“Okay, let’s get some saltines and water in you to settle that stomach, and then you can sit down with the menu. It’s big, but the sooner you learn it, the faster you can move from hosting and bussing to waiting on your own tables.”
Wait . . . I stare up at the woman who hovers over me in the tiny but clean staff restroom. “You want me to work?”
She shrugs. “Better to stay busy than to leave free time for regrets, I always say.”
“But, I mean, you’re actually giving me the job? Why?” I can’t help sounding incredulous.
She twists her lips. “Well, I’d say you need this job more than you did when you walked through my door twenty minutes ago, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah, but . . .” Dr. Perkins’s words come to mind. “Aren’t you worried what your customers will say?”
She snorts. “I don’t have any use for those kind of customers. They’re the same kind who think I shouldn’t be married to my husband for the color of his skin. Besides, anyone who can’t see how that teacher used you for his own needs is a damn fool.” She rests her hands on her hips. “So, do you want the job or not?”
“Yes.” I furiously wipe the tears from my cheeks with my palms.
“Well, all right, then. And no more cryin’. Leroy doesn’t allow cryin’ in the kitchen. Gets him all flustered and then he starts droppin’ pancakes. Ask Misty, she’ll tell ya.”
I force a smile and pull myself to my feet, trying in vain to ignore that voice in the back of my head, screaming at me.
Telling me how badly I’ve fucked up my life.
Chapter 2
May 2017
Tonight is a night of firsts.
And lasts.
As in, I will never agree to a blind date ever again.
“So I says to the guy . . .” Gord’s fleshy hands wave over his dinner plate—he’s a hand-talker—“I says, ‘Walkin’ out that door without buying this car would be a travesty I can’t allow you to suffer.’ ” He pauses and leans in, to build suspense, I guess, before slapping the table. “He drove off the lot with a mighty-fine Dodge that same afternoon.”
Gord Mayberry, future owner of Mayberry’s New and Used Vehicle Dealership when his father croaks—information he shared three minutes into our date—is a self-proclaimed master car salesman. The doughy thirty-five-year-old has regaled me with countless dealership stories while sucking the meat off his rib bone dinner, and I have smiled politely and nibbled on my french fries, struggling to keep my gaze from the prominent mole perched above his left brow, the two dark hairs sprouting from it begging to be plucked.
I wish I didn’t have to drive so I could drown my disappointment in a bottle of cheap house chardonnay.
Why Lou thought her nephew and I would mesh, I can’t figure out. I’m trying my best not to be vain, to get beyond the utter lack of physical attraction, and focus on the positives—the man owns a house, he has a great job, he’s educated. He has all his teeth.
He’d provide well for Brenna and me. A helluva lot better than I can do on my own.
And seeing as I’m a twenty-four-year-old truck stop diner waitress with a tattered suitcase’s worth of baggage in tow, who hasn’t so much as kissed a man in over three years, maybe I don’t have a right to be judgmental.
The server comes around to set a dessert menu on the table and clear our plates, earning my soft sigh of relief that I’ll be going home soon. “Can I get you something else?”
Gord yanks the napkin out from where he tucked it in his collar and rubs his sticky BBQ sauce–covered fingers against it. “I’ll have some of that divine blueberry pie of yours. How about you, Cathy?”
“No, thank you. I’m full.” I stifle my groan. He’s one of those people who assume Catherine and Cathy are automatically interchangeable. Maybe I’ll tack on a “Gordy” to see how he likes it.
“Watching that gorgeous figure of yours, aren’t you.” He grins and reaches across the table. I panic and quickly occupy my hands with my dishes.
“Thanks, doll. But I’ve got it,” the middle-aged woman chides with a wink, collecting the cutlery from me, freeing my hands for Gord’s waiting grasp.
I tuck them under my thighs instead.
He finally relents, leaning back into his side of the booth, checking his sparse blond hair in the window’s reflection. He’s not fooling anyone with that comb-over. “So . . . Catherine Wright.” His emerald-green eyes—really, the only appealing attribute this man has—study me with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. We’ve sat at this table for almost an hour and he has yet to ask me a single thing about myself.
And I know exactly what he’s thinking right now.
The Catherine Wright.
Gord may be a decade older than me and from the much larger Belmont, but I’d be stupid to think he doesn’t remember the stories from way back when. That he hasn’t heard all about me. Or at least the troublesome teenage version of me. The one who couldn’t possibly have changed enough after all these years for people to just forgive and forget.
Hell, for all I know, that’s why he agreed to this blind date. Maybe he’s banking on the hope that I haven’t changed at all and that he has a chance of getting laid tonight. I’m betting it’s been a while for him, too.
“Yup. That’s me.” I meet his gaze with a hard one of my own. One that says, “I dare you.” Actually, I do want him to dredge up things better left in the past. It’ll give me a good excuse to walk out and end this train wreck of a date.
I see the decision in his eyes a moment before he averts his gaze to the bottle of ketchup on the table, his fingers wrapping around it absently. “My aunt Lou says you’ve been working at Diamonds for seven years now.”
I guess we’re not taking a trip down memory lane just yet.
“Six and a half years.” Since the day after I found out I was going to have Brenna, through my entire pregnancy.
I was carrying a plate of grits in one hand and an open-face turkey sandwich in the other the day that my water broke. As far as truck stop owners who have to deal with amniotic fluid all over their tile floor during the dinner rush go, Lou was pretty sympathetic.
He lets out a low whistle. “I don’t envy you, on your feet all day, servin’ tables for tips. I mean, Aunt Lou’s doin’ all right, but that’s because she owns the diner. But I see those older ladies who’ve been workin’ at it awhile and”—he ducks his head and glances over his shoulder for, I assume, our waitress—“they don’t weather well in that kind of job, all haggard by the time they hit forty.”
Working at Diamonds when I’m forty is not something I want to be thinking about right now, so I push that fear away and offer a tight smile. “It’s a job for now.” It’s more steady than seasonal work at the resort, more stable than the Hungry Caterpillar café or the Sweet Stop or the dozen other little tourist stops in Balsam, and it pays a lot more than a place like Dollar Dayz. I shudder at the thought of standing behind the counter at the local dollar store all day, ringing up discounted nylons and aluminum foil for the local elderly, for $7.25 an hour.