look away while they did it.
When you are told that shit day in and day out, you start to believe it.
It’s probably why I stayed so long with Hoyt. Because the unknown was just so…unknown.
But here I was, in the thick of it, and so far, my new life was a million times better than my old life.