shook. You’re a working girl? she’d asked, and at first Audrey had thought she meant hooker.
“Let’s go in. You can show everybody you’re a big shot now,” Saraub said. His hand was on the door.
Audrey peered into the restaurant. Her old manager looked back at them through one of the cracked windows, like she was trapped inside a giant web. She wore exactly the same beehive Miss Breck hairdo she’d sported fifteen years ago. The same old ladies were waiting tables, too. Even the same hostess stood at the podium—she’d started the job as a high-school kid, and nobody’d died yet, so she hadn’t gotten her promotion.
And then, oh, no. No way. Two cars over, Billy Epps leaned against his rust-bucket VW van, smoking a blunt. His hair was gone now, and his chest had gotten concave. Hard living. How old was he? Forty? And still a busboy. When she left, he’d only just started the switch from hash to crystal meth. Looked like he’d been smoking his product, because most of his teeth were gone.
I’m proud to know you, Audrey Lucas, he’d told her on her last day of work. If only he’d known how often, during those first scary days in New York, she’d replayed that sentiment in her mind, and found courage. Sweet Billy.
“I can’t go in there,” she said. “It’s the same people I used to work with. I’d feel uncomfortable, having them wait on us.”
Saraub’s brows knit in confusion. “That’s their job. They don’t care.”
She shook her head. Saraub had never been a waiter, only waited on. It was moments like this that reminded her of the difference. “Trust me, they’ll care. I don’t belong there anymore.” She pulled out of the lot and back onto the road.
A few turns later, they were at the highway. The sky above was open and blue. In her mind she folded the grassland scenery on top of itself, to give it boundaries. “Think you can hold out for dinner until Lincoln?”
He nodded, wincing as he turned his neck back and forth, like he’d gotten a crick. “Let me,” she said, then reached out and rubbed it with her thumb and index fingers. “Least I can do for your troubles.”
He smiled in a way that meant nookie. “I’ve got all kinds of aches.
“We’ll see,” she said.
“I’ll hold you to that…. Would you change anything about this place?”
“What?”
“About growing up, I mean. Do you wish you’d gone to school in Chicago after college, or had a dad?”
She let go of his neck. “I try not to think about it. There’s nothing I can do, you know?”
“Yeah. That makes sense…. I miss my dad.”
“Why don’t you ever talk about him?”
He shrugged. “He’s dead. What’s there to say?” Then he changed the subject. “I didn’t expect Nebraska would be like this. There’s something about it that’s sad. Like it’s too raw. Exposed, you know?”
“I’m sorry I never got to meet him. You’ll have to tell me about him sometime…” She left him some time to answer, and when he didn’t, she continued. “Nebraska is God’s Country. That’s what my mom called it, at least.”
Just then, a sixteen-wheeler full of chickens packed as tight as jigsaw pieces passed them on the right. He lifted her hand and placed it on his neck. “Needy!” she said as she rubbed. “Since you asked, I thought of one thing I’d change: I wish I’d tried harder to make friends. I’d have been happier if I hadn’t been so lonely,” she said.
“Did you get teased?” Saraub asked.
She veered onto US 80 West toward Lincoln and Betty’s hospital. “Teased?”
“Yeah. Who picked on you?”
She shook her head. “We moved too often. I didn’t have a bully. It was more—I was invisible. I didn’t stay in any one school more than a few months. Sometimes girls wrote stuff on the bathroom walls, but nobody ever said anything to my face. I think they knew better. I was too weak to defend myself, and they just weren’t that mean. You’ve seen the scars on my wrists. They were a lot thicker then. I couldn’t cover them up with a little face makeup like I do now. Trying to kill yourself is a lot bigger than being a misfit, you know? They were decent people. They left me alone. My whole life, until I met you, I was invisible. Sometimes I’d be walking down 42nd Street after seeing a movie by myself in one of those big stadium seat theatres, and someone